More PC at the FC

Yet another story involving racism and Tottenham Hotspur Football Club: last week, eight schoolchildren in Ware, near London, were arrested after a teacher saw a video on YouTube showing them chanting 'Yid Army' at his leaving do. As argued previously, this has nothing to do with racism; rather this incident highlights a growing tendency to assume the worst, and to apply informal but fastidious speech codes in ever more bizarre contexts.

In any case, football crowds have never been known for their PC sensitivity, and their rowdy chants and songs have often attracted the attentions of the censorious. While racist chants were relatively common when black players first began to appear in British football in the 1970s and 1980s - in the context of a far more racist society - they are largely unknown today. (The reaction to racist chants by a small number of Motherwell supporters at a recent game showed that racism is considered embarrassingly beyond the pale by football fans today.) Nonetheless, fans will use just about any other kind of abuse to wind up opposition players and supporters, with 'sectarian' chants and songs common in Scotland, and 'homophobic' abuse common everywhere. The authorities are increasingly anxious to rid the game of these unseemly features. The European football body UEFA recently fined Rangers because their fans sang the sectarian song 'Billy Boys' in Villareal, Spain, while the English Football Association recently decided to ban 'homophobic' chanting.

Leaving aside the straightforward free speech argument - these are chants and songs, not sticks and stones - the bans are based on a basic misunderstanding of what is happening at football matches. A football stadium is not a debating chamber or a public square where ideas are taken seriously and have bearing on real life. As Mick Hume has argued, 'football is the home-ground of the id', where people go to unwind by indulging their irrational passions for ninety minutes. As a matter of fact, there is virtually no sectarianism in Scotland today outside football grounds - the 'sectarian' songs are a peculiar expression of football rivalry, not a window on the soul of the nation. Similarly, 'homophobic' chants are not meant to insult gays and lesbians in general - again, there is overwhelming indifference to homosexuality in the world beyond the turnstiles - but to antagonise particular players, who may or may not be gay. (It's not big and it's not clever, but the implication that someone is gay is the cell form of male humour, and says pretty much nothing about broader social attitudes.) Banning this kind of abuse does not simply deprive people of the right to express their opinions; worse, it deprives them of the right to spout nonsense even when they don't mean it.

This is not simply irritating for those of us who enjoy the free and anarchic atmosphere of the football stadium - or indeed the leaving do. It encourages a humourless, witchhunting mentality that sees every slip from PC orthodoxy as something to be punished, and refuses to distinguish between the meaningful and the trivial. What we desperately need is not more bans, but the robust arguments to deal with actual bigotry, the good humour to deal with daft football chants, and the common sense to know the difference.

Dolan Cummings