SOCIALIST UNITY

I am cat sitting, tough life isn’t it, greedy tikes that they are! but spent the afternoon at climate camp.

Well a bit disorientating, usually I have to travel miles and miles, and then get hassled by le flic, searched for weapons etc…..just got the train to New Cross Gate, 10 minute bike ride….no cops easy.

Usually going to the climate camp seems a bit like setting off for the Paris Commune, good but edgy because you think you might get seriously injured by the forces of law and order.

Not so this time…no police, although they seem to be hiding in the cadet centre in case of ‘trouble’.

The camp is very well organised, clean and green and fun. Hung out with my Green Left amigos and met lots of other friends, gave out some information about the lucha indigena….had a quick pint in Blackheath.

Its not often I have such relaxing day. Seeing a large banner ‘Capitalism is Crisis’, I feel the camp really shows the message that unlimited economic growth is unsustainable and shows that another world is possible.

Tomorrow I will approach the camp in a more serious way and promote a bit of activism.

Any way lovely place to be, don’t read the crap in the newspapers, if you are in south east london join us tomorrow for some bank holiday ecological fun.

Louise has very nice photos and a report here.

by Salma Yaqoob 

The English Defence League claimed they only came to protest against Islamic extremism but they actually came to spread hatred and division. One of their ringleaders, Paul Ray, made his intentions very clear when he stated, on TalkSport Radio, ‘his opposition to all Muslims practising their faith in Britain’.

Everyone has a right to their opinions but no one has the right to incite hatred on the basis of faith or race. I am concerned there is an equivalence being made between these people, who came to provoke trouble, and people who stand against fasicsm and racism. There is no equivalence and it is wrong that people have been allowed to come into the city centre with this intent for trouble. The fascists wants to see social disorder, especially scenes of violence between Muslim youth and white people, because then they can hold it up as ‘evidence’ of the ‘failure’ of multiculturalism.

Of course, our message is ‘do not be provoked’. We don’t want to see any scenes of violence in our Birmingham city centre; but the reality is they know some of these tactics have worked as in the past in Burnley, Oldham and Stoke where they instigated race riots and since that polarisation, they have benefited in their votes. I believe the English Defence League’s so-called ‘protests’ are simply a repeat of this formula which they want to bring to Birmingham and other cities across the country.

I call on politicians from all parties, civic leaders and faith representatives to condemn the racist intent behind these so-called demonstrations and also call for the banning of any future such protests in our city. Luton has also seen protests by the EDL and Casuals United, which have resulted in violence, and the police there have actually responded to a public outcry about this by calling for a ban.

Chief Superintendent Andy Frost, Divisional Commander for Luton police, said: “The risk the proposed marches pose to public safety has left us with no alternative but to apply for a banning order.”

Alan Johnson, the Home Office Minister, granted this banning order in Luton, because he received over 14,000 letters directly to himself and the Chief Constable there, saying that they wanted a ban. I urge people in Birmingham to write to Alan Johnson, as well as to the Chief Constable here to urge for a similar ban.

I love being a Brummie, I’m proud that Birmingham is a multicultural and diverse city. Let’s not be divided by the racists.”

To request a ban, please write to:
Alan Johnson MP (Home Secretary): public.enquiries@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk

Chief Constable Chris Simms (West Midlands Police): contactus@west-midlands.pnn.police.uk

For reasons of transparency, we want to keep track of how many letters are sent. Please ‘CC’ Salma Yaqoob at: salma.yaqoob@hotmail.co.uk

from NUJleft 

There’s a reason why the Daily Mail has traditionally paid its staff relatively well – and it’s not because it’s a benevolent employer.

Reporters know that in working for the Mail you hand over a little piece of your soul when you file your copy.

The deal acknowledges that any vaguely sentient newsgatherer knows it is odd, at best, to ignore the otherwise newsworthy ambitions and achievements of whole sections of society.

As Nick Davies discusses in Flat Earth News, the editorial line has a corrosive effect on the kind of journalism its journalists practise. But you take your poison, or you move on.

The same can not be said for the Guardian. Like the BBC, the desire to work there for many is cultural and political, as well as journalistic.

In recent years, however, GMG management has been chipping away at the group’s founding public service ethos that is not just important to journalists on the left, but also a vital part of a diverse and free press.

Journalists and readers in Manchester, for example, rightly wonder how “a sense of duty to the reader and the community” is best served by closing local offices and cutting jobs, while handing out massive executive bonuses.

It is also difficult to see how anyone could seriously contemplate closing down the country’s oldest Sunday newspaper or turning it into an irrelevant mid-week magazine.

The possibility that this is a softening-up exercise to push through further cuts in London is as disgraceful as it is worrying for the future of the Guardian and the Observer.

Amid all this controversy, management is busy attacking the creative rights of photographers by saying it will no longer pay to re-use images.

As photojournalist and NUJ Left member Jonathan Warren says on his blog – in a post linking the issue to the Guardian’s appeal for free Flickr images of the London Climate Camp – “photographers rely on reuse fees to earn a living”.

The timing of ‘Flickr-gate’ could not be better. Or worse. Photographers will be protesting against the rights grab outside the Guardian offices in York Way, London, at 9.30am on Tuesday 1 September.

Some freelance photographers have already said they will boycott the Guardian until it negotiates a new deal.

And if the bosses don’t get back to their roots with some “honesty, integrity and fairness” soon, other journalists and readers could well follow suit.

It is highly unlikely the Mail will benefit from this. But the Guardian, as a newspaper and a group, will certainly suffer.

I have been on holiday for the last couple of weeks in Pembrokeshire, split between visiting my brother who has lived there for the last 25 years, and camping down by the beaches of the south coast for the benefit of my children.

One experience on the camp-site showed me that I have been completely wrong in dismissing the Welsh aspect of the “England and Wales” cricket team. Young lads from a Welsh speaking family were the most enthusiastic cricket players there, and I overheard them time and again explaining to the brummies they were playing with that the heroes of the Ashes were the English and Welsh cricket team. One of the pleasant consequences of England’s revival has been the seeming re-emergence of cricket being played by children in parks and on beaches.

The controversy that has caught my notice has been the debate about the “Barmy Army”. I have a lot of respect for the sports writer of the Independent, James Lawton, who often brilliantly captures the intangible magic of sport, where extraordinary skill can transcend the bookmaker’s expectations; and the bathos of human frailty pulls the sporting demi-Gods towards hubris and thwarted hopes.

So I was interested in Lawton’s assessment of the “Barmy Army”, the somewhat self-regarding England supporters, who have been the focus of much media attention. Lawton’s view is negative:

The [Barmy] Army believe that the old role of the spectator to watch and appreciate skills of a very high order, to express emotions that flow naturally from the action, long ago became redundant in face of a more pressing need to participate.
What we know for sure is that the Barmy Army have been celebrated perhaps more than any body of sports fans since the denizens of Liverpool’s Kop first emerged as both genuine humorists and fine and subtle observers of football.
The result, as Dominic Lawson pointed out with pinpoint accuracy on these pages in the wake of some quite scabrous behaviour at Edgbaston earlier this week, is a culture of the terraces that seeks to create an alternative universe – one in which dressing up, as a most obvious example, is considered a standard device offering endless possibilities of self-advertising and, best of all, moments of television exposure.

Some of Lawton’s comments are perceptive, that the Barmy Army seem to celebrate their own exploits as much as that of the team they support, but is that not also the case with the culture on football terraces? The boorish and sometimes drunken nature of some supporters is not the creation of sporting allegiance, but a bleeding into sports culture from the values and behaviours of our wider society. Other commenters are even more scathing, in the Daily Mail, Patrick Collins writes:

A game once watched by civilised people and conducted in a civilised atmosphere is now threatened by the attitudes which have long disfigured English football. Insults are acceptable, profanity desirable, drunkeness is virtually compulsory and loyalty is demonstrated by the loudest, most bigoted chant.

There is something odd about the “Barmy Army”, with their own merchandising operation, and obvious self-regard. However, the argument that supporting cricket requires the Olympian detachment of the connoisseur able to appreciate the subtlety of each delivery and stroke seems to miss the nature of the game. The glory of cricket is that in addition to the tactical nuance of the moments of play, there is a strategic battle of judgement by the captains, and a test of will, endurance and patience. Millions of people follow the tests on the radio, enthralled by the drama, yet unable to see a single stroke; it is woven into the weft of our culture that people check the score while they are engaged in other activities and a simple statement like “Australia are 168 for two”, provides enough fuel for an hour’s day-dreaming and speculation about the permutations.

Back in the 1980s I used to occassionaly go and watch Gloucester CCC, and there was indeed a quiet atmosphere where the thud of leather on willow could be appreciated, but the main characteristic of the crowd from my recollection was genteel drunkenness. It is the word genteel which sums up the missing ingredients of propriety and deference that used to characterise the English game, and that are now lost. The atmosphere of English cricket used to be insufferably smug, based upon that genius of our nation for assuming that the particularities of our own culture are universal human attributes that everyone else should be judged by, while simultaneously finding the patriotism of other nations rather vulgar. There is no doubt that many England fans are slightly disdainful of the hungry competitiveness of the Australians, and as such their general sporting superiority is quietly regarded as a mark of their parochialism. These chauvinist attitudes will be familiar to anyone acquainted with Mike Marqusee’s book “Anyone but England”.

The Barmy Army are just one of the more strident examples of a general shift in the culture of sports patriotism in England. On the one hand that shift reflects England’s, and Britain’s, changing place in the world, but at the same time it also reflects our culture’s shallow celebration of celebrity, where the talentless exhibitionism of fans on the terraces is given as much status as the genuine achievement of the sporting professionals on the field of play.

Sport is too often considered a peripheral aspect of our society by social commenters. However the rise of modern sport’s industry coincides with the growth of both commodity production and the modern nation state. In a world where life is often predictable and humdrum, sport always includes uncertainty; indeed the authenticity of sport relies upon the game being susceptible to different outcomes. What is more, as the gifted socialist sports writer, Dave Zirin, points out, the ideology of meritocracy in sport has exposed the irrationality of racial distinctions, like the colour bar in US baseball; or the stupidity of class snobbery such as the historical divide between “gentlemen” and players in English cricket.

In a harsh world with limited social solidarity, joining the imagined community of those who support the same team can provide a strong sense of shared identity; in the case of national teams that imagined community is strengthened by cultural, linguistic and institutional reinforcements.

In CLR James’s book, “Beyond the Boundary” he writes of the importance of cricket in the development of national self confidence in the West Indies, particularly the battle to achieve a black captain to the team. Sports patriotism became an important component in the developing movement for independence.

Without the phenomenon of mass support, which requires supporters who have no personal acquaintanceship with the players, then the business model of modern sport would be impossible; and it is this broader support - relying as it does on mass media, shared culture, and rules of sports learned in a national education system - that provides the weight and impact of sport in our wider society. These are the same societal attributes described by Benedict Anderson as the prerequisites for the birth of modern nations states. However the very nature of modern sport is also based upon particular attributes of industrialised and commerce based society – for example, play between strangers requires the codification of rules, rather than the organic development of customs. This is similar to the codification of laws of contract to allow anonymous strangers to do business.

The French Marxist, Jean-Marie Brohm, wrote of modern sport as a “prison of measured time”. His writings were primarily concerned with those sports where the element of play is largely absent, based more upon direct comparative measurement: for example, athletics, swimming, weightlifting, cycling and skiing and boxing. The competition is between those who can best sublimate their human individuality and transform their body into a machine for producing the most efficient performance: the transformation of human beings into abstract physical labour that can be measured and compared.

Jean-Marie Brohm also made the perceptive point that modern sports industry reproduces the structure of our society in miniature, and represents it as ideologically neutral. So the disdain of liberal commenters towards the Barmy Army is a disdain not towards just a couple of hundred of exhibitionist fans, but is symptomatic that the ideology being expressed through sport is in flux. The England of Andrew Strauss being celebrated is not the England of WG Grace, nor even the England of David Gower. The Barmy Army are a phenomenon created by a culture of Jade Goody, Simon Cowell and Katy Price. We may not like it, but this is the culture we actually live in: This is our England.

The CLR James T Shirt pictured is available from Philosophy Football , who have also produced a T-Shirt celebrating the Ashes win.

Picture credit. http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/england/8216783.stm

Brilliant stuff.

Check out the website

very professional, with photos, video, and they have even organised a public meeting for the residents of Blackheath: 3.30pm, Sat 29 August, Greenwich Community Centre, 141 Greenwich High Rd, SE10 8JA

This really shows how a relatively small group of activists can capture the media’s attention through a combination of a clear political message, professionally presented, along with imagination and audacity.

by Naomi Idrissi

Morning Star, August 27

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php

The movement to boycott Israel is becoming respectable. In Europe and the US as well as in the Middle East and many parts of the developing world, people of conscience, including many Jews, are rejecting anti-Arab prejudice and zionist mythology and seeing Israel for what it is - an ethnocentric state which deserves to be ostracised just as South Africa was ostracised during the apartheid era.

Groups like mine, Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods, support the call made by nearly 200 Palestinian civil society organisations in 2005 for a broad campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions, including an institutional academic and cultural boycott, until Israel respects Palestinian human rights and abides by international law.

Four years on, reports of boycott activities are appearing in mainstream media and the internet is buzzing with film, photos and text reports of inventive, non-violent and increasingly effective campaigns. These take many different forms.

Last week, a worldwide letter-writing campaign resulted in human rights organisation Amnesty International withdrawing from a scheme to manage the proceeds from a concert in Israel next month by US singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen.

Cohen has been touring the globe for many weeks now. Everywhere he has gone he has encountered musicians, artists and other campaigners pleading with him not to ignore the Palestinian boycott call. They argue that to go ahead with a concert in Israel is to reward Israelis for the murderous assault on Gaza last winter which killed 1,500 Palestinians and devastated a community of 1.5 million.

Cohen tried to persuade Amnesty to give his planned concert credibility by distributing funds to organisations which he said work for reconciliation, tolerance and peace. But his argument was rejected by Palestinian groups, which said the plan would only enhance Israeli legitimacy without restoring justice to Palestinians. Amnesty bowed out, but the campaign to halt Cohen’s September 24 concert in Israel continues as part of the cultural boycott movement to persuade all international performers to stay away.

Artists and performers representing the Israeli state are also coming up against boycott actions when they travel abroad. Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC) activists, protesting at the Israeli siege of Gaza which was in force long before the all-out military assault began in December 2008, disrupted a concert in Edinburgh last year by the Jerusalem Quartet, an Israeli musical ensemble designated “cultural ambassadors” of the state of Israel and “distinguished IDF (Israeli army) musicians.”

Five activists were arrested and are facing charges for “racially aggravated conduct.” The campaign said that its members faced “trumped-up charges based on the British government’s response to rising support among the public for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel and the wave of anger at British complicity in Israeli crimes.”

They indicate official endorsement of “the tired zionist strategy” of trying to intimidate Israel’s opponents by accusing them of anti-Jewish racism, the campaign group said.

The zionist habit of accusing Israel’s critics of anti-semitism is losing its potency as more and more Jews, including some Israelis, recognise the powerful arguments for boycotting Israel.

SPSC has received vocal support from the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN), a Jewish organisation committed to justice and full recognition of the rights of the Palestinian people.

IJAN gave the Scottish activists its “unwavering support” and said “we reject the false premise that a challenge to the injustice of Israeli apartheid is a ‘racially motivated’ act targeting Jewish people.”

The network said it fully endorsed such actions undertaken in support of the call from Palestinian civil society for full boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.

Further Jewish endorsement of the boycott movement came last week from Neve Gordon, who teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Gordon said that he had reluctantly concluded that calling on foreign governments, regional authorities, international social movements, faith-based organisations, unions and citizens to suspend co-operation with Israel was “the only way that Israel can be saved from itself.”

“Israel today is … an apartheid state” in which the 3.5 million Palestinians and half a million Jews living in areas Israel captured in 1967 are “subjected to totally different legal systems,” he wrote.

Gordon said that Jerusalem has become “an apartheid city where Palestinians aren’t citizens and lack basic services.” The Israeli peace camp is almost non-existent and politics has moved far to the right. “It is therefore clear to me that the only way to counter the apartheid trend in Israel is through massive international pressure.”

If words and condemnation from the Obama administration and the European Union produce no steps towards Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, BDS becomes the only option, Gordon said.

He referred to a gathering in Bilbao, Spain, last year when a coalition of organisations from all over the world resolved to campaign for “sanctions on and divestment from Israeli firms operating in the occupied territories, followed by actions against those that help sustain and reinforce the occupation in a visible manner.

“Artists who come to Israel in order to draw attention to the occupation are welcome, while those who just want to perform are not,” Gordon added.

As part of the wide-ranging BDS movement, women in France, the US and within Israel itself have daubed themselves with mud and declared that they will not use Dead Sea beauty products from the Ahava company, which bases its operations in the illegal West Bank settlement of Mitzpe Shalem.

YouTube videos show them chanting: “Ahava, you can’t hide, we will show your dirty side, We’re here to show your dirty hands, products made in stolen lands.”

British activists hold regular pickets outside a depot near London owned by Carmel Agrexco, the partly state-owned Israeli firm responsible for the bulk of fresh produce - flowers, herbs, fruit and vegetables - exported to Europe. Much of it comes from illegal settlements on confiscated Palestinian land and depends on exploiting Palestinian water, labour and other resources, contravening the Fourth Geneva Convention regarding the responsibilities of an occupying power.

Boycott campaigners bombard supermarkets with complaints about this and regularly distribute thousands of leaflets explaining to shoppers why they should avoid goods from Israel and the occupied territories.

Two leading supermarkets have entered into high-level discussions with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign on the subject. The Co-operative and Marks & Spencer have stated that they will not stock settlement goods and Sainsbury’s and The Co-operative have started to give shelf space to Palestinian olive oil.

The stores and the solidarity movement are awaiting new guidelines from the British government’s Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) which are supposed to clarify how goods are labelled, so that consumers can choose not to buy produce from stolen Palestinian land. Ultimately, boycott campaigners want to see trade in all such goods banned.

To press home the point, inspired by supermarket actions in France, British campaigners have recently begun to stage sit-down demonstrations in stores stocking Israeli and settlement goods. Film of their actions is accessible via the internet.

Campaigns to expose the complicity of some companies in the illegal occupation is another important element in the BDS movement. Following one such campaign, French company Veolia is reported to have pulled out of a consortium set to build a controversial rail project linking east Jerusalem and settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Israeli-owned water cooler firm Eden Springs, which in Israel markets water from the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, is facing repeated challenges to its contracts with public bodies in Britain.

US firm Caterpillar, which sells Israel the bulldozers it uses to demolish Palestinian homes, is the subject of a long-running international campaign pressing it to stop selling heavy equipment to Israel. Four activists were arrested in March 2006 when, in front of the main CAT US office, they re-enacted the death three years earlier of peace activist Rachel Corrie, who was killed by a CAT bulldozer as she tried to stop it destroying a Palestinian house.

Campaigning website www.catdestroyshomes.org reports that activists have targeted CAT merchandise in stores, investments in church and union funds and declared “CAT-free zones” boycotting all CAT products. CAT distributors have seen protests from Belfast to Bil’in, Detroit to Denmark, San Francisco to Stockholm.

Support for boycott actions is growing within the trade union movement in Britain and Ireland. The Electronic Intifada reported on August 14 that although the British Trade Union Congress has not yet passed a BDS motion, the Civil Service union PCS, the University and College Union and the Fire Brigades Union have all passed strong motions explicitly calling for a general policy of boycott of Israeli goods, divestment from Israeli companies and government sanctions against the state. Others have called for elements of BDS such as a boycott of settlement goods, or for the government to suspend arms sales to Israel.

In April, the Scottish Trade Union Congress voted for the first time to endorse a report recommending “boycott and disinvest from Israeli companies.”

The boycott movement faces constant attempts by zionists to roll back its successes, usually deploying charges of discrimination. Campaigners were somewhat alarmed in July when the European Court of Human Rights upheld a French ruling that it was illegal and discriminatory to boycott Israeli goods.

According to a report in the Jerusalem Post on July 20, the court also said that making it illegal to call for a boycott of Israeli goods did not constitute a violation of one’s freedom of expression.

However, boycott campaigners believe the court’s ruling probably has very limited application across Europe, since it was based on a specific case under French law. Whatever their ethnicity, religious or political affiliation, human rights and peace campaigners are taking up the boycott Israel call in growing numbers.

Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi is a London-based Jewish campaigner for Palestinian rights. She is a member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions committee. In 2006, she helped form Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods (J-BIG) to support the work of PSC BIG campaign. She is also an active member of Jews for Justice for Palestinians, the largest Jewish organisation in Britain concerned with Palestinian rights.

The scenes that took place outside and inside Upton Park at the Carling Cup tie between West Ham and Millwall this week have dominated the news.

Commentators and journalists have lined up to heap condemnation on the kind of violence and mayhem which most people involved in football had allowed themselves to believe was a thing of the past. Others have pointed to the history of violence between the supporters of both clubs in question, doing so in support of the view that it was a certainty there was going to be trouble and that accordingly the police and the clubs should have been better prepared for the chaos that ensued.

Sadly, though predictably, there’s been a distinct lack of any analysis which comes close to trying to explain the impulse behind the kind of scenes witnessed the other night, the motivation of those involved, and how both are a result of social factors and not merely the actions of a few ‘mindless yobs’ hell bent on trouble.

The simple fact is that young men get involved in football or gang violence because it feels good. The sense of power, excitement, invincibility, and togetherness when so many come together in common cause, whatever the cause may be, is salutary and an antidote to the banality, rigid structure, and meaningless of everyday life as experienced by the vast majority of people, especially among the working class.

Watching those fans who invaded the pitch at Upton Park during the game the other night, many of them clearly men in their thirties, some running around taunting the players, others the opposition fans, was to watch men who for those few minutes were experiencing the euphoria of liberation from stifling convention, routine and anonymity. Suddenly they were important, asserting themselves and through themselves their cause, which in this case happened to be West Ham United football club.

Outside the ground before the match, with both sets of supporters baying for the other’s blood, and separated only by a thin line of police, the atmosphere produced by such hatred was so powerful and electric it managed to come through over the television. There was hatred written on the faces of those involved, yes, but there was also the elation experienced as a consequence of human solidarity.

Many of us, while not ever having been involved in organised football violence ourselves, will nonetheless have witnessed it first hand. During the mid to late eighties, when it was part and parcel of working class culture throughout the UK, at the height of Thatcher’s deindustrialisation of the British economy, it was common to see large groups of young men, oftentimes in their hundreds, marching (make that swaggering), through city centres the length and breadth of Britain on a Saturday afternoon. The sense of pride and power they exuded whilst doing so was palpable. Dressed in designer sportswear, chanting and singing, united and bonded tight, proud at that moment of who they were and what they represented, these were young men with a purpose in life – one that we might have disagreed with but a purpose all the same.

Then, in the ground, congregated together, soaking up the atmosphere of the game, taunting and being taunted by the opposing fans, the adrenalin rush and sheer excitement experienced can only be described as transcendent. In their eyes they represent not only their football club but also in many cases a defined community. Certainly with regard to West Ham and Millwall, fans on either side view their rivalry as a war between two traditionally working class and deprived areas of London – the East End and South of the River.

And, yes, while many ordinary fans are ashamed or disgusted by these organised football gangs, or ‘firms’ as they’re commonly referred to by those involved, there are others who will no doubt view them from afar with a sense of pride.

The point is that groups of young working class men - and by the way this urban myth about organised football firms being made up of middle class stockbrokers and accountants on away days is utter nonsense - fighting other groups or gangs of working class men is as old as the urbanisation of British society. With capitalism breeding atomisation, alienation and low self esteem, and of increasing magnitude the farther down the economic and social strata you go, people find ways to fulfil the need for solidarity and purpose in their lives through a group identity via alternative means and social networks. Ideally this will manifest itself politically, through involvement in progressive campaigns and organisations committed to resisting the individual and social consequences wrought by the status quo. For many young men, however, it is football that provides them with the opportunity to fulfil this need, at the same time allowing them to vent anger and frustration at the extent of their alienation.

The scenes witnessed at West Ham this week could be the catalyst for a resurgence of violence at football grounds across the country. What mainstream commentators cannot comprehend is that those involved will be revelling in the notoriety of what took place and the impact it has had. Rather than shame they will be filled with pride at having, in their eyes, fought on behalf of their football colours and respective communities. The respect they will undoubtedly receive from other football firms around the country as a result will be a badge of honour to them, and as such the mayhem and violence we saw the other night will be revered and talked about for years to come in pubs and clubs throughout the East End.

The point is that the gang culture which exists in urban centres throughout the UK and beyond comes complete with its own lexicon, morals, and value system. The violence it exalts and represents is merely a reflection of the violence of the economic and social system which gave birth to it.

Something that should never be forgotten is that liberal condemnation of football violence at home finds its echo in liberal support and justification for violence abroad under the guise of so-called humanitarian interventions - in places like the former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan - which are responsible for the slaughter of millions.