Football Violence: Sickness or Symptom

 The so-called ‘beautiful game’ is often watched by some very ugly people, but the violent scenes witnessed during the FA Cup semi-final and north-east derby at the weekend may have very little to do with football. A sporting fixture provides the forum, arguably even the catalyst, but the frustration fuelling the fighting might have roots running deeper than rivalry. As Thatcher and thuggery make a simultaneous return to the front pages, should we now expect a renaissance of the unrest that scarred our stadiums through the 1980s?

The recession of three decades ago was the deepest since World War II. Unemployment passed three million, affecting 11.9% of the working population by 1984. As manufacturing output fell, Conservative Chancellor Geoffrey Howe increased taxes and cut public spending. Against a backdrop of class division and industrial unrest, Mrs Thatcher’s government decreed that workers coming out on strike would see their benefits slashed.

It’s not entirely true to say that football is the opera of the working class, but it is perhaps no great surprise that amid deepening discontent amongst Britain’s blue collar workers, a minority would take it onto the terraces.

Whilst the overcoming of shared hardship can produce a galvanising effect, the reverse is also true. With Thatcher’s assertion that there was no such thing as society, those on the sharp end of Eighties economics were effectively told they were on their own. The politics of every-man-for-himself is always welcomed by the winners, whether it brings a Porsche and pin-stripes or buying your council house. However, the excess of the 1980s was cold comfort for those who became the first in their families not to find work waiting at the pit, plant, or factory down the street.

The violence that erupted this week at Wembley and St James’ Park was an unpleasant echo of events that saw English clubs banned from European competition for five years, following the Heysel Stadium disaster. Such scenes are inexcusable in any context, but it would be naïve to simply dismiss them as unfortunate side-effects of football culture.

 

As members of the public and parliament alike are pausing to observe the passing of an eighties icon, many are again at the mercy of economics beyond their control. The current Downing Street tenants might allege that “we are all in this together”, but they would do well to remember that for those left disenfranchised by the politics of plenty, there’s nothing quite like the poison of poverty to pierce our all too thin veil of civilisation.

                                            

Thatcher, The Marmite Baroness.

Possibly the most polarising figure of British politics across any era, Margaret Thatcher remains as divisive in death as she was in life. Wrangling over welfare cuts and simmering brinkmanship in North Korea were temporarily tossed to the inside pages, on the announcement of the former Prime Minister’s passing. The great, the good, the guarded and the grumpy, were queuing up to extol and eulogize, or verbally eviscerate. No matter what your opinion of her, it was hard not to have one.

The PM cut short his intended itinerary in Europe, dashing to Downing Street and leaving the French President without a dinner date. Pomp before politics perhaps, but he was never going to miss this moment, or worse still, leave the tribute to a Tory titan to his Lib Dem Deputy. David Cameron paid tribute to the “patriot Prime Minister”, and her “lion-hearted love of this country”, a nation he said she not only lead, but “saved”. Perhaps conscious of an impending onslaught of less obsequious outpourings, Mr Cameron concluded with a reminder that Mrs Thatcher was also “a mother and grandmother, and we should think of her family tonight.” It appears that those popping champagne corks around the lions of Trafalgar Square may not have heard him.

The emotions erupting across every social media platform in response to her death speak to the deep division Baroness Thatcher still elicits. Time has clearly not healed all wounds. The passion with which she was both praised and pilloried suggested the rupturing of ancient, long-untapped arteries of antagonism, which were more than equal to the admiration she also inspired.

Growing up as children of teachers, our standard of living stagnated as health and education spending was steadily eroded. I may have been trained to detest the avarice which underpinned Thatcher’s economic policies in the 1980s, but the enlightenment of education and adulthood furnished me with my own reasons to continue my disenchantment.

The relaxing of banking regulation in October 1986 is directly responsible for the casino culture that caused the financial crisis, and the grand privatisations just produced companies who will always put profit before investment in infrastructure and provision of affordable public services. That is why the only thing many rail commuters can rely on today is an over-inflation fare increase every January.

Those that loved Baroness Thatcher should be allowed to mourn their loss, and as for the rest of us, surely celebrating the death of an elderly grandmother has no place in a civilised society. She may have said; “there is no such thing as a society,” but that was just another thing she was wrong about.

Thatcher died in the Ritz Hotel, while many of those on the sharp end of her economic policies would be hard pushed to meet their maker in a Travel Lodge. Tormenting her memory on twitter won’t change anything, compassion and using your vote just might.  

Happy 40th Birthday to the 'Brick'.

If your mobile phone mysteriously orders a Maserati this week, or rashly runs off with a much younger model, it could possibly point to a mid-life crisis brought on by its 40^th birthday.

The very first ‘cellphone’ call was made four decades ago by senior Motorola engineer Martin Cooper to Dr Joel S. Engel, an employee of rival telecoms giant AT&T. Although pipped at the post by his pioneering counterpart, Dr Engel probably then made the second most important discovery of the day, that you can’t slam the phone down on a mobile call, to any real degree of satisfaction anyway, without breaking it. Cooper’s prototype, the catchily titled DynaTAC, was mildly more convenient than actually carrying a phonebox around with you, but weighing in at over a kilogram, not significantly lighter. 

Interviewed on Sky News, Mr Cooper said the phone was over nine inches long, and its meagre 20 minutes talk time was actually quite sufficient, because you couldn’t hold that brick up to your ear for much longer anyway. When asked for his reaction to the development of the so-called smartphone, interestingly, he said he was rather disappointed. “We are trying to build a devise that is all things for all people,” he said, “that does not allow you to do any of them really well.” As one who has never found a better way to send a number from my contacts list in a text message, other than balancing the phone precariously on my knee and scribbling the number on my hand first, I concur. That is the most frustrating telecommunications experience I have ever had, apart from the day I bought a Blackberry, and the 712 days afterwards when I had to use it.

The global population is currently believed to be around seven billion, and the International Telecommunications Union now estimates that six billion have a mobile phone. In the UK alone some 92% of us have one, and the rest probably just left theirs in their other trousers. Disappointing or otherwise, the mobile phone is now an assumed appendage to our daily faculties. But the man who made that initial pioneering call now cautions that we mould our lives around our mobiles, rather than designing them to meet our needs. “I am looking forward to big improvements in the future”, Cooper says, “mostly aimed at customising phones to people, making the phone your slave, instead of you being a slave to the phone.”      

I would think of a deeply salient point to end on, probably suggesting the modern mobile offers those with nothing positive to say, ever increasing mediums to do so, I would, but my phone’s ringing…