Violence and Racism in Football: Politics and Cultural Conflict in British Society, 1968-1998, by Brett Bebber

Abstract

This is a ‘top down’ study of the twin phenomena of hooliganism and racism in contemporary British football. It is not a ‘thick description’ of the sub-culture of group violence that erupted around British football from the 1960s onwards involving urban working-class youth but, rather, an analysis of the British state’s reaction to this phenomenon, using newly declassified material. The author, Brett Bebber, draws on hitherto unused sources which show that the state took ‘hooliganism’ seriously (he does not like the term, seeing it as value-laden and inherently pejorative). He then links this inter-club violence between sections of white working-class youth with the wider use of football by the National Front and other racist groups to attract new recruits and publicity for themselves. As a general social and cultural account, the book’s faults are easy to see. ‘Interrogating the origins of fan subjectivities or the group dynamics of social violence’ (p. 3) is not within Bebber’s remit. In other words, understanding why this happened is not really his objective, though he stresses the importance of locating these outbreaks of disorder in a wider historical context. The problem is that he does not appear to understand this context very well. He gives the game away in the first sentence of Part 1: ‘Throughout the 1950s and 1960s football attendance became a communal activity for working class men and women, enriched by strong social networks and shared experiences’ (p. 19, my italics). Why does the sentence strike a false note and set alarm bells ringing in a reviewer? First the use of ‘became’ shows that the author appears to have little sense that professional football was a core component of working-class culture by 1900, let alone 1950. The book lacks any sense of the earlier history of the game, which is crucial for an explanation of how it changed. Secondly, the inclusion of ‘women’ is even stranger. Women never made up more than a small minority—probably around five to ten per cent and frequently less—in what was a supremely male space. Whatever else hooliganism was, it was gender specific. Were the words ‘men and women’ included out of misguided political correctness or out of a genuine belief that women attended matches in any significant numbers let alone ‘shared experiences’ of the game with men? How many women were arrested for hooligan behaviour? All of our evidence (and personal testimony and memory) suggests that this did not happen.