Pyro's

how about they are in way as unruly or violent as past generations but letting off pyros is still stupid

 

No one here is excusing the use of pyros or denying that youth crime in general is a problem. But it has been so for far longer than anyone alive today can remember.
Suggesting that it now represents some kind of breakdown in societal norms and respect for authority etc simply ignores the historical fact that people have been saying the same about teenage behaviour since long before the era that you are holding up as a better time.

 

Bloody hell, I think I've gone back in a dream and woken up in one of Prof Geoff Pearson's Bradford Uni social policy classes!

 

Absolutely!

This book was the basis of his lectures in the early 80s.

Hooligan: A history of respectable fears https://amzn.eu/d/561QTh0

Read the reviews. It basically mirrors this discussion!

And from the Goodreads reviews:

"This is Pearson's point, of course. The law-and-order debate is always the same, and always entirely ahistorical. The nation is always under threat from youth gone wild. The liberals are always mollycoddling them. The root is always foreign influence, judicial softness, and undeserved luxury. The solution is as obvious as the cause: as one Tory MP confidently asserts, “If birching and short sentences will not stop it, then more birching and longer sentences will have to be tried”

And equally consistent is the proof these firebrands give. Merely cast your mind back a generation or two and you'll recall that Britain was more peaceful, more respectful of authority, more stable, and so on. This constant desire for happier and simpler times gives Pearson the structure for his book, which is unusual - a history told in reverse chronological order. For each generation he humours the reactionaries and jumps back twenty or thirty years, as instructed, starting with the 1950s. Lo and behold, we meet again and again youthful crime sprees, horrified conservatives, gangs on the rampage, soft-hearted philanthropists, and the same instruction: just look back a generation, to when things were fine.

The reverse chronology works a treat in letting us see reactionaries frothing over more and more innocuous things - there's a marvellous section on the horror of the bicycle and its ability to let working-class people loose across the British countryside. We see how disgust at 80s football fans is contrasted with rosy memories of sporting tradition, then when we reach the origins of that tradition - oh what a surprise, the same newspapers hated that too. We see shifting definitions of the Others corrupting English life - immigrants, Americans, the Irish, the continentals ("a state of affairs intolerable even in Naples!") and a constant depressing drumbeat of complaints that the working classes turn to crime because they have it TOO good. Even Pearson's sardonic demeanour is shaken when he finds Victorians denouncing the workhouses and slums as plagued by excess luxury.

Pearson's concluding chapter tries to make some sense of this, and it's difficult, because the conservatives making these arguments are so often just plain acting in bad faith. The ahistorical claims are the point - the arguments aren't meant to be a proper explanation of the situation, and the people they're aimed at believe them already. This is why "Respectable Fears" can never be assuaged, and always recur - a Pearson of today would wearily roll his eyes at talk of 'New Elites', cultural Marxism, the panic over trans people or small boats, and the barbarising effects of social media. The rhetoric and tactics never vary. Even if it peters out near the end, Hooligan's historical journey through what we now call "normal island" is worth taking."

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/5508584

I always had a soft spot for Geoff Pearson. Liked a pint or three with his students and gave me a first for my essay on 'Youth Culture: A Comparative Study of Mods, Skins & Punks".
He, sadly, died in 2013. I think I might just buy meself a copy of 'Hooligan' and read it again for old times sake.

 

The problem on Wednesday is that it has now gone beyond young lads larking about with pyros. At least one seat was ripped off and thrown onto the pictch, maybe more, so they are now sinking to hooliganism and vandalism.

 

back to the good old days of the 70/80s

 

I appreciate that young (and old) people have always had a penchant for unruly behaviour, but maybe now is a time for someone or some club to take a lead in trying to stamp out what for me is beginning to ruin the modern game.
If this cannot be done then you can rule me out of away games in the future, I just don't want to know anymore.

 

It’s simple let it be known and well publicised that anyone found to have set of pyros or caused damage or hooliganism of any sort it will lead to a life ban. The scribes can not then say they haven’t been warned

 

That's sad to hear Jayteebee but quite understandable, we usually travel with the Corn Dolly crew a good set of lads/lasses we have a few beers before the game, spending time with my grandson and like minded City fans makes my day then you go into the ground and hope you can get a seat as far away from these guys as possible, as you say something has to be done to stop this stupid and dangerous practice it is not an acceptable part of the British game and needs stamping out.

 

I think that yearning for a past 'Golden Age' is part of the human condition -- perhaps a longing for the time when we were too young to yet understand what living really means, and so did live without many cares.

The ideas mentioned in your quotes cross ages and cultures. If we go back to the ancient Greeks, we find their moralists complaining bitterly about the adoption of Persian customs by their society: reclining to dine, weird music, etc. Those horrible, effeminate, decadent Persians are corrupting us! We must stop this! Fast forward a few centuries and the Roman absorption of Greece and Greek culture into the Roman world, and what do we get? Roman moralists complaining bitterly about the adoption of Greek customs by their society! Those horrible, effeminate, decadent Greeks are corrupting us! We must stop this! Always the 'Other' corrupts us...

Still, there are grains of truth in the moralists' / conservatives' / reactionaries' complaints. For example, back in the 50s-60s when my Mum and Aunt were young nurses the uniform protected you, and you could, in general, feel safe even in rougher parts of cities because you were respected. I don't know that a present-day nurse could say the same.

RCB

 

That is indeed a simple solution. So simple, in fact, that isn't likely to be effective. We know from decades of criminological research that simply hiking up the sentences/sanctions rarely, if ever, works to reduce offending rates. By far the bigger deterrent is the likelihood of getting caught. And that's where the problem arises, because it's very difficult to stop the pyros being smuggled in without doing intimate searches. And even if you were allowed to do that, how many innocent youths would you need to strip search to catch the one who is smuggling them in? It's clearly an excessive measure. So the kids know they can get them into grounds with impunity. And it seems that it is very difficult to identify individual throwers in big crowds of kids all wearing similar dark Stone Island gear. If it was simple to crack this problem, it would have been sorted by now. But it clearly isn't simple

 

It's similar in idea to having the death penalty for murder. It satisfies people lust for their perceived justice but in practice it doesn't stop murders from happening because that's not how society and the human mind works.

 

Your examples of Greeks, Persians and Romans is brilliant. It's the ancient equivalent of the Poles, Bulgarians etc 'swamping' our society and the moral panic about the small boats. Yet still the nostalgists believe that it was better 30 years ago/when they were younger etc. Nothing changes there.

Obviously I can't contradict your mum and aunt's personal experience but I'm not convinced that a nurse's uniform would have been universally protective everywhere. And even if it was, the double standards were mind blowing. Married women, including nurses, were routinely subjected to what we now call domestic abuse and marital rape. The scale of it was horrific, but it was just accepted. The police weren't interested in what went on between a man and his wife. My grandad knocked my nan about with impunity when he he'd had a skinful of beer. And took a leather strap to my uncles' backs. It was just a 'domestic' and everyone turned a blind eye to it. Things, although far from perfect, have improved massively in that regard. Yet now we have incels and right wing YouTube culture warriors bemoaning emasculation and wanting to take us back to when women did what they were told or got a good hiding or 'seeing to'.

 

Modern thinking nobody knows how many murders the death penalty deterred. Whe people see their mates banned and prosecuted it will deter some

 

That's pure conjecture on your part. The fact is the death penalty did not deter people from murdering people, someone going out with the intention to murder cares nothing for the repercussions.

 

'Generation to generation, nothing changes in Bohemia'. (Nik Cohn)
'All you've got to do is delete the words 'punk rock' and write in 'Rolling Stones' and you've got the same press as you had fifteen years ago...They puked at London airport, we pissed in the filling station'. (Keith Richard)

No disagreement from me. I did put in that 'in general' to try to cover myself, and was thinking primarily of being in uniform and on duty (or the way there and back). (I'm sure my people weren't the only nurses in uniform to have bus conductors waive the fare because of that, for example.) They trained and worked across the north (Batley, Dewsbury, Bradford, Leeds, Manchester) and in London/the home counties (Amersham, Maidenhead, Taplow, Richmond, Uxbridge, Croydon, West Middlesex) (I might have missed some places) and don't recall much if any trouble from society at large. Patients, however, could be a different matter!

But yes, we have to live in our own time. It's a pity though that we don't always manage to keep the good bits from the past while improving the bad bits. We do progress as a race, but so glacially that maybe only over the course of a very long life can one see that indeed we have progressed. Science/technology, medicine do advance noticeably quickly, but human behaviour seems to be a lot slower.

As for the pyromorons, perhaps for convicted first offenders a conditional discharge dependent on honouring a stadium ban for a set period, education on smoke/chemicals and their effects on health (spend some time in a respiratory ward in a hospital, for instance), education about the effects of smoke/fire in a stadium on City supporters in particular, and some sort of fine might convince the more sensible ones -- and there will be some -- to change their ways. Some of course you can't reach, and repeat offenders have to be treated differently. This all assumes one can actually identify and arrest the culprits...

RCB

 

Presume all those Sheffield Wednesday fans on the pitch tonight will be banned?

 

If you do buy it, can I have it off you next? I was also looking to buy it after reading the review you posted, but it’s 28,99€ for paperback! No wonder the youth are always in their phones if books cost that much!

 

The lino went for a Burton. Not sure he was pushed or accidentally knocked over. I don’t think there was anything malicious, but I’m sure it’ll be made a noise about.