On a summer’s evening in 1978 I was standing on the platform at Redcar Central station, wondering if I had just missed my train. So I approached the only other person on the platform and asked him: ‘Excuse me, do you know what time the next train is due?’ He replied ‘What if it is?’ and punched me hard in the mouth. I hurried away. He was big, probably in his thirties, morbidly obese and pissed. With any luck he should be dead by now.
I don’t quite buy the argument that these ‘far-right’ riots are an example of the dispossessed, effectively disenfranchised, urban working class articulating their many real concerns about our society. I think they’re largely the work of descendants of that fat bully who twatted me for no reason. I’d go further and suggest that they are inextricably linked with football hooliganism. My reasoning for that is the way they look, the way they dress and the fact that one of the supposed organisers up here on Teesside was on a banning order from the Riverside stadium and now allegedly travels to watch Rangers play each Saturday. That gives you an indication of the Ur-politics at work as well.
They do not have aims, other than a fervent desire to tear into the Old Bill and maybe frighten a few Muslims. There is no serious ideology at work. They are not demanding radical Strasserist economic reforms with the abolition of capitalism and the creation of socialist guilds allied to ultra-nationalism – it is instead merely a primal scream of loathing. You will notice that the places that have experienced the riots – Belfast excepted – are heavily footballing towns.
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