The pains of growing up

The eternal search for freedom from responsibility

Blame football fans not the police for the deaths of seventy people after a football match in Egypt 

by Theodore Dalrymple

The deaths of at least seventy people at a football match in Egypt has confirmed my reasoned prejudice against this sport, whose psychological, cultural and economic effects is so disastrous. Of course, there is nothing in the game itself, apart from its inevitable propensity to injure the players, that is intrinsically deleterious; but all that surrounds it, at least in its modern professional form, is harmful and horrible.

Football rots the mind and ruins the conduct. Among other harmful effects, it deforms the ambitions of young men from poor areas; it deceives them into thinking that it is the way out of their economic problems and the sovereign way to obtain diamond studs for their ears, so essential to their dignity. Their chances of success are not much higher than that of buying a winning lottery ticket and in any case it appears that such young men in England do not even have the elementary self-discipline necessary to compete with foreigners in this activity.

Be that as it may, the Guardian newspaper's report of the tragic events in Port Said was most interesting, and not without wider significance. The beaten team in the match that ended in so many deaths was called Al-Ahly, and the newspaper reported that the following had occurred afterwards:

"Fans congregated outside Al-Ahly's ground in the Cairo neighbourhood of Zamalek… Chants rang out in front of the club against the ministry of the interior and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, as fans believed that there was a major lack of security at the match."

An individual fan by the name of Khaled Gad told the Guardian's reporter that:

"What's upsetting is the huge lapse in security which I feel is purposeful on the part of the interior ministry and the military."

I hold no brief for the Egyptian army or ministry of the interior, but this is surely a most extraordinary exercise in blame-shifting.

I am perfectly prepared to believe that arrangements in Port Said were not all that they might have been - only in Switzerland are arrangements all that they might be - but let us just remind ourselves of what, according to the Guardian, actually happened: or, to put it another and better way, what people actually did:

"The violence flared after Al-Ahly, one of Egypt's most successful teams, were beaten 3-1. Television footage showed players running from the pitch chased by fans while a small group of riot police tried to protect the players, but they appeared overwhelmed and fans attacked the players as they fled. Fans of both teams clashed and stormed the pitch and dressing rooms."

Let us pass over the fact that in the first sentence of this account the violence flared as if it were an inanimate object obeying the laws of nature, and that existed independently of the decisions of the people who committed it; for reasons of space and time we have often to use this kind of shorthand, but we should be careful not to let it pervert our way of conceiving the matter.

Surely (if this account is otherwise accurate) the fans who gathered outside the ground in Zamalek should have shouted:

"We are fools, we are morons, we are criminally stupid, we are murderously idiotic!"

To blame the armed forces or the ministry of the interior for the fact that fans attacked players and each other is, in effect, to grant the armed forces and the ministry of the interior complete authority to supervise and control them. To the above chants, the crowd in front of the ground in Zamalek might with justice have added:

"We are like children! We deserve no freedom! We must be beaten with truncheons!"

In Khaled Gad's comment there is, of course, an explicit paranoia: that the armed forces and ministry of the interior were not merely incompetent but were malevolently plotting. No theory is advanced as to what they were trying to achieve with their plotting: a demonstration to the world, perhaps, that the Egyptian people are so immature that they need authoritarian herding? But while the paranoia might have something specifically local about it, the general form of thought - that the authorities were to blame for the bad behaviour of ordinary people - is a commonplace throughout the world, and not least in Britain.

Not long ago I published a little book pointing out that Britain is the most littered of any major country in western Europe and suggesting some reasons why this is so. Almost invariably when I introduce the subject into conversation, the first thought of my interlocutors is that there are not enough litter bins, that is to say it is the fault of the authorities that the British are the slovenliest people in western Europe.

Few people, I suppose, are more willing to criticise our public administration than I, but this is going too far. I regularly drive down the A14 from the M6 to Cambridge - a distance of about 80 miles - and the roadside, yard after yard, mile after mile, is indescribably filthy, with plastic bottles, polystyrene burger boxes, long strips of polythene and plastic bags full of rubbish by the thousand and the tens of thousand.

How many people must have thrown their rubbish out of their vehicles to produce this informal linear rubbish-tip, and how many litter bins would have been necessary to prevent it from developing? One every yard for 80 miles? Would people have stopped - illegally - to put their rubbish in the bins? Furthermore, I ask my interlocutors whether, in the absence of litter bins, they dispose of their detritus in this way? You may readily guess the answer; so then I grow furious, and accuse them of talking - rubbish, the kind of rubbish that leads to, and justifies, the most abject authoritarianism.

The form of the argument blaming the ministry of the interior for the appalling behaviour of the football fans in Egypt, and that blaming the British local authorities for the slovenliness of the British in the matter of litter, is exactly the same. Both are manifestations of man's eternal search for the greatest freedom of all, the freedom from responsibility.