There's a new issue of View from the Allotment End out now, which you should buy. I've got this piece in it, explaining that, while it is nice to see Luton Town doing well, they do have one of the worst scumbags on earth as a fan -:
I can’t say I was exactly jumping for joy after Luton Town won promotion to the Premier League by beating Coventry City on penalties in May 2023’s play off final, although I do confess to grinning broadly when they’d knocked out Sunderland at the semi-final stage. To be clear from the outset, it isn’t Luton’s current players, management or ownership that I have a problem with, though I do recall them reducing me to tears aged 8 when they won 2-0 at St James’ Park in the FA Cup 4th round in 1973 (my first game ever in a seat, as the East Stand opened that day). However, I will admit to a historical grievance against them. Not so much for Kenilworth Road’s appalling plastic pitch, which was even worse than the one at Loftus Road of the same era, but for the evil doings of Thatcherite slug David Evans, who was both The Hatters’ chairman and Tory MP for Welwyn Hatfield in the awful decade that was the 1980s.
Not content with publicly proclaiming that The Birmingham Six were murderers, for which utterance he paid out almost a million in damages for slander, or claiming that young black men were responsible for 99% of rapes in the Greater London area, Evans compounded his repulsiveness by willingly putting Luton’s name forward as guinea pigs for Thatcher’s disgraceful football ID card scheme, whereby only home fans who carried a membership card could gain entry to the stadium and all away fans were banned, ostensibly because of Millwall fans rioting after an FA Cup game in March 1985. It took the Taylor Report into the carnage of Hillsborough for the Tories to abandon this scandalous scheme that sought to criminalise ordinary, decent football fans, for the supposed crime of wanting to watch their team play away from home.
Aside from Evans’s malfeasance, most people associate Luton Town with Eric Morecambe in the directors’ box, David Pleat dancing an eccentric jig of joy across the Maine Road pitch after relegating Man City in 83, turnstiles granting entry to the ground via a back alley in between a load of terraced houses, or a 30-point deduction that saw them relegated from League 2 and eventually, perhaps unwittingly, lit a spark of defiance that precipitated their return to the top table after a scarcely believable 4 promotions in less than a decade. All great stuff, but what about their celebrity fan, who is the main reason why I find it impossible to celebrate Luton’s renaissance?
Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, a violent, racist criminal and convicted felon, with numerous convictions for assault, stalking, threatening behaviour, and many other forms of intimidation, never lets any soundbite opportunity go by without mentioning his allegiance to Luton. Apart from the fact this inveterate liar and serial fraudster has long sought to present himself as a serious political journalist and cultural commentator, despite the nefarious crap he regularly espouses, it really does stick in my craw that Yaxley-Lennon has artfully manipulated some of the least civilised terrace habitues into becoming his personal poorly educated, drunken street fighting rabble. Whether we’re talking the discredited BNP, dissolute EDL or risible FLA, Yaxley-Lennon and his acolytes, in snide versions of chunky Italian knitwear, have been front and centre of any marches and confrontations, ostensibly to defend English culture.
Cards on the table. I am a Marxist. I am a lifelong Socialist. I am further left than almost anyone you’ve ever met. I don’t believe for one second you can keep politics out of sport. That said, I have dedicated my life to keeping ultra-right wing scumbags away from the game I love. I’m not being hypocritical; I am simply standing up for what I believe in. Make no mistake, I will fight fascism until the day I die, as I do not believe the interests of the working classes, which is still the social construct from whence the overwhelming majority of football supporters are drawn, are served by the aims and objectives of right wing politics, whether that be the Tory Party or the gangs of far right thugs seeking to brawl on the streets of London with anyone whose religion, skin colour or sexual orientation they don’t approve of.
To clarify, it is entirely possible to advocate more than one ideological position at the same time. To be in favour of an independent Palestine, as I am, and to be opposed to Israel’s response to the Hamas offensive, and Zionist expansionism in general, is not to be Anti-Semitic. However, to be both vehemently Islamophobic, as Yaxley-Lennon and his associates have long publicly proclaimed themselves to be, as well as repeatedly being filmed making Nazi salutes and carrying flags with Swastika emblems across them, simply does not compute. If you can tell me how thugs who deny the Holocaust happened, praise the ideology of 1930s Germany and claim Capitalism is run by an international Jewish banking cartel, have any place on a march against Anti-Semitism, please explain your thinking to me. Yaxley-Lennon wasn’t welcome at the November 25th, 2023, march against Anti-Semitism and, having got his grid all over social media, ended up in the nick for affray. No doubt he sees being lifted as another example of the Woke Conspiracy against English Culture. The moron.
The very minute it was suggested by Yaxley-Lennon’s lickspittle apologists that “football lads” were welcome to join the counter demonstration to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign march for peace on October 14th, 2023, my heart sank. What has being a football fan got to do with popularising a far right ideology that has race hate as its core value? Each and every weekend, hundreds of thousands of ordinary supporters, up to the thick end of half a million people, attend games, not to mention watch them in the pub, and manage not to embark upon incidents of mindless violence with complete strangers. Why should a tiny percentage of ordinary football supporters take it upon themselves, drunk or not, to abuse ordinary people in Waterloo Station, on account of their perceived religious and cultural background? It’s because they’ve been cheated, fooled and hoodwinked by the right wing media and the spreaders of hate speech on social media, into thinking that they should be doing Yaxley-Lennon’s dirty work for him.
Looking at it in the cold light of day, it is insane, and it seems preposterous to suggest that normal, rational followers of the game will take up arms for a wannabe dictator. However, we must remain vigilant; when (British) Sea Power released the joyous anthem Waving Flags, to welcome those citizens of the 2004 EU Accession States who had made Britain their home, the very idea of Brexit was a farcical one. How do things look 20 years later? Do not be so complacent as to believe the likes of Yaxley-Lennon won’t make further repeated attempts to recruit hard of thinking drunken hotheads to be his Stone Island clad Sturmabteilung for the race war he wants to provoke.
Then again, I’m not opposed to all football violence. On January 6th, 2018, just before Newcastle United knocked The Hatters out of the FA Cup, a vociferous, petite Luton Town fan was put on his arse outside The Forth pub on Pink Lane by a broad-shouldered, well-built and morally impeccable Socialist football fan. We’ve not seen Little Tommy in these parts since and he tends to gloss over this event, which is a shame because the Hull City follower who did the deed, is a Humberside-born Asian lad who has lived on Tyneside for almost 4 decades now. Well done that man!!
Superb article.
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