Boris Johnson and football racism

Last weekend, when football briefly took over from politics as the UK’s spectator sport of choice, during the derby between Manchester United and Manchester City in the Premier League, a fan was caught on camera aiming what appeared to be monkey gestures at several black players.

In the aftermath, the actions were condemned by the pundits in the Sky Sports TV studio. But one moment stood out, when the former United defender Gary Neville, passing comment on the incident, blamed Boris Johnson for stoking racism and bigotry in British football.

Of course, Johnson chose the very same weekend to announce that EU citizens had been treating the UK as an extension of their own country for far too long, and that it had to end, which will have done little to change Neville’s views, or those of people who consider the prime minister at best an bigoted idiot, and at worst a full-blown racist. They were certainly galling comments, meant to appeal to the lowest of incentives, and were grossly insensitive.

There are arguments for and against the bigotry of the prime minister. But Neville, despite his political views, was wrong to cite him as a cause of worsening racism. He has fallen into the trap of oversimplifying the issue, of laying too much of the blame at a single person’s door, when the reality is far more complex.

Johnson has not helped himself with some fairly galling comments throughout his political and journalistic career. It is difficult to tell whether or not he is genuinely prejudiced, or just, in a very stupid way, believes that he is playing to the gallery. At times he has seemed to think his infidelity or dishonesty has made him appear a politically incorrect rogue rather than something nastier.

This certainly gives his opponents a stick to beat him with, even if they may be wrong to blame him as a cause, or even enabler, of such behaviour in wider society.

Neville’s comments gloss over the truth about the roots of racism, both in football and wider society: Johnson’s lazy pandering to xenophobia is a reaction to longstanding prejudice. Football has a very long and unhappy relationship with racism, that did not magically spring up in the aftermath of 2016, nor in the three months since Johnson became prime minister.

Go back through pretty much every football season and there are examples of racist abuse, both on the terraces and on the pitch. That more is being reported is not because it is increasing, but because we are becoming more vigilant towards it, and more likely to report it.

Part of what fuels the idea that there is more racism now in football is that modern football fans, fairly global in outlook, increasingly have to confront it coming from elsewhere. Italian and Bulgarian fans have recently been the subject of heavy coverage and criticism in the UK press.

The irony there, of course, is that the sort of xenophobia Johnson is accused of propagating is not against black people, who suffer the most racist abuse in football, but against southern and eastern Europeans, who, it seems, are among the most prolific perpetrators of said racism. It doesn’t quite fit the narrative.

As the former Liverpool and England footballer John Barnes has said, racism in football cannot be eradicated until it is eradicated in society. And, as he has also pointed out, the only way that can be solved is through improving society — especially through education, both for the white majority and ethnic minorities.

If racism is, as we are so often told, a structural issue, then it needs to be addressed at a structural level. But to lump the blame on an individual for some off-the-cuff remarks undermines Barnes’s argument.

Johnson must certainly bear some responsibility, as prime minister, for the national mood. But to blame him and his columns for the actions of idiots at football grounds places too much burden on him, and takes away the agency, and by extension, the guilt, of those idiots in question.