Violence and Racism in Football

Politics and Cultural Conflict in British Society, 1968–1998

Brett Bebber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781848932661
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317321606
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

This study, based on government records, newspaper articles and fanzines, explores the complex interaction between politicians, police and the perpetrators of football violence. Bebber looks at how successive governments tried to impose law and order on football 'hooligans', whilst inadvertently escalating the violence.

PART I: VIOLENCE AND POLITICS IN BRITISH FOOTBALL

1 AN INTRODUCTION TO FOOTBALL VIOLENCE: CONTEXT, COMMUNITY AND CONFLICT

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s football attendance became a communal activity for working-class men and women, enriched by strong social networks and shared collective experiences. Football spectators gathered in multiple venues across Britain on the weekends to participate in customary activities that promoted specific values of locality, community and territoriality. Groups of violent youths that emerged from these informal social networks engaged in an increasingly large number of raucous and threatening activities throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. These disruptions ranged from cursing and taunting policemen to organized violent encounters between groups of opposing fans. Police reports afford the opportunity to examine not only the forms of disorder that spectators initiated, but also how the police framed their actions and responded to them. Using these sources, this chapter aims to contextualize British football violence and provide a background to the expansion of state control over this national sport. While providing a brief summary of broad historical transitions and social trends can be difficult, it will first provide social, economic and cultural contextual background. The second section recounts the forms of violence and disorder that British fans participated in, and the varied and conflicted responses towards their increasing incidence among many types of fans. This introduction to British football violence provides a background to the responses by the public, government agencies and local police authorities that will be examined in later chapters.

British Football Violence Contextualized

Several broad changes to British politics and society, and leisure culture specifically, gave way to the rise of football’s popularity, as well as the violence that came to mark the sport from the mid-1960s. The relative affluence of British society in the 1950s and 1960s provided increased opportunities for sporting leisure and popular entertainment, and professional football became the mainstay of these weekend pursuits. Along with cinema attendance and seaside trips, football spectatorship developed into an accessible and widespread form of recreation.¹ Advances in British leisure received the full support of Clement Attlee’s (1945–51) post-war administration. Attlee wanted to provide welfare and security for the British people that had been lacking since the interwar period. While this administration had no specific policy on sport, they did recognize the benefits of extending leisure and popular entertainment to British citizens. The proposed reconstruction of Britain’s labour force and anticipation of full employment depended on balancing work with leisurely pursuits such as football spectatorship.²

Throughout the 1950s, programmes for physical education and participation proliferated, culminating in the establishment of the undersecretary position titled Minister for Sport in 1962 under the Conservatives, and the national Sports Council by Harold Wilson’s Labour administration in 1966. Both major political parties promoted the extension of British sport to more participants, but also chartered research on perceived problems within British sporting culture.³ Britain’s second and more aggressive Minister for Sport, Denis Howell, oversaw the extension of state intervention into British football that will be discussed later. These developments resulted in skyrocketing interest in British sport, and football specifically, as a British tradition that provided not only opportunities for participation, but also for recreational and community-based football spectatorship. The marked interest that several post-war governments demonstrated in promoting grass-roots football participation linked directly to the widespread desire for the national team to succeed on the international stage. Throughout the post-war decades, with widespread media coverage and increased significance to the nation, ‘football was probably more pervasive than ever before in British social and cultural life’.⁴

The intertwined interests of government and British football culminated in England’s World Cup victory in 1966, arguably the world’s greatest sporting achievement. The championship heralded Britain’s return to the international stage after a period of decline. Defeats in sport throughout the 1950s mirrored Britain’s international regression. In the first twenty years after the war, though post-war administrations had succeeded in returning affluence to British society for large segments of the population, they suffered international humiliation in the Suez Canal affair, the decolonization of Africa, and Europe’s marginalization during the Cold War. England’s victory in 1966 provided a symbolic but tangible sense of restoration of British superiority in both the sporting world and national politics.⁵ Even the Labour Party capitalized on the victory, as Harold Wilson celebrated with the team on the balcony of the Royal Garden Hotel shortly after the match. This symbolic gesture was not only Wilson’s attempt to garner political capital but also a projection of the change in fortunes for both British sport and British workers.⁶

Through the 1966 World Cup victory football became cemented as a primarily working-class bastion apart from other public school sports like cricket and rugby. England not only won the trophy, but also hosted the tournament, allowing more Britons exposure to football as a modern form of entertainment. It represented an improvement in fortunes for working-class spectators who closely identified with the team. The team itself had a particularly working-class feel to it: values of hard work and physical toil embodied in the English side won out over the flair and gusto of more talented global opposition. This construction of English playing ‘style’ as bullish and honest, constructed mostly by the media but reproduced elsewhere, represented values to which many working-class men related.⁷ Football spectatorship at the local club level received a quick boost from the rise in national visibility and popularity of the sport. However, it became clear that some popular approaches to football spectatorship had changed from leisurely family recreation to stylized and fiercely loyal partisanships rooted in reinterpretations of working-class ideals. The marriage of working-class men and football continued, fuelled by new generations of supporters who grew up with the game.

Outside of sport, several shifts in the material and cultural realms of British life allowed for and perhaps encouraged increased levels of social violence by the mid-1960s, which often occurred within the sport by the end of the decade. Economic historians have claimed that prosperous national economies marked Europe for two decades from 1953, culminating in stagflation and fluctuating currency rates caused by the oil crisis of 1973.⁸ Spurred by American investment and stable exchange rates managed by the European Payments Union and the International Monetary Fund, European economies neared full capacity.⁹ Yet, the ‘Age of Affluence’ did not come to a full stop by 1973, but rather ground to a slow halt with consequences for most working- and middle-class Britons years earlier. Indeed, Britain’s increase in social violence in football coincided with the beginnings of England’s post-colonial economic decline.

Early successes in economic growth dovetailed with the post-war social democratic compromise. The Labour Party in Britain, like many European attempts at social democracy, fostered the management of a mixed-market economy, balancing private investment with state management of key resources and industries in a form of state-managed capitalism. Nationalization, centralized state planning and investment in industry pulled Britain’s economy out of the postwar recession as both the Labour and the Conservative parties planned for full employment, living incomes, moderate wage raises, and the extension of social welfare services.¹⁰ Health care, electricity, coal production and railway services all came under the development of the British state in a long period of statesupported economic growth. This prosperity also existed because successive government administrations effectively managed conflicts between labour representatives and the interests of capital until the mid-1960s, avoiding politically devastating strikes and crises of industrialization.

Yet, by this time, the side effects of constant economic growth gradually engulfed European nations, impelling Britain in particular towards decreasing government expenditure. Inflation afflicted working-class livelihoods in most of Western Europe as the money supply swelled beyond what was necessary for most national economies.¹¹ In November 1967, the devaluation of the pound pushed Harold Wilson’s Labour administration to void the ‘social contract’ and decrease domestic spending by £716 million over the next two years.¹² Though the Labour Party had already removed Clause Four – the commitment of Labour representatives to nationalization of key industries for general welfare – in 1964, this retrenchment signalled a new era of social divestment. Roy Jenkins, Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, imposed strict government expenditure restrictions and introduced several new taxes and levies as priority was given to balancing Britain’s international deficit.¹³ Labour effectively chose to maintain international capitalist relations rather than its promises of social democracy and public welfare. Because of these various impositions, British citizens, especially those in working-class households, began to feel the effects of intermittent periods of inflation and increasing costs of living since the mid-1960s. Britain’s flagging economy created increased competition for jobs and estate housing, themes which, as will be shown, emerged in discussions about the origins of football violence. Concerns about economic opportunity coloured the political messages supporters espoused, which when coupled with increased local and territorial sentiments attached to football clubs, often conditioned increased levels of violence in football.

Concerns about economic competition also affected football supporters’ approaches to the increasing number of both black Britons and black migrants in the professional ranks, producing social conflicts that often resulted in racisms and anti-immigration politics. As Part III of the book demonstrates, several interested parties used football in attempts to recreate the social landscape of Britain, with particular attentions to the racial homogeneity of sport and the wider society. These concerns must be contextualized within the broad range of emerging racial and anti-immigrant discourses of the post-colonial era. Enoch Powell’s now infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968 gave voice to a host of white concerns about the influx of migrants to British industrial cities. The Birmingham MP was responding to the ongoing debate about British immigration policy, a debate framed since 1945 in terms of national belonging, citizenship and legality.¹⁴ Powell’s linking of black people and criminality painted all migrants to Britain as creatures of urban decay, a ‘race apart’ that threatened the very security of Britons’ lives and the future development of the nation.¹⁵ The speech capitalized on existing fears of migration and gave them an unstable political legitimacy, popularizing anxieties about integration and job competition. Powell became emblematic of a section of the British population that wanted to recreate a ‘Little England’, but felt powerless to defend themselves against the supposed coming socio-economic subordination to new commonwealth immigrants.¹⁶

The speech was also reflective of the expansion of white identity to include all working-class Britons, defined against colonized societies and commonwealth migrants first in the high imperial age, then again in the post-colonial period. As part of the ‘changing symbolic constitution of racialized capitalism’, white British identities expanded from bourgeois Victorians to include most working-class Britons through populist imperial and nationalist sentiments after 1945.¹⁷ Just as the ‘colonial frontier’ came home to British cities, white working-Britons were also subject to base forms of imperial nationalism and the transition to welfare capitalism. Thus, immigration was not the only perceived threat to white, British identity from the mid-1960s: the contraction of empire, the coming European economic community, a declining national economy and even signs of American cultural dominance all encouraged conservative white racialized sensibilities.¹⁸ Despite the fact that historians have repeatedly shown that migrants almost always filled jobs that most white labourers viewed as unskilled and therefore less desirable, Powell’s speech both popularized the idea of the vulnerability of white-working class communities and became a significant moment in the postwar construction of racialized and anti-immigrant discourses.¹⁹ As later chapters demonstrate, football supporters generated antipathies towards black footballers with many of these concerns in mind, both reflecting and contributing to broader debates about the cultural and social landscape of post-colonial Britain.

In addition to a declining national economy and the politics of race and nation, concerns about youth degeneration in an increasingly affluent and permissive society conditioned state agencies’ and the public’s responses to racism and violence in British football. From the 1960s forward, British governments also faced a number of challenges inspired by youth dissension. Cultural commentators and politicians became concerned about youth permissiveness, exemplified in drug use, pop music and generational rebelliousness.²⁰ The first development of youth subcultures had inspired new associations among working-class youth and perceived threats to security that became the subject of media and academic attention. Teddy boys and girls appeared in 1955 and spread from the inner-city to the suburbs, taking their unique blend of style and vandalism to the heart of the new, purportedly affluent Britain. The mods and rockers, the next wave of youthful threats to post-war British serenity, made headlines by vandalizing several seaside resorts in 1964. These style-conscious and increasingly violent subcultures became Britain’s first post-war ‘folk devils’.²¹ To several commentators these subcultures represented the worst aspects of the rise of affluent consumer society, the outcome of a lingering social paradox in post-war Britain. While affluence and comfort were the aspirations of political and social interventions by post-war governments and the rise of the welfare state, many Britons resented the freedom that affluence produced. To many, the Teds, mods and rockers, and subsequent subcultural groups in later years, represented the replacement of production at the centre of social life with egregious leisure and consumption.²² Post-war youths’ penchant for expensive clothes and conspicuous consumption of drugs, clothes and alcohol supposedly indicated the unfortunate outcomes of new wealth and a more generalized moral decay in British society. These anxieties coincided with overstatements about the degeneration of British values within Labour’s ‘permissive society’, where Roy Jenkins criticized puritanical restrictions on personal liberties as the party’s Home Secretary.²³

Academic studies revealed that the distress generated by youth subcultures was not merely a product of collective ‘labels’ but that these associations also had their origins in shifts in the structural and cultural make-up of British society. In the late 1960s skinhead groups constituted a collective attempt to reclaim working-class identity by emphasizing its masculine and aggressive character. Their symbolic representations of hostility and belligerence, epitomized by certain forms of dress and grooming, achieved social recognition inaccessible to them otherwise. The mods, in contrast, had dressed fashionably in an effort to express their figurative rise in social mobility, an attempt to mimic a livelihood not generally available to them.²⁴ Both subcultural movements became means by which working-class youths manipulated their immediate social environments and resisted class subordination through sometimes violent transgression. As reactions to modifications in the structural composition of class relationships, youth collective identities sought recognition of their public resistance. They achieved their goal. A series of media condemnations accompanied the rise in popularity of each youth subculture, and provided a framework for moral backlash by football spectators.²⁵ Youth subcultural movements also became linked with football, as skinheads and casuals participated in football violence and attracted the attention of police. These groups of rival fans also attracted widespread media attention that interpreted their violent transgressions as moral disobedience rather than expressions of class struggle or economic discontent.

The 1968 student uprisings constituted a transformational moment in public images of youth cultur...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• Introduction: Sport, Politics and History in Post-War Britain
• 1 Violence and Politics in British Football
• 2 The Total Policy of Containment
• 3 Racism and Cultural Conflict In British Football
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index