28.04.2004

Give censorship the red card

We have often heard that Britain is an ‘institutionally racist’ society. Try telling that to footballing supremo ‘Big’ Ron Atkinson. In a fit of rage last week after watching Chelsea get mercilessly thrashed 3-1 by AS Monaco, Atkinson immediately offered a less than flattering view of the defender, Marcel Desailly: “I’ve always thought that he has no awareness of danger. He is what is known in some schools as a fucking lazy thick nigger. That is a fucking disgusting performance.”

Unfortunately for Atkinson, and no doubt slightly distressingly for Desailly, this supposedly private post-match comment was inadvertently transmitted to parts of the Middle East. Quite predictably, the uproar from Egypt and Dubai quickly made its way to the UK. Within two days, Atkinson (“by mutual consent”, apparently) had chucked in his weekly column for The Guardian and resigned from his role as ITV’s premier football pundit - not to mention the fact that Big Ron claims to have already lost commercial contracts coming to some £1 million or so.

That is an expensive price to pay for uttering one word, and we are not talking about “fucking” here.

Nor does Atkinson’s mortification end there. In what must be the final humiliation, he has been told that his services will no longer be required at this weekend’s major Newton Abbot football competition, to be held in the Decoy Park recreational area. Now in its third year, this annual tournament runs over two dates - from May 1 to 2, and from May 29 to June 3 - and youngsters aged from the age of seven come from all over Britain to take part in the 100-team competition. Atkinson was due to be the tournament’s celebrity compere. However, the organisers of the competition, R and T Tournaments, felt that they could not “be seen to condone what he said” and quickly arranged to ship in instead Sir Geoff Hurst, England’s 1966 pin-up wonder boy. As the front page headline in the local newspaper put it, “Big Ron gets the red card” (Herald Express April 27).

From Dubai to Devon, Atkinson seems to have become a bit of a pariah.

Rather ironically, if it is true, Atkinson says he cannot even remember uttering these offending words, and has since offered a fulsome apology - repeatedly. In his defence, Atkinson pointed to his long footballing record of promoting and encouraging black players: “All I can say is that my actions over the years speak louder than my words - I’m an idiot, but I’m not a racist.”

He might have a point. Atkinson has a fearsome reputation in the football world: first as a player (Aston Villa, Oxford United, Witney Town), then more successfully as a manager, where he has presided over an impressive roll-call of teams - Kettering Town, Cambridge United, Manchester United, West Bromwich Albion, Atletico Madrid, Sheffield Wednesday, Aston Villa, Coventry City. By all accounts, Atkinson favours the ‘kick up the backside’ style of management over the touchy-feely, therapeutic-driven approach.

More germanely, Atkinson “was at the vanguard of introducing brilliant black footballing talent into the British game” (Herald Express April 27). In particular, when at West Bromwich Albion, he championed the “the Three Degrees” - Laurie Cunningham, Cyrille Regis and Brendon Batson (now secretary of the Professional Footballers’ Association). He also attended this year the 10th anniversary lunch of Kick It Out - the well known football anti-racism campaign.

All in all, it hardly sounds like the profile of a racist. Having said that, it is hard to disagree with the sentiments expressed by Kick It Out’s director, Piara Power: “What he said was unambiguous, non-negotiable and hugely offensive. You don’t need to be engaged in sophisticated debates about race to realise those words are offensive.”

Clearly, in historical terms football has been plagued by racism and extreme national chauvinism. Examples are legion. Over the years and decades though, racist attitudes in football - including, sometimes, sheer foul abuse - have become increasingly harder to find in the boardrooms and official-administrative structures of the beautiful game, but less so as you move amongst the terraces. Interestingly, what ‘official’ racism remains appears to be found in the lower league teams. In the views of the chief sports correspondent of The Guardian, Vivek Chaudhary: “While there is less racist abuse within the top end of the game - particularly that aimed at players - it still exists within the lower leagues, and players regularly complain of name-calling from opponents and spectators” (April 23).

In the same article, Chaudhary recounts - “it wasn’t so long ago” - how one premiership manager told him that the reason there are so few Asian professional footballers is because they are too busy working in shops and eating curry. Additionally, Chaudhary mentions that only three of the 92 league managers, and only a handful of coaches, are black.

So the battle to drive racism out of football has yet to be won - but it is self-evident that racism has been progressively ‘de-institutionalised’, just like in post-World War II UK society as a whole. Indeed, as the opprobrium heaped so massively upon Atkinson’s head manifestly shows, the footballing establishment is essentially no different from the police force, the home office or the NHS bureaucracy - that is, institutionally and ideologically anti-racist. Frankly, how could it be anything else?

Just to glimpse at the long list of Kick It Out’s sponsors should tell you a lot - the League Managers Association, the Association of Premier League and Football League Match Officials, the Football Safety Officers Association, the Local Government Association, the Metropolitan Police ... It is no accident either that the chair of Kick It Out is no other than Lord Herman Ouseley, the former chair of the Commission for Racial Equality. There is no doubt that Kick It Out is essentially an establishment organisation, and hence promotes the establishment’s bourgeois anti-racism.

Communists, obviously, find the language used by Atkinson reprehensible - and we would take the same view about a sports commentator who decided to mouth off, say, about a female tennis player being ‘a stupid lazy bitch’ or ‘a fucking thick cunt’, or described a gay boxer as ‘a fucking limped-wrist faggot’. Such language resonates with bigotry and chauvinism. At the very least, it causes offence. Communists aim to combat all forms of prejudice and backwardness - an aim which necessarily corresponds to the idea that language is neither a timeless nor a passive vehicle, but is itself a terrain of class struggle. To say that is not to fall victim to ‘political correctness’.

However, nor do we approve of or seek to promote morbid sensitivity - which in its most extreme and irrational forms leads to a witch-hunting atmosphere, outright censorship and even prison sentences. Communists are democrats as well as anti-racists. To ban, or prohibit, words or terms, or certain viewpoints, is at best counter-productive and at worst establishes a ruling ideology which recruits the righteous, the gullible and even the oppressed themselves into a veritable crusade which permits no open questioning or deviant utterances.

Take the ruling bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. It ‘officially’ banned the promotion of racism and national chauvinism - in reality there was, of course, Russian domination, national oppression and the state-sponsored growth of anti-semitism. But to question any of that was to automatically be found guilty of promoting nationalism - for Russian nationalism dressed itself up as internationalism.

In the US there is the constitutional right to free speech. However, the state and military bureaucracy and the top business management have hijacked anti-racism and turned defence of black rights and minority sensibilities into their opposites. Often with the support of a wide swathe of liberal and progressive opinion this leads to an oppressive top-down anti-racism and disastrous results. The case of David Howard is not untypical. A minor municipal official in Washington DC, he was forced to resign after he used the word ‘niggardly’ to describe a federal government budget squeeze. A word of Scandinavian origin, it was ignorantly deemed to be ‘racist’, ‘offensive’ and therefore beyond the pale.

Closer to home, was it such a victory for rational political debate that Kilroy-Silk got kicked out of the BBC for writing his daft article in the Sunday Express ruminating about the place, or not, of Arab civilisation in world history? Then there was liberalism’s favourite punk-Stalinist, Julie Burchill, who in the pages of The Guardian wrote of “the Hitler-licking, altar-boy-molesting, abortion-banning Irish” (June 29 2002). A typically puerile journalistic rant, but we should not forget that at the time the Crown Prosecution Service considered taking legal action. John Twomey, a social worker at the London Irish Centre complained to police that her article contravened the Race Relations Act. Should we have supported such a prosecution - and demanded on the front page of our paper that Burchill be imprisoned?

No, communists and revolutionary socialists have every interest in free speech. Even if what is said or written is offensive - to small minorities or big majorities. The alternative is far worse. Censorship and handing what can or cannot be expressed over to the courts, government quangoes and local government bosses can only but weaken our struggle, which if it is to be successful needs the right to criticise all that is wrong, all that is backward, all that is mistaken.