Racist Friend

This article will appear in issue #3 of the absolutely superb View magazine, which I urge you to buy from their Twitter account at @ViewFootballMag, but hurry as they're not accepting orders after Monday 29th June...

The last game I saw before lockdown was an absolute cracker. Saturday 14^th March; denied the chance to see my beloved Benfield away to FA Vase semi finalists Hebburn Town because the Northern League had gone into preventative lockdown, I sampled the lower rungs of the non-league pyramid to see a step 7 contest where Percy Main Amateurs got the better of Winlaton Vulcans in a Northern Alliance Premier Division encounter by a margin of 2-1. For clarification, this is the level of our game where clubs are denied entry to the FA Cup and FA Vase, do not need seats or covered standing, but must have a permanent rail around the pitch. Round our way, almost all the teams at this level, unless they are Reserve, U23 or Development squads from clubs higher in the pyramid, play on council, school or university pitches. Several clubs own or lease their grounds, but even then, the facilities are basic. The Northern Alliance, formed in 1890, is a brilliant competition over 4 divisions of 16 clubs each and I’m actively looking forward to seeing the 2020/2021 football season kicking off at this level. Social distancing is not an issue when there are more people on the pitch than off it. Whispers of a September 5^th start are circulating, and I feel heady with excitement at the thought of Cullercoats against Rothbury and other arcane treats.

Going back to the start of lockdown, it soon became apparent to me that I had a lot of spare capacity in my head now I had no reason to think about football, cricket, gigs or pubs. It was quite a sobering experience realising just how much time I usually spent thinking, imagining, planning, fantasising, attending, and writing about football. Never has the opening page of Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby been so relevant; for alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron. As Hornby explains, this is not to denigrate the intelligence of football fans, but to point out that the amount of obsessive thought given over to the game by most of us means that the potential for reasoned debate with people who have no interest in football, who are often our nearest and dearest, is somewhat restricted. If nothing else, this whole, hideous pandemic has answered the question, posed by Scottish author Gordon Legge in his 1989 collection of short fiction; What do You Think about in Between Talking about the Football?

As I’ve ham-fistedly hinted above, I got massively back into reading during lockdown. Not since I was an undergraduate, did I pore over so many books by so few authors, devouring the entire written output of Michael Houellebecq and BS Johnson. At the last count, I’d read 26 books in 2020: 22 of them from late March onwards. I’d like to think the reason I got so clever in the first place is because I ‘ve read books all my life. Others, or so it seems, prefer to stick with a single, grammar and factually error-strewn GIF, Meme or whatever you call them. You see, sadly the anecdotal evidence from this bizarre, unplanned and unregulated social experiment in physical distancing and cyber association we’ve been subject to since March 22nd, is of a whole swathe of football fans moving inexorably to the furthest extremes of ultra, right wing politics. It’s demonstrated to me that your Average Joe prefers a simple lie (All Lives Matter, for instance) to a complicated truth (All Lives Matter is a racist slogan).

I suppose this isn’t a new phenomenon; the hideous, pernicious racism on the terraces during the 70s and early 80s was sickening to behold. Thankfully, at Newcastle United, the 1985 Geordies are Black & White movement, inspired by the volleys of abuse our first black player Tony Cunningham was forced to endure, was successful in driving National Front paper sellers away from the gates of St James Park and abusive chanting on the terraces. I’m not naïve enough to believe that a certain percentage of boneheads still harboured racist beliefs, but at least they kept their sick opinions to themselves.

The world changed after that; Britain became multicultural, multi-ethnic, and ostensibly tolerant. William Hague’s 2001 Tory party general election campaign based on xenophobia and naked Euroscepticism foundered very badly, as the sentiments he espoused seemed rooted in a bygone era of race hate that died out with Enoch Powell’s demise. By 2007, British Sea Power seemed to have summed up the zeitgeist with their anthemic Waving Flags; a love song to citizens of the 2004 EU accession states who had made Britain their home. And then Cameron won the 2010 election and the whole Tory shouting match about Brexit kicked off, resulting in the 2016 referendum that punctured a hole in our social fabric that nobody has sought to mend.

I noticed in the run up to the referendum that large numbers of people I knew or interacted with on social media were swallowing the Farage-inspired Take Back Control nonsense. In almost every instance, these were not people I’d recently become acquainted with, largely because of the Against Modern Football ideology and the resurgence of the fanzine movement both seemingly embracing those with a more inclusive, progressive set of norms and values. On my timeline, the ideological dinosaurs retweeting and sharing opinions I was more than uncomfortable with, were either current or former Newcastle United fans for the most part; luckily I was able to disengage by ignoring or blocking because, if there is one thing I have learned from bitter experience, there is no point in trying to argue logically over 280 characters with a meathead who simply won’t listen, never mind think.  Quite interestingly, the home towns of these intolerant paranoiacs were in constituencies such as Blyth Valley, North West Durham or Bishop Auckland. More of that later.

Nationally, the evidence of this rightward drift in the conduct of the sort of bloke I’d rubbed shoulders with from the early to mid-70s was demonstrated by the depressing, but thankfully brief, existence of such organisations as the Football Lads’ Alliance and the, presumably ironically named, Democratic Football Lads’ Alliance. The whole history of the extreme right in Britain has been one of splits, internecine squabbling, and electoral failure. However, with Johnson, Cummings and Gove at the throttle, who needs a fringe Fascist party when there’s a mainstream one that appeals to the same base instincts as Jaya Frandsen, Nick Griffin or John Meighan? Consequently, the unending stream of lies pumped out by the state propaganda machine have been taken as Gospel and unthinkingly parroted across every social media platform from then unto the present day.

The immediate result of such authoritarian populism has been an alarming increase in the number of people I actually know, who I’ve known for decades and stood on the terraces with at local non-league games in many instances, who endorse opinions that, if they were shared by a professional footballer for instance, would result in a rightful ban and fine for unacceptable conduct. I was, and continue to be, taken aback by the bigotry, hatred and prejudice demonstrated by people who had never given, to my knowledge, any public show of Islamophobia, racism, virtue signalling or other prejudicial behaviours. Stuck indoors, spending all day on social media hasn’t done these people any favours, as firstly the Black Lives Matter campaign, that they completely fail to understand the purpose of, and also the ludicrous, discredited save our statues demonstrations, that simply provided a collection of old style pretend tough guys with a chance to throw bottles at middle class students, has given these ageing, armchair authoritarians a reason to act as  vociferous mouthpieces for the state and its right wing fellow travellers.

Things reached rock bottom in the North East during the first two weeks of June, with Saturdays 6^th and 13^th days of outright shame. Firstly, the save our statues nonsense first reared its head, with a wholly unfounded rumour that the war memorial in Durham market square was supposed to be under threat, when actually what was happening was a Black Lives Matter protest a mile down the hill on the old racecourse. As is generally the case in such febrile times, truth went out the window and 30 or so middle-aged, balding, semi-retired “football lads” from outlying towns such as Bishop Auckland and Consett turned up to defend the statue from nobody at all. I’d tried to reason with those on Facebook and Twitter who sought to praise the actions of these brave patriots, but they weren’t for telling. Still I suppose it made a change from endless All Lives Matter propaganda or frankly disgraceful references to the death of Lee Rigby.

The following day saw the toppling of the Colston statue in Bristol which, with the redecoration of the Churchill one in Whitehall had many people frothing at the mouth about things they had never previously known about, much less understood, especially when a website, of dubious provenance that appeared to have the dread hand of MI5 behind it, listing all statues in major English towns and cities was launched. Presumably, it was the work of a cyber agent provocateur designed to inflame opposition passions. In Newcastle, the absolute centre of the city is Grey’s Monument; a 125 foot basalt column that bears a granite representation of the Prime Minister who piloted the 1832 Great Reform Act and 1834 emancipation of slaves through parliament, as well as giving him name to a repugnant, scented brand of tea. Not only was he ideologically at total variance from the likes of Colston, but any attempt to destroy his statue would require a feat of engineering beyond the realms of reality. Unless there was a secret, as yet undiscovered, cabal of anarchist steeplejacks, scaffolders and demolition experts, ready to wreck the iconic centre of the city, nothing remotely destructive was going to happen. Just to be sure, about 150 cartoon hard lads, many of whom would be entitled to concessionary travel passes, assembled under the name of Defenders of Newcastle on Saturday 13^th.

On Monday 8^th, social media was aflame with a pair of videos, originally posted on Instagram by a Northumbria University Law student Melis Altinors, which showed her in conversation with her boyfriend; a personal trainer by the name of Richard Heslop.  At Altinors’s prompting, Heslop repeatedly issued racist, Islamophobic and homophobic statements that were inflammatory enough to not only attract the interest of Northumbria Police, who issued the pair with cautions, but to cause Heslop to lose his job in very short order. Meanwhile, Altinors awaits her fate, as the University is debating what action to take against her. This whole episode was a low watermark in the life of my city, but it was about to get a whole lot worse the following weekend.

I really wanted to attend the Black Lives Matter silent protest that had been scheduled for the same day and same time, but as my partner is still shielding, it would have been foolish to do so. Instead, I sat gloomily in the house, watching footage of the day unfold. The demonstration ended predictably with an unprovoked attack by the right-wing thugs in chunky Italian knitwear on the peaceful BLM protest, with bottles and smoke bombs filling the air before raining down on the wholly innocent anti-racists. To my eternal shame, I recognised more of those among the ranks of conservative casuals than the progressive protesters. That appears also to be the case for Northumbria Police as they’ve lifted 30 or so fascists for public order offences.

Meanwhile, despite irrefutable video evidence to the contrary, many of these grassroots bigots continue to insist that BLM matters protesters are to blame for violence and that the message on the shirts of Premier League players ought to be to do with the NHS or even, depressingly, All Lives Matter. I’m aware though of a slight reduction in the frequency of such falsehoods, which I’m tentatively ascribing to the resumption of the Premier League and Championship. Perhaps now we have football to think about, the non-league Nazis will stop being a problem. Of course, even if they are, the beauty of Northern Alliance games is that social distancing from the opinions of Tommy Robinson’s grandpa can be easily achieved.