Is football violence making a return?

This has been a question I’ve toyed with for a while now. We’ve seen several high profile incidents only in the last few weeks with Millwall at Wembley in their semi final FA cup fixture against Wigan and the day after Newcastle fans causing havoc in Newcastle city centre. I must stress these are often minorities and the vast majority of football fans are peace loving and will never cause any trouble at all. But does this signal a wider problem these few incidents? Clearly football is not immune to the outside pressures of society and during an economic downturn social tensions do rise to the surface as we have seen with the riots in 2011 and big strikes a few years back. There are certainly huge tension levels out there. A ghost walked over football's grave last weekend. As the nation prepared to bury the 80s with the funeral of Margaret Thatcher, stark reminders of the game's most wretched decade glared out from television screens and news pages. During Saturday's FA Cup semi-final Millwall fans fought among themselves at Wembley. After Newcastle United had lost 3-0 at home to Sunderland on Sunday some of their supporters tried to confront visiting fans at the railway station and pelted police with missiles, injuring three officers. By the violent standards of the 70s and 80s these incidents were relatively minor. Thirty or 40 years ago they would barely have merited a paragraph or two of news coverage. In football the stage had been reached at which stuff like this was a weekly routine. Thatcher was one of football’s worst enemies she despised football fans and classed all fans as hooligans which were grossly unfair. Things came to a head in March 1985 when Luton Town met Millwall at Kenilworth Road in an FA Cup quarter final and visiting supporters stage a prearranged riot. Having met up in London they travelled to Luton en masse and right on cue invaded the pitch, forcing the referee to take the teams off for 25 minutes while fans fought the outnumbered police. Nine days earlier the second leg of a League Cup semi-final between Chelsea and Sunderland at Stamford Bridge had also been disrupted by a pitch invasion which brought on mounted police. Ken Bates, the Chelsea chairman, complained about a lack of government action to curb the mayhem and given the limp responses of the Football Association he seemed to have a point. All the FA did in this instance was warning Chelsea about their future conduct. Luton was ordered to fence off their pitch and Millwall were fined £7,500, which was not much even then. Thatcher had an hour-long meeting with her ministers to discuss football violence and expressed her disappointment with the game authorities' apparent inability to face up to the problem. A meeting between government and football representatives at Downing Street failed to produce any new ideas. Thatcher saw football fans much like the working class as feral animals needing to be put in their place and dealt with firmly. There was no sense of trying to understand the tensions that her own government at the time created and field. The only, somewhat extreme, innovation was short-lived. Chelsea erected an 11ft electrified fence around their pitch hoping to deter invaders with a 12-volt charge, but the Greater London Council threatened legal action and the thing was not switched on. All this and worse was to come. On the last day of the season rubbish which for years had been allowed to accumulate under the main stand at Bradford City's ground caught fire and 56 died in the inferno. On the same afternoon Leeds United fans went on the rampage at Birmingham City and a boy was killed when a wall collapsed. Heysel was 18 days away. All they did was put up steel fences to keep spectators off the playing area and four years later the terrible logic of this practice led to Hillsborough when cackhanded policing at an FA Cup semi-final resulted in 96 Liverpool supporters, whose only offence had been to arrive early, being crushed to death behind one of the goals. The Taylor Report, all-seat stadiums, bans on alcohol and the fact that unruly elements have largely been priced out should have minimised the chance of football grounds again becoming death traps. Moreover, the speed with which Millwall and Newcastle have reacted in trying to track down those who caused trouble last weekend is a refreshing contrast to the foot-dragging responses of the past.Violence is not something football fans should have to accept and a firm stance on this by all clubs threatening life time bans on anyone found guilty is a must. We’ve come along way in the game to drive out violent elements I do hope we do not go back to those dark days.

Hillsborough the truth finally is outed and highlights shameful role of the state

The report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel has ripped aside the tangled web of lies and cover-up woven by the South Yorkshire police, the government and the army of lickspittles in the press who denigrated Liverpool and the victims of the man-made catastrophe in 1989 that was Hillsborough. Kelvin McKenzie, then the editor of the Sun and Murdoch's bag carrier who peddles his poison to the highest bidder, was the most vocal with his tissue of lies about that tragedy. 96 football fans lost their lives, those deaths affected thousands of people. Many continue to suffer extreme trauma as a result of their experience. Some suffered personality changes and went to an early grave. The families of the 96 greeted the report with relief and euphoria. Having campaigned in the face of impossible odds for 23 years, this was to be anticipated, but the relief and sense of victory and exoneration throughout Liverpool was palpable. This fight for the truth has united Liverpool and Everton fans alike. Fans who oppose each other in a football sense came together as football fans feeling a huge injustice over Hillsborough. Yesterday was a shocking day and a groundbreaking day in many ways. The independent report uncovered some very startling home truths on South Yorkshire police and the wider role of the state. Trevor Hicks of the family support group, who lost two daughters, reported that three family members fainted when evidence was revealed by the panel that with the correct support from the emergency services 46 of the victims may have been saved. This information added to the sense of anger and outrage which permeated the city. A question uppermost was that, of the 48 ambulances which rushed to the stadium, only two actually made it onto the pitch. Even the tops of the ambulance service were implicated in the subsequent cover-up. The police, the Sun, with Thatcher and her government implicated in the cover-up, were subject to excoriating condemnation. McKenzie's apology and the Sun's later apology was contemptuously dismissed for the hollow gesture that it was. There can be no doubt that the instructions for the cover up came from the very tops of the state machine. The brutal anti-working class culture of the South Yorkshire police force which played a leading and pernicious role in crushing the miners in their struggle to defend their jobs and communities was laid bare by this report. Michael Mansfield QC, who assisted the families, clearly identified the link. The police authorities revelled in an atmosphere of impunity which flowed from the anti-working class outlook of the then Thatcher government. Liverpool was also the city where the Militant-led socialist council in the mid-1980s had resisted the attacks of the Thatcher government by mobilising the support thousands of working class people. By falsely accusing Liverpool football fans as being drunken hooligans, the ruling classes also intended to denigrate the city's tradition of militant struggle. The next stage of this campaign will be to call for those implicated in this cover-up to be subject to the criminal law. Even the chief constable of the South Yorkshire police has been compelled to accept that those engaged in unlawful activity will be subject to prosecution. Cameron's frank admission of the cover-up and his apology surprised many. But if he had attempted to continue the cover-up his government could have fallen, he had no choice in the face of the evidence but to admit the truth. Parallels can be drawn with French author Émile Zola's article J'accuse (1898) in which he exposed the role of the French state in the anti-semitic frame up of Alfred Dreyfus. The furore which followed brought down the government. Not only are the families to be applauded for their courage and tenacity in the pursuit of justice, but a debt of honour is owed to them for showing that working class people fired with courage and determination can render the forces of the state accountable. The police officers involved in this awful cover up who colluded with the state and politicians at the time should not be allowed to get away with this. The Hillsborough victim’s families have the truth now, now they want justice and I and the socialist party fully support their fight.