Crying ‘offence’ is the real offence

Monday September 19, 2011

The ‘inoffensive rule’ should be broken by all football fans, argues Dennis Hayes

Bill Shankly famously told a Granada TV interviewer in 1981: “Someone said to me ‘To you football is a matter of life or death!’ and I said ‘Listen, it’s more important than that’.” The point he was making is that football is not part of life. It is many things. It is ‘the beautiful game.’ It is in that part of adult life that is ‘play,’ grown up play. This is not to trivialise football but to recognise that it is a special part of life, like literature, that is separate from the normal, separate from ‘life and death.’ The chanting and ‘tribal’ loyalties of the fan are outside of the normal despite the fact that some thuggery occurs because a few fans confuse football with normal life and death matters.

When I was a teenager and went to see Preston North End, Shankly’s club when he was a player, someone shouted out that one of the home team was playing like ‘An homosexual grasshopper!’ Whatever it meant, and it would now be decried as homophobic and speciesist, it showed the poetry of the football crowd. As Tom Miers and Stuart Waiton have argued on this site even ’sectarian’ chanting and singing has a ritualistic function and does not have the meaning it would have in a non football context.

The Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Bill, now on its way to becoming law, conflates football with real life and it obliterates in the phrase ‘offensive behaviour’ the distinction between deeds and words. It is a new low point in the attack on free speech. The ‘offensive behaviour’ it refers to includes ‘sectarian and other offensive chanting and threatening behaviour related to football which is likely to cause public disorder’ and ‘expressing or inciting religious, racial or other forms of hatred.’ All this is speech and should be answered with more speech, not a criminal sentence.

I have been writing offensive articles against those who make ‘offence’ the cardinal sin since 2005. The reason is the same then as now – the claim that what someone said was as ‘offensive’ and as hurtful as physical assault shuts down debate and criminalises the speaker. It appears to gives the ‘offended’ person the moral high ground. What it really does is to make human communication impossible because it replaces giving reasons and argument with subjective emotional responses. Ultimately it means there will be no debate at all as all interesting debate offends someone’s deeply held beliefs. Alan Cochrane clearly saw the parallel consequence for football in his spoof piece
suggesting that games should be played in empty stadiums to tackle the bigots!

The ultimate consequence of the demand that we should all be inoffensive would not merely be empty football stadiums but empty minds. The only real way to stay free from the crime of offence is to have a mind so free from bigotry, so open, so empathetic that your brains fall out.

Professor Dennis Hayes is the director of Academics For Academic Freedom