On the National Rail website for Saturday, for trains leaving Weston super Mare at 1748 and 1848 towards Birmingham, is a ‘major’ ‘information’ message: “Due to a football fixture, there will be supporters travelling on this service. Please be kind and respect our colleagues and fellow customers when travelling.”
It’s novel (to me – when did such messages start?) and strange. Is that message aimed at the supporters themselves – as if they will behave well, as a result of reading that, assuming that they even see it? Or is it aimed, slyly, at most of those who will read it, the non-football, law-abiding passengers, warning them to expect trouble? The unspoken message from the railway authorities: by giving you knowledge of what may happen, it’s your fault if you get frightened, sworn at or assaulted; you should’ve gone on another train. In other words, leaving Saturday night trains to the rowdies. They win.
Same trains
The police and railways have had 70 years to do something about hooliganism by football fans travelling by train on Saturdays. In the 1950s, the hooligans broke light fittings in carriages (that crime’s been designed out). Long gone are the days of British Rail putting on special trains for the away fans; now, they’re on the same trains as anyone else – shoppers returning from the main centres such as Manchester and Nottingham and above all London. Since covid, if anything weekend travel by rail has recovered more than weekday commuter travel. It’s only fair to say that most travelling fans are good-natured enough, and you can have a conversation with them, whether on a train or in a pub beside the station before the journey. The antisocial behaviour and menace is by those who are drinking from when they stand on the platform to begin their day – at 8am or 9am, depending on how far they have to go – meaning that long before the evening return journey, they are drunk. Perhaps so drunk they can hardly walk, difficult for the law-abiding to deal with for fear (for that’s the word) of sparking a confrontation, even violence. The norms of behaviour, therefore, on trains on Saturdays, above all into the night, plummet. Football away fans are not only to blame; consider those travelling into Newcastle or Edinburgh for a night out by train; again, going into those cities from late morning on for a day’s drinking.
Keep a lid on it
Policing and criminal justice is deployed to keep a lid on the worst trouble, only partly because of capacity. The criminal justice system, certainly courts, are one of the Monday to Friday, business hours (if that) public services; to arrest someone on Saturday night means holding them until Monday morning for a court appearance; all at a cost.
Who is it?
Hence the message online. It’s evidently not a blanket message because a later journey from the south west through Bristol to the north does not carry the message. The message is not detailed enough to inform the reader of which football fixture will cause the supporters. Bristol City (pictured, Ashton Gate) are away at Burnley that day; it’s likely to be Sheffield Wednesday, who are at Cardiff. If it’s known in advance that some trains and not others are at risk of trouble – enough of a risk for National Rail to post the message – why not carry out a policing operation to do something about it, to deter trouble and arrest the most troublesome?
There lies the answer to why football hooliganism has gone on for at least 70 years, quite often not inside football grounds (which have copious CCTV and stewarding) on the way to and from the ground and railway stations, or at motorway service stations and above all in and around pubs. Far more hooliganism goes on than the authorities can handle, just as far more Saturday night disorder, shop theft and fraud happens than authorities can even count.
Tactics
Rail operators and British Transport Police (BTP) cannot agree on tactics – should the priority be to get the hooligans, no matter how troublesome, to the end of their journey – maybe to carry on drinking, or stagger to a taxi rank and cause more, late-night trouble, for where does the football hooliganism end and the everyday drink-related violence begin – because once they get off at their destination, they’re someone else’s problem? Or, does BTP try to ‘disrupt’ the trouble-makers, throw them off trains, which only runs the risk of putting rail staff and passengers at risk later on, when inevitably the hooligans (with extra grievance) have to carry on their journey home? In a crisis, such as after the mass hooliganism by Rangers fans in Manchester at the UEFA Cup final in 2008, was to pack the lot onto trains back to Glasgow and just make an end of it.
