By Mark Baber
April 10 – A proposal by two politically right-wing-leaning football figures for a minute’s silence before this weekend’s Premier League fixtures, in tribute to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, has been met with an almost unanimously hostile reaction from English football fans and writers, who have been remembering her approach to football.
Reading club chairman John Madejski and Wigan owner Dave Whelan, have controversially called for a minutes silence at football games for Thatcher, who died after a stroke on Monday, aged 87.
Whelan insisted he could not understand why parts of the population, especially in the north, did not want to mark Thatcher’s death and said Manchester United’s decision not to have a minutes silence was “very disrespectful”.
Thatcher is widely reviled in football, particularly in northern working-class bastions of the game, primarily as a consequence of the social effects of her policies while in government, but football was certainly on her long list of “enemies within”.
After the Luton Town v Millwall riot, the Bradford fire and then the Heysel tragedy, the Thatcher government saw football almost entirely through a law-and-order prism and, as Henry Winter writes in the Telegraph, proposed the Football Supporter Act which reads “like something out of George Orwell’s 1984”, proposing making it an imprisonable offence to attempt to attend to a football match without ID.
Internationally Thatcher was opposed to the FIFA boycott of South Africa over apartheid, holding that “the ANC is a typical terrorist organisation … Anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo land.” Her close ally, Teddy Taylor said “Nelson Mandela should be shot”.
She was also a close friend of the dictator Pinochet, who used the Chilean National Football Stadium to detain as many as 40,000 political prisoners, 1,850 of whom were killed and 1,300 still missing.
On the domestic front Thatcher will be remembered for having presided over the Hillsborough disaster of April 15, 1989. Having done little to address the unsafe conditions in football grounds, having criminalised football supporters and having cabinet members committed to a “managed decline” of the city of Liverpool, it was her ally in the Murdoch-owned-and-favoured media, The Sun, which, in the immediate aftermath, described the Liverpool fans as “animals”.
Thatcher and her government were happy to accept the accounts of the senior commanders of the South Yorkshire police force, who covered up their incompetence and claimed the catalyst for the tragedy were drunken, ticketless Liverpool fans. She was reluctant to accept the Taylor Report of which she said, “The broad thrust is devastating criticism of the police. Is that for us to welcome?” This was despite being informed in a cabinet memo of the “defensive – at times close to deceitful – behaviour by the senior officers in South Yorkshire.” It was only last year that the full extent of the cover-up was fully exposed by the Hillsborough Independent Panel report and current prime minister David Cameron’s apology for the double injustice suffered by the Hillsborough families.
The Premier League and FA have said they will not hold a minute’s silence in Margaret Thatcher’s memory. A minute’s silence would likely be difficult to observe across football grounds in England.
Two days before her funeral, the families of the 96 who died at Hillsborough will gather at Anfield to mark the anniversary of the tragedy. Meanwhile, ironically, Reading’s clash with Liverpool this weekend will be preceded by a minute’s silence, as described by the club website,
Supporters of Reading Football Club and Liverpool Football Club will hold a minute’s silence before Saturday’s fixture at Madejski Stadium as a mark of respect for the anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster.
One suspects that if John Madjeski is to hold a minute’s silence in tribute to Thatcher his only opportunity will be in his own boardroom on his own as the noise from football supporters across England will drown everything else out.
Contact the writer of this story at moc.l1734870161labto1734870161ofdlr1734870161owedi1734870161sni@r1734870161ebab.1734870161kram1734870161