By proposing that online hate offenders – like those abusing England footballers for missing penalties at the final of the Euros at Wembley in July 2021 – will get football banning orders, the Home Office has reached a new height of folly, writes Mark Rowe.
An amendment to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill will be brought forward early in 2022, the Home Office said.
Home Secretary Priti Patel said: “This summer we saw the beautiful game marred by disgraceful racism from online trolls, who hid behind their keyboards and abused our footballers. Racism is unacceptable and for too long football has been marred by this shameful prejudice. Those responsible for appalling racist abuse online must be punished. The changes to the law I am announcing will make sure they are banned from attending football matches.”
The Home Office has long had a habit like the rest of Government of answering any social and criminal problem by making a law against it, most recently the proposed Protect Duty that will – despite a lack of public and business appetite for it – place a legal responsibility on all ‘publicly accessible locations’ (including such terror hot-spots as beaches) to take measures against terrorism. But by raising football banning orders of the physical world to supposedly prevent, deter or punish a crime in the online world, the Home Office has ignored two absurdities.
First; is there any evidence that the people that post racist and vile messages against footballers, attend football? Long gone are the days when the Home Office funded criminologists to carry out academic research into such questions that had an impact on public policy; such as hooliganism. Presumably at Wembley, the hooligans who drunkenly forced their way into the stadium (pictured) or who rioted outside were not the ones posting? Even if they were, the Home Office and the police have been deafeningly silent on how they will do better next time to head off the scenes of disorder at the Euros final between England and Italy, that the Baroness Casey review made plain was a ‘near miss’ that could easily have seen a Hillsborough-like tragedy of crushed innocent fans.
Even assuming that the same people who troll footballers actually attend the football games that those footballers play – rather than more or less randomly abusing everyone who trends on social media – to apply a football banning order, you first have to bring the troll to court, and those guilty of online abuse are no more reaching court – there’s so much online bile around – than many, or any, of the Wembley trespassers were arrested or later brought to justice (in contrast with the determined and successful police work to bring rioters and looters to court after the widespread disorder in English towns and cities in August 2011).
But, in the age of Trump and a bring a bottle party to 10 Downing Street during lockdown, it’s wrong to expect any more for Home Office public policy to make sense; to be a reasoned and useful answer to a crime problem. In fact, quite the opposite; anything will serve, so long as it makes the Home Office look active and tough, if it helps to distract attention from fields where the Home Office is evidently and embarrassingly unable to solve a long-time problem, such as the cross-Channel migrants; and the low rate of rape, or any, convictions compared with the continued cases of violence against women and girls.
See also Max Hill QC, Director of Public Prosecutions (and Newcastle United fan) on the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) website, on shouted racist offensive comments at games, and online abuse: https://www.cps.gov.uk/cps/news/dpp-max-hill-how-were-taking-action-against-racist-and-homophobic-football-chants.
