Put out that fire before it takes hold again

Things had been going so well. A month of football festivity that began with Andrea Bocelli at the Stadio Olimpico performing Nessun Dorma, the anthem of that glorious summer of 1990 when football was a regal festival that brought the nation together (up until the point when it went pear-shaped on penalties, of course). England’s progress through Euro 2020 has been a thing of joy, too, not just because they kept winning (and winning well), but because we had, or so we thought, an England team to got behind as a nation. An England team that was about youthful exuberance, a wealth of squad-deep talent, a manager whose past pain was felt by everyone, but whose enduring humility and all-round niceness carried through a vision for his side. 

Even the moronic booing when England players - black and white - took the knee in their opening Group D game against Croatia, eventually gave way to cheers from fans more genuinely inclined to get behind their players, as the privilege of having a ticket to a Wembley international should require. But, clearly, we’d been lulled into a false sense of security. For all our pride at football coming home to where it began, we’ve had a painful reminder of the neanderthal tendencies that lurk not far from the surface. 

Without dismissing it, the drunken yobbishness at Wembley (and in Leicester Square) was tragically inevitable. An 8pm kickoff, you say, for the biggest game in 55 years? Great! When do we start drinking? What has emerged as more disturbing is the motivation amongst those who violently tailgated their way into Wembley Stadium on Sunday evening in truly disgraceful scenes that would have ruined many genuine fans’ experience before a ball had even been kicked. Sadly, though, worse was to come in the wake of the final kick.

Picture: Twitter/England

The racist abuse directed at teenager Bakayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho after their penalties missed should shock everyone, but sadly, they come as no surprise. That booing at Wembley, a month ago today, was a warning that for all our belief that football has become a more inclusive place, after the horrors of the 1970s and 1980s, this country’s culture wars have given rise to it once more. 

Some time ago I likened the febrile mood in Britain to that of New York in Ghostbusters. I didn’t make the comparison to be flippant, but to analogously illustrate how the emergence of cultural division and nastiness was like the film’s fissures and cracks in Manhattan sidewalks revealing the pink slime bubbling up from the underworld. Since the European referendum, there seems to have been a legitimisation of hate on grounds other than just binary politics. The murder of Jo Cox was a sign, as was the desecration of a Polish cultural centre in West London not soon after the vote. The faceless keyboard warriors who posted disgusting abuse on the England players’ social media accounts (not to mention the astonishing volume of people who ‘liked’ those comments), can be directly traced to the UK’s culture war, legitimised by politicians who’ve facilitated and even encouraged the ongoing assault on wokeism, and given licence to the right-wing media and the gobshite rent-a-quote controversialists that provide them with clickbait.

Footballers are normally relatively timid when it comes to their public proclamations. Asked if they’d be in a starting line-up and the doctrinal response is always: “That’s up to the manager - I’m just happy to be a part of the squad.” So it is “extraordinary and unprecedented,” in the words this morning of political correspondent Chris Mason on BBC Breakfast, “that we have an England footballer in Tyrone Mings - in a direct and public and unequivocal way - taking on one of the most senior politicians in the country, the Home Secretary, Priti Patel.” 

Patel - who’ll I’ll readily describe as being thick as mince - gave her tacit approval of the knee taking at Wembley being booed by branding it as “gesture politics”, tapping into the frequent message of the right associating the practice by footballers with the alleged Marxist beliefs of America’s core Black Lives Matter movement. Asked by GB News if she would criticise booing fans, she said: “That's a choice for them, quite frankly”. The Aston Villa player - who has previously met Patel to discuss issues of racism - had enough last night, tweeting: “You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as 'Gesture Politics’ and then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we're campaigning against, happens.". He is, Mason correctly described, “boiling with anger”. He’s not alone: Anton Ferdinand - caught up in that ugly racism episode involving my own club’s John Terry a few years ago - added to the debate on the BBC, citing his own experience of the racist abuse he’s had to endure in his football career, calling on the government to something about the social media platforms facilitating the abuse. 

Whether you take the flimsy view that those responsible were just drunken idiots mouthing off, or you see it as the thin edge of a nefarious wedge that seeks to dehumanise minorities, and history has taught us where that leads, it all boils down to the same thing: that any form of abuse, directed at any minority or, for that matter, majority, is symptomatic of a lack of respect for fellow humans. I understand how some people believe that political correctness goes too far, and that wokeism or cancel culture can be irritating, but I’ve never understood how just being kind should come to being wrong. That lies at the heart of online abuse, that social media has enabled commentary that invariably wouldn’t be made to someone’s face. Not to labour the point, but abusing someone for not scoring in a penalty shootout is nothing short of cowardice in the face of bravery. 

Inevitably, the online comments on Sunday night have reignited the debate over social media platforms being unable to police themselves, and that legislation - such as the UK government’s proposed Online Safety Bill forcing Twitter, Facebook and all the rest to make social media a safer place for everyone. The counter to this is that it would effectively be a form of censorship. At the time of writing, a petition calling for greater governance of social media in the wake of the England players’ treatment had reached 500,000 signatures. I can only expect that number to get bigger.

The trouble is that even with Boris Johnson yesterday calling on the footballers’ abusers to “crawl back under the rock from which you emerged”, his own lack of condemnation for those booing England players at Wembley will count amongst the abusers themselves. Patel’s comments, compounded by the tweet that launched Mings’ into orbit, will only have worsened things.

The sad part of this is that a football tournament that, mostly, provided a beacon of hope for inclusion and social cohesion, ended with a stark return to the behaviour that most right-minded people had hoped had disappeared. Of course, it hadn’t, and like a resurgent disease, had simply found somewhere to lay low. On Sunday it erupted. It was sad enough to lose a final on penalties, but nothing - nothing - in any players’ miss, whether Saka, Rashford or Sancho this time, Chris Waddle and Stuart Pearce in 1990, or Gareth Southgate himself in 1996, warrants the level of ferocity that now, in the age of social media anonymity, has been directed at the latest three players. Even more so the colour of their skin. 

The genuinely frightening thing, however, is that in a country where I’d thought myriad minority cultures are accepted and integrated, and in particular, the offensive attitudes towards black football players that blighted the British game as recently as the 1980s, are still there, and they have an outlet. And it’s all part and parcel of a country that has become divided by the politicians who are meant to lead and unite us. It comes from the top. 

Unplugging the social network

There is, already, an irony to the post you're about to read, in that it will be promoted on the very social media services it concerns. But that's purely because, like most people who use social media, I can't help but want attention. Which, let's face it, is mainly how social media came about to begin with.

It is also behind the news today that pub chain JD Wetherspoon is departing social media for good. Now, given the state of the world - not least of which, a third world war in the offing... - this is "probably" not big news. But, partly as a result of social media, news that Wetherspoons is calling "timegennelmenpurleaze!" on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, is...er...indeed news.

According to the chain's not-particularly publicity-shy chairman, Tim Martin, social media is a waste of time and even a drain on his pub managers' time. Well, that's one possible reason. Two others are that 1) Wetherspoons doesn't exactly have a massive following on any of its social accounts and 2) the chain has been mercilessly trolled for taking a pro-Brexit stance (in November last year it had 500,000 beer mats distributed throughout its 895 pubs in the UK with a three-point "Brexit Manifesto" calling on the leaders of the main political parties to get a move on with leaving the EU). Another suggestion is that this is all just a publicity stunt - which, given the fact I'm blogging about it, would mean 'mission accomplished'.

Either way, Martin has raised a valid question about the role of social media in the commercial world. "We are going against conventional wisdom that these platforms are a vital component of a successful business," he told the BBC, saying that society would be better off if people cut the amount of social media use, adding a clear dig at Facebook with a reference to the "misuse of personal data".

Somewhat less convincingly, Martin chose to bring up time consumption amongst employees as another reason to leave social platforms behind, saying that "90-to-95%" of his pubs' managers "felt using social media was not helping the business" due to its "addictive nature", adding: "We were also concerned that pub managers were being side-tracked from the real job of serving customers. I don't believe that closing these accounts will affect our business whatsoever."

While I'm sure some Wetherspoons customers might have reason to complain about inattentive bar staff, I very much doubt that they are too busy tweeting out special Friday night offers on jugs of sangria (for reasons of transparency, my local when I lived in Paris - The Bowler - once tweeted me personally because I hadn't been in for a few weeks. Now that is customer engagement!).

Time will tell, though, whether the Wetherspoons departure from social media will have any impact. Conventional wisdom does dictate that a digital presence is essential in the modern world, whether to drive sales, corporate reputation, customer loyalty or all three. Many marketeers believe that Facebook, Twitter and its ilk are simply free advertising platforms which can be augmented by so-called "paid promotion" (essentially, the nub of these networks' business models). The issue, however, is that whether you're an advertiser or simply someone desperate to see friends' cat videos, social media is still, by and large, whatever you want to make of it.

As I wrote, some many posts back, Twitter can be a little like the river of demonic ooze running beneath New York in Ghostbusters, if you dare to be sucked into the reactionary trollery and right wing nutjobs lurking barely below the surface. But it can also be a tremendous expression of democracy, or a wonderful outlet for distributing questionable humour, or the most efficient news feed this side of buying a Reuters subscription.

As for Facebook... Well, the almost-original social network (Friends Reunited, anyone?) clearly has its faults. I won't dwell on the Cambridge Analytica debacle, but there is something intrinsically creepy about suddenly seeing promoted posts for travel companies like Thomas Cook and First Choice on my timeline barely a day after I was looking at summer holidays on my iPad with these very companies. As innocent as it might look, the data harvesting practices of social media networks and their clients concerns me more than anything. They are sitting on a vast amount of information about me, my interests and buying habits which, surely, should be mine to know and for commercial organisations to find out when I choose to buy something from them, and not before.

But back to Charles Martin, who rounded out his decision to take Wetherspoons offline by declaring that people would be "mentally and physically better off" if they limited their social media use to just half an hour a day. Here he may have a point. We certainly know that social media has only added to the complications of modern teenage life, especially amongst girls who, on top of all they've always had to go through, now have to put up with social exclusion, fat shaming and even sexual abuse via the various 'must have' social media platforms they sign up to. Adults are not immune, either, with some living vicariously through Facebook and Instagram, while others suffering feelings of inadequacy as a result of pictures posted of their perfect friends living it up.

The question is, could you do without social media? Would your life feel more complete, rather than less, without it? Those older than the Millennial generation will, of course, have enjoyed life pre-digital. We talked to each other, face-to-face or by phone. If we wanted to show off where we'd been on holiday we handed round a packet of prints from Boots or suburban bores invited friends round for a slide show with fondue.

Now we can share the beach vista as we're sitting in it; we Facebook the meal we're about to eat (though, thankfully, not the final third of the digestion process...); and children will live their entire lives, from the moment they burst out of the womb, in Instagram pictures and stories. And we will lap it all up, so to speak. Because, thanks to the smartphone, we have social media at our fingertips constantly. Just look at a train station at rush hour - banks of stooping commuters, thumbing through their timelines.

And it is exactly this point why, I suspect, JD Wetherspoon will be in a very small minority. In the early days of 'websites', digital interaction was via the PC. Now, it's constant via mobile devices - even smart watches. We fill every unaccounted-for eyeball time with social media sites, on trains and buses, as we walk and as we fly. For some, it's their entire world. For others, it's their only means of self expression. And for others, it's simply a way of avoiding talking to others.

The Wetherspoon chairman's assurance that his company would "still be as vocal as ever" might hark back to the pre-digital age when other media platforms gave companies a voice to the outside world, but the reality - the unbearable truth, if you like - is that in 2018, social media is part of the daily fabric. Rather than leaving such services, corporations should be doing more to make social media a safer place to inhabit. The Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal and recent stories about the role social media plays in London's epidemic of drug/gang violence should serve as a warning to the vast majority of corporate concerns who do still believe in social media. If there really is a reason for corporates unplugging from social networks, it's that for all the good these platforms do in connecting friends or allowing those without a voice to have one, there is a dark side not worth associating with. That's the minority who take it too far. Yes, you Mr. President.