Bloody Hooligans!

Some things never change, it seems. I knew that the public demonisation of those involved in the August riots as workshy criminals reminded me of something. Reading The Football Factory by John King has brought it all back to me - pretty much the same treatment was meted out to so called football hooligans back in the 1980s and 1990s by politicians and the media. Then, as now, there was no attempt to try and analyse the underlying causes of the unrest, or to put it into a wider social context. Instead, the hooligans were just dismissed as a bunch of violent thugs. I was always put off of reading The Football Factory because of the bad film made of it with Danny Dyer. (Actually, any film with Danny Dyer is pretty much guaranteed to be bad, not that it stops him making the bloody things - last Christmas I even saw a Danny Dyer box set of DVDs. I mean, who would buy such a thing, apart from his mother, of course?) However, the novel, published in 1996, is excellent, portraying the hooligan phenomena as an expression of the increasing disenfranchisement of the traditional working classes - feeling marginalised by the 'gentrification' of their traditional habitats by the newly monied middle classes, and abandoned by the major political parties.

Like I said at the beginning, some things never change. Arguably, pretty much the same factors lay behind the recent riots - like football hooliganism, largely an urban, inner city phenomena. Even the dramatis personae are similar - mainly young men working in meaningless unskilled jobs, if they had employment, or unemployed youths with little or no prospect of gaining paid employment. Just like the hooligans, they found themselves part of a society which, whilst on the one hand failing to provide them with basic human commodities such as work, housing or hope, on the other hand still expected to be able to control their lives through increasingly stringent and petty seeming laws and restrictions on their behaviour. Significantly, in The Football Factory, the narrator explains at one point the attraction of seeking out violent encounters with rival 'firms': for the 'hooligans' it is one of the few choices they feel that they can freely make any more, and that it represents a brief moment of 'freedom' from society's strait-jacket. Whilst they are running amok, he explains, they are in control, the authorities aren't. Not surprisingly, similar sentiments were expressed by some of those involved in the riots. But hell, what do I know, though? Bloody hooligans! Bloody rioters! We don't need to understand anything about them beyond the fact that they're criminal scumbags! Shoot the lot of 'em! That'll solve the problem!