EURO 2004

Recent events have reminded me of this article which in my days of writing free articles to promote Pear Shaped in Fitzrovia I sent into the local online newspaper The Croydon Citizen which was "written by the public" because they were too tight to generate all their own content.  It promptly went bust.  That aside every time there's a Euro tournament I think of this...

Owen Jones of the Independent thinks so and tell us so in an article on Water Cannon.   He is of course quoting Martin Luther King’s second most famous soundbite : “Riot is the language of the unheard”.  (see here)

Water cannon is a very bad thing that can lead to activists getting a bit wet...  So Owen presses more buttons than Matt Smith when pretending the Tardis console propels a fiberglass box to all corners of Universe [Mark Duggan, don’t trust the PoPo, Police state blah blah blah].  But do rioters actually have anything to say worth listening to?  

Well let’s talk about the riots.  Not ones where large sections of Croydon were burnt to the ground, 5 people were killed nationwide and 15 people seriously injured in 2011.  But the EURO 2004 riots in which my old office building lost 8 plate glass windows for which anyone has yet to receive any compensation, a bus driver friend of mine was rocked about in his bus and Portugal deported 11 people.  I say riot, but according to the PoPo this was not a riot just a “disturbance”.  So no one gets a payout...  They just claim on the insurance and move the office out of Croydon.  But more than £250,000 of damage was caused to property and at least ten men were jailed for a total of 22 years (see here)

In 2004 “serious disturbances” broke out in Croydon, Birmingham, Wakefield in West Yorkshire, Boston in Lincolnshire and a number of towns in Hertfordshire on the 14 June.  The bout of "serious public disorder in Croydon" lasted for an hour, between 10.15pm and 11.15pm and involved 400 people including “Judge’s son” Matthew Carroll, 19.  In mitigation Anthony Heaton-Armstrong, for Carroll, said his client had argued with his girlfriend that day and drunk six to seven cans of lager, six to seven bottles of beer and three to four tequilas.  So if there was a political message it may have been Tramlink + SkyTV makes off pitch hooliganism more easy. (see here)

I expected academia to be able to make some sense of it all but “Crowd psychology, public order police training and the policing of football crowds” by  James Hoggett and Clifford Stott simply boasted that “The success of the tournament in terms of the absence of collective disorder among fans is now widely acknowledged in policy circles throughout Europe”.  Which is good because otherwise C.J.Scott would have to do a rewrite of “Preparing for Euro 2004: policing international football matches in Portugal” commissioned by the Portuguese Public Security Police.  Suffice to say most of these documents are about how to separate hardcore hooligans from the easily led.  Something that’s about as easy as proving Tommy Robinson guilty of mortgage fraud.

Also facing prison was Terry Kevin who's family “wept as he was led from the dock at Croydon” after he was caught throwing bottles at the PoPo.  Judge Cedric Joseph said sternly that "Deterrent sentences have to be passed to make clear that behaviour of this kind is utterly intolerable" and other empty clichés repeated almost word for word in 2011 to a new generation.   Kevin was banned from watching footy in pubs for 6 years and had previous convictions for assault.  (see here)

The 2004 “not riots” were also international.   20 UK football fans were held after a punch up in Portugal  on the 16th of June.  Alan Walker, 29, was banned from matches for three years.  His doting father commenting to the Guardian “He's a nutter when he's had a drink. He's a lager lout and can't handle his drink.   He's very easily led - you can tell him to do something when he's had a few drinks and he'll do it.”  As Martin Luther King might say “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” (see here)

A more mature contributor to the fun in Portugal, Garry Mann, was finally extradited back to Portugal in 2010 to do his 2 years bird.  “The Labour government and Crown Prosecution Service have betrayed me,” he bemoaned to the BBC.  Mann claimed he was arrested, tried and convicted within 48 hours and had appealed to the European Court of Human Rights …who rejected his application.  "I wasn't even there. It's a stitch up” he’d claimed since 2004 when he was deported by Judge Filipe Marques who identified him as a “ringleader” along with 11 others.   (see here)

And of course it wouldn’t be a youth crime story without some parents insisting in the teeth of the evidence that their child is a nice boy really.  Step forward Linda Jackson the mother of David Jackson (28) from Peterborough.  "He is being made to look like a yob and a hooligan and he's nothing like that at all.”  The Judge however decided he was and sentenced him to seven months in jail suspended for three years. (see here)

The question is why?  Unemployment was at 5%.  The UK economy grew by an estimated 3.1%.  2004 was actually the best year economically since 2000, well ahead of the 2.2% growth recorded in 2003.  But England lost 5-6 in a penalty kick and these conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention.   Euro 2004 was the language of the unheard.  So what were they saying?  Perhaps not everyone shared in the prosperity?  Or maybe some people are bad.  Or both.

There must be sociological reason because otherwise what would the political class have to do if acts of mass violence were simply incoherent?   Or as Martin Luther King might put it “The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.”