New Labour, racism and 'new' football in England

Patterns of Prejudice

Volumn 40, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 61-82

  Bradbury, Steven ^a   Williams, John ^b  

^a LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

English football; Fan racism; Football Task Force; Governance; Institutional racism; New Labour; Normative whiteness; Racism; Third Way

Indexed keywords

EID: 31844448001     PISSN: 0031322X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00313220500482704     Document Type: Review

References (89)

1. Reported in S. Lowe, 'Nation turns the blame on English being over-sensitive', Daily Telegraph, 19 November 2004, 53. In England, earlier in 2004, the well-known television football pundit and ex-manager Ron Atkinson had himself been instantly sacked for using the word 'nigger' in an aside caught by microphones left 'live' at the end of a broadcast.
2. J. Carlin, 'Spain must take prompt action or stain left by Bernabeu disgrace will remain', Independent, 19 November 2004, 61.
3. Kick It Out is the national football anti-racism campaign in England that works with the Football Association (FA), the national team and professional and non-professional clubs.
4. D. Taylor, 'Aragones attacks English "wolves'", Guardian, 17 November 2004, 36.
5. See, for example, J. White, 'This shocking abuse is a weekly ritual', Daily Telegraph, 19 November 2004.
6. For an explanation citing globalization and racism in Europe, see W. Hutton, 'Caught in a circle of hate', Observer, 21 November 2004, 28;
7. for one citing the effects of immigration in Spain, see G. Tremlett, 'Immigration surge fuels racism in Spain', Guardian, 20 November 2004, 19.
8. See G. Balague, 'A lot of noise, but very little self-analysis', Observer, 21 November 2004, 7.
9. These clearly premeditated incidents seem unlikely to have been the work of 'committed racists', so they do raise key questions concerning Long and McNamee's important attempt to develop a 'racist register' for sport; see J. Long and M. J. McNamee, 'On the moral economy of racism and racist rationalizations in sport', International Review for the Sociology of Sport, vol. 39, no. 4, 2004, 405-20.
10. As the football magazine When Saturday Comes pointed out (no. 215, January 2005, 4), tabloid newspapers in England chastised Spain for its football racism while simultaneously running racist stories about asylum-seekers and mythic 'Gypsy' settlements in Britain. Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, the players' union in England, argued in the British broadsheets that the England team should have vacated the pitch in Madrid. Referee René Temmink had recently abandoned a Dutch league match between ADO Den Haag and PSV Eindhoven after eighty minutes because of repeated antisemitic chanting by the home fans.
11. See K. Mitchell, 'I was a racist - but football changed me', Observer, 28 November 2004, 8.
12. E. Cashmore, 'Beware the banana skin', Independent on Sunday, 21 November 2004, 16.
13. Boa Morte claimed that, when he had reported a fellow professional player in England for calling him a 'black cunt' during an FA Cup match in January 2003, he was accused of 'playing the race card', and no charges were brought by the FA; reported in A. Kessel, 'Home is where the hurt is', Observer, 21 November 2004, 6.
14. Five men were later arrested and a twenty-two-year-old local man was fined £1,000 and banned from football grounds in England until 2009; see P. Hurst, 'Football fan is banned for racially abusing opposition player', Independent, 25 November 2004, 6.
15. Piara Powar of Kick It Out made this comment about the fine imposed by Fifa; see 'Spain fined for racist chanting', 21 December 2004, available on the BBC News website at http://news.bbc.co.uk/sportl/hi/football/internationals/ 4110135.stm (viewed 26 October 2005).
16. Blair's comments were reported in D. Pilditch, 'Blair puts the boot into Spanish racists', Daily Express, 19 November 2004, 9.
17. D. Butler and D. Stokes, Political Change in Britain (London: Macmillan 1974).
18. T. Mason, Association Football and English Society, 1863-1915 (Brighton: Harvester Press 1980).
19. A. Tomlinson, 'North and South: the rivalry of the Football League and the Football Association', in J. Williams and S. Wagg (eds), British Football and Social Change (Leicester: Leicester University Press 1991).
20. N. Fishwick, English Football and Society, 1910-1950 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press 1989), 138.
21. See J. Hargreaves, Sport, Power and Culture: A Social and Historical Analysis of Popular Sports in Britain (Cambridge: Polity Press 1986), 92-3,
22. and S. Jones, Sport, Politics and the Working Class (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press 1988), 122.
23. This position was occasionally challenged, for example, in the Trade Union Congress's protests about the visit of Nazi Germany to play England in Jewish North London in November 1935; see Fishwick, English Football and Society, 139.
24. Jones, Sport, Politics and the Working Class, 18.
25. Fishwick, English Football and Society, 150.
26. Rt Hon. Lord Justice Taylor, The Hillsborough Stadium Disaster, 15 April 1989: Final Report (London: HMSO 1990).
27. On 'new' football and the FA Premier League, see J. Williams, Is It All Over: Can Football Survive the FA Premier League? (Reading: South Street Press 1999),
28. and A. King, The End of the Terraces (Leicester: Leicester University Press 1998).
29. P. Davies, All Played Out: The Full Story of Italia '90 (London: Heinemann 1990).
30. P. Davies, All Played Out: The Full Story of Italia '90, Ibid., 244.
31. For more on England football fans and racism in the 1980s, see J. Williams, E. Dunning and P. Murphy, Hooligans Abroad (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1984).
32. B. Carrington, 'Football's coming home, but whose home?', in A. Brown (ed.), Fanatics! (London: Routledge 1998).
33. For more on Blair and 'cool Britannia', see K. Davey, English Imaginaries: Six Studies in Anglo-British Modernity (London: Lawrence and Wishart 1999).
34. R. Holt and T. Mason, Sport in Britain 1945-2000 (Oxford: Blackwell 2000), 155.
35. R. Levitas, The Inclusive Society? (London: Macmillan 1998), 113.
36. For more on the new marketing trajectory of English football, see Football Association, Blueprint for Football (London: Football Association 1991).
37. S. Hall, 'New ethnicities', in J. Donald and A. Rattansi (eds), 'Race', Culture and Difference (London: Sage 1992), 252.
38. Davey, English Imaginaries, 17.
39. For more on the contingent inclusion of ethnic minority fans during Euro '96, see L. Back, T. Crabbe and J. Solomos, The Changing Face of Football: Racism, Identity and Multiculture in the English Game (Oxford: Berg 2001).
40. J. Cunningham and T. Pendry, Charter for Football (London: Labour Party 1996).
41. A. Brown, 'The Football Task Force and the regulator debate', in S. Hamil, J. Mitchie, C. Oughton and S. Warby (eds), Football in the Digital Age: Whose Game Is It Anyway? (Edinburgh and London: Mainstream Publishing 2000), 57.
42. Quoted in Brown, 'The Football Task Force and the regulator debate', 69.
43. A. Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press 1998).
44. For a critique of Giddens and the 'third way', see P. Cammack, 'Giddens's way with words', in S. Hale, W. Leggart and L. Martell (eds), The Third Way and Beyond (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2004).
45. Levitas, The Inclusive Society?, 117.
46. Brown, 'The Football Task Force and the regulator debate', 62.
47. Andy Burnham, interview with the authors, 12 April 2002. All the semi-structured interviews with Task Force members quoted here were conducted as part of an ESRC CASE studentship in partnership with the Professional Footballers' Association. For more information on interviewees and methodology, see S. Bradbury, 'Racisms and Anti-Racism in English Football', Ph.D. thesis, University of Leicester, 2003.
48. Brown 'The Football Task Force and the regulator debate'.
49. Andy Burnham, interview with the authors, 12 April 2002.
50. Adam Brown, supporters' Task Force representative, interview with the authors, 5 April 2002.
51. See, for example, I. Ridley, 'Softly, softly, Task Force... I think I'm being used', Observer Sport, 12 December 1999, 2.
52. See V. Choudhary, 'Task Force split over money', Guardian, 22 December 1999, 22.
53. Andy Burnham, interview with the authors, 12 April 2002.
54. Gordon Taylor, interview with the authors, 8 May 2002.
55. Adam Brown, interview with the authors, 5 April 2002.
56. William Macpherson, The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry by Sir 'William Macpherson of Cluny, Cm 4262-1 (London: Stationery Office 1999).
57. Football Task Force, Eliminating Racism from football (London: Football Task Force 1998), 7.
58. Andy Burnham, interview with the authors, 12 April 2002.
59. P. Connolly, 'Racism and young girls' peer group relations: the experience of South Asian girls', Sociology, vol. 34, 2000, 499-519 (503).
60. Piara Powar, interview with the authors, 9 May 2002.
61. See Back, Crabbe and Solomos, The Changing Face of Football,
62. and J. Garland and M. Rowe, Racism and Anti-Racism in Football (London: Palgrave 2001).
63. Andy Burnham, interview with the authors, 12 April 2002.
64. C. King, Offside Racism: Playing the White Man (Oxford: Berg 2004).
65. Jos Johnson, Highfield Rangers PC, interview with the authors, 5 February 2002.
66. Kick it Out, 'Submission to the Football Task Force', 1998. See also J. Bains and R. Patel, Asians Can't Play Football (Solihull: Asian Social Development Agency 1995)
67. and D. Burdsey, 'Obstacle race? "Race", racism and the recruitment of Asian professional footballers', Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 38, no. 3, 2004, 279-300.
68. Piara Powar, interview with the authors, 9 May 2002.
69. See M. Brown, 'Forcing the issue', When Saturday Comes, no. 148, 1998, 22-3,
70. and E. Lindsey, 'Task Force fails to really put the boot in on racism', Observer Sport, 29 March 1998, 4.
71. Annual National Criminal Intelligence figures on recorded racist offences at football matches are routinely highlighted by anti-racism groups as underplaying the problem of football racism; such data tend to rely on fan reporting. National survey data on football fans suggest that incidents of racism are much more widely spread at football. See J. Williams, FA Premier League National Fan Survey (Leicester: University of Leicester and FA Premier League 2001).
72. The Foxes against Racism group in Leicester, for example, began as a response to the Task Force agenda and is still highly active in the city today.
73. Piara Powar, interview with the authors, 9 May 2002.
74. Back, Solomos and Crabbe, The Changing Face of Football, 201.
75. Jos Johnson, interview with the authors, 5 February 2002.
76. Lindsey, 'Task Force fails to really put the boot in on racism'.
77. S. Bradbury, The New Football Communities: A Survey of Professional Football Clubs on Issues of Community, Ethnicity and Social Inclusion (Leicester: Sir Norman Chester Centre for Football Research, University of Leicester 2001).
78. J. Long, K. Hylton, M.Welch and J. Dart, Part of the Game: A Report Prepared for Kick It Out at the Centre of Leisure and Sport Research (Leeds: Leeds Metropolitan University and Kick It Out 2001).
79. A Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) survey, Racial Equality in Football (London: CRE 2004), reported that 13 of 810 local county FA council members (less than 2 per cent) were black or of South Asian origin.
80. Burdsey, 'Obstacle race?', 298.
81. See also Bradbury, 'Racisms and Anti-Racism in English Football'.
82. Burdsey, 'Obstacle race?', 288.
83. Colin King, in Offside Racism, makes this point strongly, but he also seems, to us, to operate with what Long and McNamee call an on/off conceptualization of racism that, in turn, is predicated on a rather essentialized notion of race and difference. We prefer Burdsey's more complex approach to 'race' and identity construction, but we would also suggest that Burdsey overplays the structural importance of subjective interpretations of identity among young British Asian footballers.
84. Piara Powar, interview with the authors, 9 May 2002.
85. Independent Football Commission, Annual Report 2003 (Middlesbrough: University of Teeside 2003).
86. Significantly, the IFC was forced to defend media charges, prior to publication, that it was claiming that the game was 'racist', but commented that the continuing perception that English football is 'institutionally racist' is important. IFC member and former Tottenham and Manchester United footballer Garth Crooks commented: 'For change to be meaningful it has to be radical. This report is not about a token black face here and there'; quoted in 'Report critical over racism', 10 February 2004, available on the BBC News website at http://news.bbc.co.uk/sportl/hi/ football/3476161.stm (viewed 27 October 2005).
87. Commission for Racial Equality, Racial Equality in Football, 42.
88. Burdsey, in 'Obstacle race?', argues that his Asian subjects suggest that the separate development of Asian leagues at amateur levels is one of the reasons for their lack of progress in the professional game, though there is no evidence at all to suggest that more progress is made by Asians in areas where amateur football is mixed.
89. Quoted in Kessel, 'Home is where the hurt is'.