England fans abroad: Are they simply tw*ts?

“It is a minority, but there are far too many, and it would be wrong to try to minimise it as a small minority. There is a significant contingent of people who cannot behave because of alcohol” – Deputy Chief Constable Mark Roberts, responsible for policing football, on October 18 2018 after England fans caused trouble in Seville.

‘About 100 of them got into the swimming pool, driving out everyone else. Then they began jumping up and down, splashing and chanting “You what? You what? You what, you what you what?” They didn’t do it once or twice, they did it for about 15 minutes. We stood and watched, amazed at how funny they seemed to think this was. Then they started singing “Here we go here we go here we go” for another ten minutes, like it was the cleverest thing ever. Then a couple hit a Spanish lad in the face. “What you looking at Pepe?” Bam! They loved annoying people. Loved picking a fight. If you didn’t get annoyed at them they’d pick on you. But if you did, they’d come over and hit you. Everyone was sick of them. It was shameful” –  Jimmy E, June 6 1989.

This is an extract from a letter – remember them? – that my pal Jimmy wrote, which came to the surface in the last week while I was unpacking after moving house. It describes a scene he witnessed at a hotel where he was working in Fuengirola. What he describes was how English people on a Club 18-30 holiday routinely behaved, pretty much every day. While this was the first time he’d seen it, it then happened all the time, right through the summer.

This culture was perfectly expressed by the band Thunder, who around that time had a song called An Englishman On Holiday.

Laying down in this Spanish bar, that last slammer hit me like a car
I’ve got the 6 a.m. Balearic blues, can’t even focus on my own tattoos
I had a fight with this German guy, I saw him give my little girl the eye
While he was trying hard to be so cool, I hit him with a stool

Oh yes, alright, I’ll be going all night
Gonna drink ’til they take me away, I’m an Englishman on holiday

Every year I get to do the same, I meet the boys and get on the plane
We like to sing and shout out “here we go”
‘Cos they’re the only words that we all know.

I called up Jimmy and told him about the letter I’d found. He recalled that summer he’d spent working in a huge hotel bar.

“It wasn’t just how aggressive and boorish the English were, it was how pleased they were with themselves for being that way. That’s what shocked me. Like as if it was great to behave like a total twat. They just wanted to cause trouble and they all thought they were bloody great for doing so. No excuses. They were just idiots who felt, for whatever reason, entitled to behave like an invading army.”

We went on to talk about the behaviour of some of the England fans in Seville prior to the game this week.

“They’re the same people. They’re the same type of selfish bastards causing mayhem and destruction and taking pleasure in it. The English are the only ones to do it en masse and glory in it. It’s their identity. It is a uniquely male, English thing. It was almost never Scots or Irish or Welsh. I was embarrassed to be English by the end of that summer. I don’t get it. We grew up going out drinking and never behaved like that, did we? We never wanted to be that much of a twat. I still don’t get why they’re like that.”

So that’s my question. Why are those English people like that?

No England game played within reach of a short flight fails to attract a few gangs of such people. We saw them in Spain last week but we’ve seen them in France, Holland and Germany too. Is it really all drink-driven or does the drink just allow them to indulge their real selves. The journalist Daniel Taylor has called it the stag-do mentality and maybe it is, but where does that mentality derive from?

Vandalising a car, or a bar, or throwing someone’s bike in a canal, or whatever it is ‘the boys’ are laughing about, must be rooted in a sense of Englishness for it to be a uniquely English trait. Others drink and get rowdy, but it doesn’t so easily default to racist, nationalistic and xenophobic chanting.

It looks like a defensive measure taken to try and define yourself against something and of course, English v Foreign has always been fertile soil for evil’s bitter seeds to flourish.

Trying to assert superiority and dominance is often an expression of a sense of inferiority or weakness. So it could be a rebellion against a sense of powerlessness in their everyday lives. At home they have to shut up and take orders, but when away they let all out that pent-up suppressed emotion.

Their lack of empathy is striking. Many of us find our public behaviour rotates around wishing not to upset or offend people but these men seem to have surrendered those basic values. That’s not a small thing and tells us that the desire to behave badly is greater than almost anything else. It is very important to them.

Some may just excuse it all as being caused by heavy drinking. Whilst drinking must be an ingredient in this rancid mix, the need to get drunk en masse is but another illustration of unhappiness and perhaps even mental unwellness. It may seem normal to them, but of course we know it isn’t.

All of which leads us back to England, the country. What sort of society is it which produces these people? The other home nations do not send such people abroad to kick the wing mirror off a car or shatter a windscreen. The Irish, Scots and Welsh are often welcomed. Shutters are not pulled down for them the way they are when England are in town.

Maybe this is because the other nations that make up Britain have a strong sense of national identity. England doesn’t. England has strong regional identities which many of us readily embrace, sometimes to the exclusion of a sense of Englishness. So are these Englishmen culturally adrift and in search of an identity?

Is it a product of a culture of toxic masculinity? Are these men feeling emasculated by what they perceive as the feminisation of society and take England games as a chance to reassert or express old school maleness?

Or is it because the English economic model is built on promulgation of individualism and consumer choice over and above the community and the spiritual? Is that making these people feel like losers in the race of life and thus want to lash out? Are they simply angry at life? Or maybe, and this is Jimmy’s view, they’re just amoral swine who need slapping down and putting in jail.

Just banning drinking, as the police suggest, might help, but this urge to be a bastard on foreign soil has buried roots and will not go away until we dig deep and address the real issues of manhood, nationhood, territorialism, racism, empire and economics. Until then, as Danny Bowes from Thunder sings, it’ll be a case of …

I’ve got to get out before I miss the plane, next summer I’ll be back again
I’ll be fighting for the Union Jack, if they let me back
Oh yes, alright, I’ll be going all night,
Gonna drink ’til they take me away, I’m an Englishman on holiday…

John Nicholson