I Predict A Race Riot

The England and Wales Public Order Act of 1986 defines a riot as being "where twelve or more persons who are present together use or threaten unlawful violence for common purpose and the conduct of them (taken together) is such as would cause a person of reasonable firmness present at the scene to fear for his personal safety".

Definitions of riot differ as do the numbers required to constitute a riot, but the generally accepted principles of riot are that there has to be common purpose and that there is violence, implied or actual. The numbers are, nevertheless, important in creating an impression as to whether there is or there isn't a riot. Do fifty people on the streets of Arenal really constitute a riot? In legal terms, they do; in perceptual terms, perhaps not. Riot implies masses. Hundreds rather than two score and ten.

Riots vary in their type, their definitions requiring an adjective to establish the type. Put "race" in front of "riot" and an emotional mix is formed, one that is as explosive as the race riot has always been. In Britain, the first race riots took place in 1958. Twenty years later, the location of those original riots - Notting Hill - saw more "race riots", but there was a difference between the 1958 riot and what happened over successive years in the late 1970s. The first one was the product of the classic and potent elements that foment riots - simmering and brewing tensions between opposing groups that finally break out into violence with the unpredictability of spontaneous combustion. The riots at the end of the Notting Hill Carnival were, on the other hand, more predictable.

The "sus" law was unquestionably a factor and the black community had legitimate grievances, but these grievances tended to be obscured. The riots came to be predictable because they masked a criminal intent, that of "steaming" (organised and mass muggings). They shielded acts of robbery with violence, and they involved considerable numbers of people. Around 6pm on August Bank Holiday, if you had an instinct for sensing trouble or intelligence from within the community itself (and I had both), you got the hell out of the areas around Ladbroke Grove and near the sound systems under the Westway. You knew it was all about to kick off, and it did.

Two years ago in Arenal, nine skinheads, eight Germans and one Austrian, were arrested following incidents in the resort. The skinheads, described as neo-Nazis, had been engaging in some racially motivated aggro. The incidents were described as having been a "race riot", even if the number of people was comparatively small. Nevertheless, it was a riot in that there was common purpose and there was violence. The common purpose was race hate.

Arenal has witnessed other such incidents, and at the weekend came the incident which involved, so it was said, some thirty German neo-Nazi skins and twenty black street sellers. Reports differ as to what actually happened. One suggested that the heat was taken out of the episode by the police and that there were no arrests. Another said that there were both injuries and arrests. Whatever the accuracy of the reports, the intent was the same. Here was a bunch of so-called German tourists who came, as they have in previous years, to start trouble of a racially motivated variety. Race riot perhaps, but utterly predictable certainly. Stage-managed. What occurs in Arenal has nothing to do with simmering tensions and grievances, it has everything to do with loutishness. One can call it a race riot, but it was really thuggery with a racial motive. And planned thuggery at that.

In a sense, it can be said that there are regular "riots" in Mallorca's trouble resorts. The incident along Magalluf's strip, captured on camera and circulated on YouTube, when a car was trapped by a horde of youthful tourists screaming "who are you?" and simulating urinating through the driver's window became a riot. There may not initially have been common purpose but ultimately there was. Personal safety was threatened. Violence was implicit.

Defining an incident as a riot might be considered an over-dramatisation and embellishing a riot with racial overtones adds further drama, but it isn't wrong to suggest that riots are not uncommon. These, though, are riots without any hint of justification that erupts from legitimate grievance. These small-scale Mallorcan resort riots are the product of drunkenness, thuggery or both. And the worst ones are those which are racially motivated and planned. This is not what tourism was supposed to be about. It was supposed to be about broadening cultural understanding. 


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Football: It's not cricket

At five minutes past four local time yesterday afternoon Luis Suarez missed a penalty for Liverpool. It would have signalled the first cries of exasperation and the first curses of the new Premier League season in Bar Brits the length and breadth of Mallorca. The footy was back, the Saint Mick was flowing and the tills were alive with the sound of euros.

In a multi-screen Bar Brit would have been a corner of a bar in a foreign land that was forever, or at least on Saturday afternoon, England. An England that once was. Cheers there would have been, but they would have been a momentary distraction for the bellydom bemoaning Suarez's miss. At five minutes past four local time Kevin Pietersen caught Sree Sreesanth. England had thrashed India, had claimed the number one spot in the world test cricket rankings and had restored the order of Empire.

During the lunchtime interval before the confirmation of England's newly acquired status, there was an interview on "Test Match Special". It was with Dan Stevens who plays Matthew Crawley in "Downton Abbey", a period drama set at a time when Empire was starting its decline but when civility was encapsulated by the village green and a gentlemanly ethos of cricketing fair play and values.

Stevens went to Tonbridge School. Its annual fee of over 31,000 pounds is greater than the national average wage and, so, far greater than that earned by inhabitants of inner cities, assuming they earn at all.

Cricket is still a sport of the public school. As it always has been. Yet it was, until around the fifties and sixties, a game of the people as much as football was. It is popular now, but not to the extent it once was. The downturn in its popularity and the supremacy that football assumed coincided with the irreversible changes to English society from the sixties onwards.

Football reigned through the wasteland years of the seventies, the brutality of the eighties and into the newly aspirational nineties, the Premier League being born out of clubs' demands for ever more television money. So started the golden era of English football, golden in terms of the sheer amount of cash the game could generate. It became unquestionably the people's game.

Yet this people's game, at least in its Premier League manifestation, is far removed from the people. They have been taken in, exploited and made complete fools of. But they still lap it up. They still flock to the Bar Brits, donning their replica shirts.

The richness of the sport, the attitudes that surround the game and the exposure of the wealth and misbehaviour of players are the stuff of constant media fascination, fed to a fanaticised public incapable of discerning the degree to which it is being manipulated and driven by the game's marketing. Despite the cost of football, be it that of a Sky subscription or the cost of attendance and travel, the public refuses to turn its back on a sport which has lost any sense of moral compass. The most sickening word in the football vocabulary is a four-letter word - "scum". Teams are scum, other fans are scum. It is a filthy word that sums up the attitudinal wrongs of a sport that in its playing is the preserve of the filthy rich.

Cricket has acquired its own wealth, its own disposability, its own attitudinal failures. It is still played on the playing fields of the public schools, attended by the sons of bankers who can afford thirty thousand a year fees. Yet despite its wealth and a history redolent of Empire and the public school, it is more of a people's game in that it has not lost sight of its core values. It comes close to doing so, but somehow manages to pull back from the brink. Fair play just about prevails.

It fails, though, to capture the following of those who inhabit a Bar Brit and who have been sold and continue to be sold a game that is as socially divisive as bankers earning huge bonuses. Football constantly searches for role models, as though this quest were an admission that the game has no core values. And who does it throw up? Terry, Cole, Rooney. Millionaires all.

The Bar Brit football fan who bleats about the criminal avarice of rioters fails to appreciate that what's on a plasma screen on a Saturday afternoon is avarice gone mad. Football is a game lacking a sense of fair play. It is one dominated by its "scum" attitudes and its glamorisation of those of questionable intelligence and personal values. This, not cricket, is what you mainly get on a plasma screen. So why should anyone be surprised when someone smashes a shop window and helps himself to his own screen?


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.