I really hate Rod Liddle

cymrococh · March 1, 2010

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/columnists/rod_liddle/article7043692.ece

A MILLWALL mate of mine called Tatts was up before the magistrates last week on a racism charge, a consequence of him using the word “pikey” while watching our usual defeat at Gillingham. There but for the grace of God. I cannot recall ever watching Millwall play Gillingham without uttering the word “pikey”, or making a traveller-related slur. Except we don’t think of it is a traveller-related slur, just a Gillingham-related slur. I’m pretty sure that four or five years ago I joined in with a spirited rendition of “You can shove your lucky heather up your a***.” And long before that, the magnificently offensive “You can’t read, you can’t write, you wear gold and Nikes, you are all from Gillingham and you are f****** pikeys.”

I’m delighted to say that Tatts was found not guilty. His successful defence included presenting to the beaks a T-shirt that was on sale to the Priestfield faithful, bearing the proud slogan “Pure Pikey”. Also, the prosecution case was subtly undermined by the police admitting that the Gillingham fans were habituated to sing, every match without fail for the past 20 years, “We are the Pikeys!”

This syntactic and semantic complexity was too much for the prosecution case. There will be those of you, I dare say, who think that the entire stadium should have been arrested; the Gills fans for proclaiming that they were pikeys, which is a racist term, the Millwall supporters for implying that as a consequence of the opposition’s stated allegiance, they did not much like pikeys.

Maybe the defence could have marshalled some semioticians to show that there is no one-to-one relationship between the signifier and the thing signified, or that everything is just a reflection of a reflection of reality. Sort that out, m’lud.

Meanwhile, you might be wondering why the police wasted their time and your money on such a staggeringly fatuous prosecution, while I wonder why Millwall (three wins in our past 17 meetings) are so useless whenever we play the pikeys, just as when we play Brighton (who are themselves the subject of impolite and politically incorrect chanting).

There was another example of anti-racist vigilance in the football world last week. A T-shirt shop in Scotland was raided by police for selling South Africa 2010 shirts emblazoned with the legend “Anyone But England”. This was suspected of being a racist slur against English people. Can you think of a more stupid prosecution? The shop, needless to say, was doing an extremely good trade, earning valuable revenue and thus slightly reducing the enormous welfare payments which we, down here, donate to the Scots every year for their heroin and pies.

Maybe I’m wrong but I suspect that all English people respect the right of our neighbours to cloak themselves in bitterness and envy whenever a World Cup comes along and they’ve been evicted from the competition at an extremely early phase by Iceland, or the Faroe Islands, or a team consisting entirely of kittiwakes and gannets from Rockall. This is banter that we expect from the Welsh, Irish and French as well, and we will not complain too much if it is appended to allegations of imperialistic oppression or Anglo-Saxon perfidy. That goes with the territory and is taken, I would hope, in the same spirit as my defamatory allusion to heroin and pies. It is not remotely racist and I do not believe any Englishman seriously thinks that it is.

There are one or two Scots racists, for sure, whose loathing extends to outright vilification, persecution and even violence. They are fewer in number, I suspect, than the many south of the border whining about the presence of Scottish politicians in government and why the ghastly lot don’t go back home to their glens and deep-fried pizzas. But those T-shirts are nothing to do with that and Scottish people should be able to extract an amount of pleasure in wearing them when the crippled, shag-depleted remnants of the England team step out against the USA in June.

The same month there will be plenty of English people with a similar sense of mischief watching Wimbledon and wearing their “Anyone But Murray” T-shirts. Is that racist, not wanting Murray to win? Most English people I know would, in a match between Murray and the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, be fervently on the side of the magnificently deranged commie. Frankly, I think it would be a pretty close call if Murray ever came up against Osama bin Laden, perhaps in one of those Grand Slam qualifiers. But this sort of gallows humour should not be mistaken for racist intent and, in fairness, I know of nobody who thinks it is racist intent, save for the Crown Prosecution Service and the police.

My friend Tatts, incidentally, who spent an hour before the game in a Gillingham pub with his Gillingham mates, their kids running around in “Pikey Army” T-shirts, is of the opinion that that the prosecution against him went ahead because the police need ever more arrests to justify the extraordinary amounts of money they extract from football clubs every year, sums that have been criticised recently by a certain Mr Paul Scally — the chairman of Gillingham. Is Tatts right? Dunno. But racist? You have the suspicion that Rosa Parks would be spinning in her grave.

Invoking Rosa Parks to support an offensive football chant is a new low.

He makes a pisspoor attempt to defend it in this thread - http://www.wsc.co.uk/component/option,com_kunena/Itemid,73/func,view/id,346852/catid,27/limit,20/limitstart,0/

Swipe · March 1, 2010

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