Why
are the English being hooligans again?
Look
to present British politics for answers — and also to history.
By TUNKU VARADARAJAN
6/12/16, 9:29 PM CET Updated 6/12/16, 11:07 PM CET
There was a time
when you took it for granted that a crowd of young Englishmen at a
football match would cause mayhem. In the 1980s, in particular, the
English football hooligan was a species dreaded across the Continent.
He roamed in packs, often shirtless in hot weather. He consumed
oceans of beer and posed a threat to public order unmatched by the
urban fauna of any other land. He held everyone else in contempt, and
believed that there was no fighting man on earth to match the English
fighting man. He was a Kipling subaltern of the Thatcher-era, with a
buzz-cut and a beer-gut and the cross of St. George tattooed on meaty
forearms. Hardness was an end in itself, and was cultivated as a
moral virtue. Those who fled from him, those who buckled under his
fists and kicks, were beings of a lower order — dagos, wops, frogs,
krauts, wogs, kebab-munchers.
Bill Buford captured
the world of the English football hooligan in his chilling book,
“Among the Thugs,” an account of the soccer violence of the
1980s. His is a book that is worth re-reading after the events in the
past week in Marseille, when English football supporters cut a
piratical swath through the old port city, drinking, brawling,
vomiting, swearing, smashing things (bottles, heads, etc), and giving
the French riot police a run for their funny money.
Buford spent months
embedded with different groups — or “firms,” as they called
themselves — of English football hooligans. “The supporters did
not like the stranger,” Buford explained. “The foreigner was the
one they really hated.”
The English had
rampaged through Marseille for two whole days before they encountered
any Russians.
The English hooligan
— a word in which these men gloried — “wanted an England to
defend.” “They wanted a war.” “They wanted a nation to belong
to and fight for.” (There is an excellent essay on Buford’s book
by David Rudin, published last year in Howler Magazine).
The advent of the
Premier League in 1992 brought a great whoosh of money into English
football, and with that changed the character of England’s football
stadiums: new fans began to come in numbers, middle-class and
civilized. They no longer jostled beerily in terraces, crushing each
other and pissing on the folks in the tiers below, but sat, instead,
on numbered seats. With this new money — and lucrative global
broadcasts — came the need for new policing. Hooliganism became
harder to afford, and harder to pull off. In 1990s Brittannia —
cool and multiculti — hooliganism also became deeply unfashionable.
So why, after such a
long and lovely lull, has English hooliganism made a sudden comeback
in France? Only part of the answer lies with the presence in
Marseille of other thugs from Russia, with whom the English hard men
may have been goaded into combat. And certainly, in the hours before
the England-Russia game on Saturday, louts from both lands did engage
in urban warfare.
But the English had
rampaged through Marseille for two whole days before they encountered
any Russians. So what was it that brought out their atavistic habits?
I sounded out two friends of mine who are astute observers of the
English condition, one a distinguished novelist, the other a
much-lauded Queen’s Counsel.
“They just hate
the French,” said the novelist, “and have done so for 800 years.”
This may be in part “because the English ruling classes are
French…or Normans,” and have lorded it over the country’s lower
orders — the hooligan demographic — for centuries. The barrister
had another explanation. “There are now very few outlets for
British male tribalism. Although the economy is doing very well, it
is not based on hard, physical work in communal environments reliant
on teamwork. The State no longer recognizes any virtue in
masculinity.”
Britain, he
continued, “has always had world-class yobs. The British Empire was
built because it was its yobs who could mine coal and make steel, and
who could fire guns on ships faster and fix bayonets more
effectively, than anyone else in the world.”
An English supporter
injured after a street brawl is helped by a rescue squad | Christophe
Magnenet/AFP via Getty Images
An English supporter
injured after a street brawl is helped by a rescue squad | Christophe
Magnenet/AFP via Getty Images
Britain is not alone
in boasting the presence of young male trouble-makers in its midst. A
cult of vapid male “hardness” is prevalent in many parts of the
world. But only in England is it linked to the thugs’ own sense of
global superiority. Call it English Exceptionalism. And this
exceptionalism explains the slogans of the English yob, which rest
almost exclusively of the ethnic and national disparagement of
others. “Raise your hand if you hate the French!” chanted the
English mobs in Marseille. Can you imagine groups of French or German
or Spanish thugs trying such a stunt in the middle of Liverpool, or
Manchester? Of course you can’t. But the English fan feels quite
entitled to abuse the locals right in the heart of the locals’ den.
That this is
happening now is no accident — and the return of English
hooliganism is most interesting, politically. Not for many long years
has English nationalism hung so thickly in the air as it hangs right
now in Britain. The debate over Brexit has brought out some ugly
impulses and even uglier stereotypes. The tabloids — the reading
staple, apart from porn and comic books, for the average English yob
— have stoked a resurgence of ill-will toward the foreigner. It is
permissible to say things, and anathemize entire nations — Turks,
Poles, the Roma, Bulgarians, Latvians — in ways that had fallen
completely out of fashion in modern British discourse. Plumbers,
scroungers, prostitutes, gypsies, beggars, terrorists, NHS-parasites,
wage-undercutters … they’re all the fault of the EU, which is,
after all, in the English demonology, a FRENCH project.
So with beer in
their bellies, rolled-up tabloids in their arse-pockets, sun on their
heads and Brexit on their minds, the English football fans are ready
to riot, to stage their unkempt nationalist theater. It happened in
Marseille. It will happen next in Lens, where England plays Wales;
and then in Saint-Étienne, unless the French raise their woeful
policing game — or England are disqualified from Euro 2016 because
of their hooligans.
That would be the
most ignominious Brexit of them all.
Tunku Varadarajan,
contributing editor at POLITICO, is writing The Linesman column
during Euro 2016.
Authors:
Tunku Varadarajan
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