My home is under a dispersal order because of Millwall vs. West Ham - where’s the Notting Hill Carnival level outrage against football hooliganism?
Both teams have garnered a reputation for their violent tribalism over the decades, more than once escalating into rioting, stabbings, and even death.
Both football and Notting Hill Carnival represent important facets of British culture and identity - but if you’re someone who spoke up about the danger of Carnival and stayed silent about the continuous threat of football hooliganism, I’m afraid you’ve left yourself an open goal.
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It’s a historic day for the Championship League, as East London rivals West Ham and Millwall FC go toe-to-toe for the first time in fourteen years. Dubbed the “Dockers Derby”, the match represents a feud spanning more than a century - but it’s not a feud known for its sportsmanship. Both teams have garnered a reputation for their violent tribalism over the decades, more than once escalating into rioting, stabbings, and even death.
The Metropolitan Police clearly also don’t anticipate a friendly reunion, having this week announced mammoth dispersal and removal powers spanning from Blackheath to Bermondsey (for non-Londoners, that’s roughly five miles). It’s not dissimilar to the policing prep usually allocated to Notting Hill Carnival - but residents of Notting Hill have plenty of advance notice to avoid the August bank holiday if they wish. No such luck for south east Londoners, who see a tweet from the police on Thursday, and have two days to batten down the hatches for Saturday.
As a Londoner of more than a decade, I’m no stranger to playing vomit hopscotch at big public events: I’ve been swept up in Notting Hill crowd crushes, and I’ve been doused in plenty of football fans’ airborne Stella. Both events are messy, often emotionally heightened, and can veer into public disorder if not managed properly, but crucially, both represent important facets of British culture.
Notting Hill Carnival celebrates a Caribbean population that has remained steadfast against decades of racial discrimination - meanwhile, football provides an outlet for Brits who’ve faced years of economic decline and the slow dissolution of their home communities. The main difference lies in how we tolerate the disruption generated by each event.
Every August, it’s a foregone conclusion we’ll see a swathe of think-pieces evaluating whether Notting Hill Carnival is a threat to Britain’s moral fibre. It’s the same annual feeding frenzy - someone trots out the crime statistics, another points out Glastonbury Festival has more arrests per attendee, then someone inevitably uses a racial slur. It’s ugly, it’s largely confected, and the organisers get annually hammered in a criminology case study they work hard to confine every year.
Meanwhile, football disruption seems to benefit from a “boys will be boys” attitude - we titter at the lads engaging in the same disorder we see at Notting Hill, and we pay little mind to the explosion in domestic violence incidents spurred on by football. This year for the World Cup alone, the UK saw football-related domestic violence rise to 2,322 incidents - but did that receive the same level of outrage that Notting Hill Carnival receives every year? Of course not.
Best we got was Reform MP Sarah Pochin telling our boys to “keep winning” to prevent more cases.
It’s not just a cultural double standard, either - football disruption entails a considerable cost to the taxpayer. In July this year, UK football’s policing lead Chief Constable Mark Roberts pointed out that the current model of billing the taxpayer and not the football clubs for public protection isn’t sustainable - especially when that bill totals £70m each season (compared with £10-15m annual policing costs for Notting Hill). And considering the Home Office reported record-breaking levels of football-related police incidents last season, that cost probably isn’t going down anytime soon.
So, I’m afraid if you’re someone who spends their Augusts foaming at the mouth about Notting Hill Carnival, you might want to start sharpening your quill to write about the scourge of football hooliganism too.
Otherwise, people might think it’s not just public disorder you’re angry at.
Rose Morelli is a producer for LBC.
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