When the "Lions" Roar (1998)

'Propah Nawty'

TV Review from the July 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the last couple of weeks it has been difficult to miss the World Cup, even if it has been possible to miss the football aspect of it. This is because most of the news and current affairs coverage has had nothing intrinsically to do with the game of soccer at all; rather it has been about some of the people who watch it-the England soccer hooligans.

Wednesday Night Live, an ITV series of debates hosted by Nicky Campbell and Mary Nightingale, led the field. What made it interesting was that, as is usual with these sort of sensationalist “debate” shows, a potentially combustible mix had been cobbled together by way of a studio audience. In this instance the audience included both former and still practising hooligans, including some recently returned from the Battle of Marseilles.

Chief among the former (or should it be “retired”?) hooligans was a character called Dougie Brimson, a former Watford-supporting thug who has co-authored a series of books about soccer violence with his equally bizarre brother, Eddy. When Mary Nightingale asked Brimson whether he had any regrets about his hooligan activities he professed none, arguing that “it just happened”.While adding that he wasn’t particularly proud of what he had done either, he obviously had in the back of his mind all the money he had been able to make out of it. Indeed, the Brimson brothers have been nothing if not prolific, with the pen as much as the boot. In the last two years they have had no less than four books published, each one selling tens of thousands of copies. No wonder they have no regrets.

The Brimsons epitomise the way the popular media approaches problems like soccer violence, and it was entirely fitting that one of them should have been on this programme. Their forte has been to claim to abhor soccer violence, and to have the solution to it, while at the same time making money from recounting all its glorious and gory details. Their books are replete with descriptions of major “offs” and battles between Britain’s rival soccer gangs (known, interestingly, as “firms”), they explain how the soccer gangs are organised and how they operate, and one even contains a list of the most fearsome and prolific gangs, from the likes of West Ham’s notorious Inter-City Firm (ICF) to Bolton’s prosaically named Mongoose Cuckoo Boys and Bradford’s equally bizarre The Ointment.

Murder, she wrote

The approach of the Brimsons, replicated in this debate to an extent, has now become dominant. No longer confined to those authors who profess repugnance at death and murder while making millions out of retelling all the details, it has now well and truly infected the news media at all levels. Both BBC and ITV news programmes showed the violence perpetrated by English soccer fans in France at length. On Wednesday Night Live it was left to Michael Knighton, football “entrepreneur”, to make the point that much of the film shown on British TV had been carefully edited to create a certain story, portray the desired image and reinforce the chosen moral of the day all at one stroke in a style the tabloids can barely hope to keep up with.

For make no mistake about it, while pious TV journalists get all sanctimonious about the Sun and the Star, television is where most people now get their information, and this was a story the news networks were determined to ram down everybody’s throat.

This is not to say that such scenes of violence should be censored, of course—just that the popular news media makes no serious attempt to understand this problem, what causes it and why it is likely to occur time after time as it has in the past. The television approach is essentially no different to that of the tabloids —“tut, tut, isn’t it a disgrace? Look-here’s another picture, with lots of blood this time too.”

Given the ruling morality in the capitalist world it is difficult to know how many people can have a serious difficulty with soccer violence anyhow, and it is surely a subconscious recognition of this which is the basis for so much of the media coverage. How can people who support murder and mayhem in the Gulf or the Falklands seriously take exception to the antics of England’s other “invaders”, the organised soccer firms? Certainly not if they were only “defending themselves”, they can’t, as so many—including Tory MP Alan Clark—claimed they were in France.

Wednesday Night Live had a handful of Paras in the audience who said they were disgusted by the soccer thugs, who made them ashamed to be “British”. They were so convinced of the dichotomy between state-sponsored violence and soccer violence that they suggested that “national service” actually represented the cure for the entire problem. Unfortunately, Dougie Brimson intervened to point out that several of those arrested in “the first wave” at Marseilles were in the forces and that he himself had been in the RAF for years, serving in both the Falklands and the Gulf.

The real problem was only fleetingly referred to, once by a psychologist and once by Mary Nightingale, who made the startling point that in the end it all seemed to boil down to nationalism of one form or another. And that, of course, is the undoubted truth. Next time the news media cares to laud “our boys” as they come back from a glorious victory over devious and untrustworthy foreigners they may care to spare a thought for the poor old English soccer hooligan who they purport to despise in the cynical ratings war. The regiments and the “firms”, after all, believe in the very same nationalism, have the self-same conceptions of honour, brotherhood and loyalty, and, in more than a few instances, are actually made up of one and the same people.

Dave Perrin