| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Pendry: Briefly, does the right hon. and learned Gentleman recognise that there must be better liaison between the Department of National Heritage and the Department of the Environment because, often, the
Department of National Heritage wishes to do what he did when he was there--to get on with it and to have stadiums built? It is frustrated by the Department of the Environment calling in plans when perhaps it should try to resolve matters in other ways.
Mr. Mellor: I agree entirely. Exactly that is happening at Fulham, and I think that a Department of the Environment inspector finally cold-boxed the Southampton scheme, so I accept that point.
Many sports are having huge difficulties coming to terms with the modern world. In many, their own way of running things is not exactly the way that one would devise if one were setting them up today. It is ludicrous that the Football Association should be dominated by people from the amateur game. That is no criticism of the amateur game, but it is not especially relevant to some of the big things that we are talking about. I am a great admirer of Bert Millichip, who is the exception and has given good leadership, but in any other game or walk of life, many other people on the FA council would have been pensioned off. All the people on the FA vice-presidents bench are over 80--it is known as death row.
Rugby will have terrible problems as professionalism comes in. The other day, I had the opportunity to interview Mark MacCormack, who in 1960 met a golfer called Arnold Palmer and then a golfer called Gary Player. Mr. MacCormack built up a business that totally transformed the world of golf and then of tennis. Suddenly, little provincial sports changed. Mark MacCormack had to twist the arms of the Wimbledon authorities to persuade them that they should have hospitality tents and such things. The first reaction of the senior president at Wimbledon was, "Would people be interested in coming?"
Mr. Joseph Ashton (Bassetlaw):
I shall confine my remarks to one specific matter because quite a few hon. Members want to speak: policing and hooliganism at the European championships.
I am to be chairman of the all-party Association Football Committee thanks to my hon. Friends. At one of our regularly attended meetings, many of them will have noted that, last week, we met two chief inspectors from Scotland Yard's football intelligence unit. We were impressed by the report given to us by--and I hope that they will not mind me naming them--Chief Inspectors Peter Chapman and Brian Drew of the football section of the special crimes squad. They did a marvellous job in explaining the background to the security and organisation. They came under severe questioning.
The football intelligence unit is not especially new. It has been there for some time. It keeps quiet because, obviously, it does not want to reveal too much of what it knows, but the committee will visit the unit a week on Tuesday. Any Members are welcome to come along if they wish. They will find that it is possible to press a button and hooligans from every club--photographs, details and names--will be revealed on a screen. The unit has acquired a marvellous amount of information and knowledge. It can tell when hooligans will be going to a specific point, what time they will arrive and what pub they will meet at.
It is sad that such information cannot be revealed because of the Data Protection Act 1988. Although it is available to the police, it is not available to clubs.I remember meeting the Home Secretary about this on behalf of the committee following the Lansdowne road incident in Dublin, when thugs from Britain threw chairs off the stand on to the crowd below. To be fair, he conducted a full investigation into it, but still said that the Act means that the identities of potential hooligans cannot be revealed to clubs. The clubs cannot, therefore, check and decide not to give a certain person a ticket or a season ticket or to put stewards on at certain points.
If it is to prevent a crime, the Home Office should examine how this mass of information can be disseminated to clubs and even to area police forces in great detail so that much of the hooliganism--the 1 per cent. of people who create problems, which attract so much publicity--can be curtailed.
Today's Yorkshire Post headline reads:
The football intelligence unit is liaising with several other countries, so not only the British police, but Europe's top cops will be handling things. They know their own hooligans. They will be able to mingle with the crowd and pick them out. Television will be zooming in on and looking for them.
We will not have the position, which has occurred so often, where hooligans are simply put on the next ferry and sent back to their country, knowing that they have got away with it and that they can return even the following week and do it again. Now there will be instant prosecutions. I hope that newspapers will give publicity to such prosecutions.
There is a Europewide network of potential thugs. The vast majority of people who commit such offences are not football fans, but National Front supporters and fascists who have used football to set up a network in Paris,
Madrid, Barcelona, Hamburg, Berlin and throughout Europe. They want to jump on the football bandwagon and to fight world war 3 and world war 4 and they will use any chance that they get. Let us not over-exaggerate it. There are probably no more than a dozen from each country, but they love the publicity and the cameras that zoom in on them, as they did at Lansdowne road in Dublin. They love waving their national flag and abusing it. That is one of the things that could spoil the games.
I tabled a question to the Home Secretary asking him to consider moving the Trooping the Colour ceremony, which, unfortunately--I think that we should have noticed this six months ago--falls on the date of England-Scotland game. Obviously, 20,000 people may come down from Scotland, travelling overnight. I am not saying that they will be exuberant because one or two might have a hangover, but seeing some horses in a parade down the street and the opportunity for mischief and a bit of fun can be tempting.
Mr. Tony Banks:
The horsemen will all have swords though.
Mr. Ashton:
My hon. Friend keeps interrupting, but I cannot hear what he is saying. It needs only two or three such supporters to think that they can stampede the horses. The television cameras will be there. To those people, it will be great fun, but to the rest of us and for the European championship tournament, it will be a great disaster.
The police are confident that they can handle both events on the same day and I am sure that they can, but it is one thing policing in grounds, which is now a fine art. There has been hardly any trouble in any ground in Britain for many years because of all-seater stadiums, television cameras and segregation. I said this to a director of Sheffield Wednesday football club. We and everyone else have put time and money and gone to great lengths in relation to crowd safety, but on the streets, it can be different. Football is a game of great grief or great joy and if matches finish at half-past nine or half-past 10, supporters go to a pub and someone says a wrong word, trouble can happen.
In these championships, we have a new position. The penalty shoot-out will not necessarily take place. Teams will play extra time until a goal is scored. With the old penalty shoot-out system, the police could get ready at the end of the half hour, with everyone standing up and looking in case of trouble, but now the end of the game can come at any time during the half hour.
Mr. Tony Banks:
I am sorry for interrupting my hon. Friend. I was suggesting that if the Scottish supporters decided to make some trouble for Trooping the Colour, they should remember that the troops all have swords. It could be Culloden all over again.
"Police face £1m soccer bill",
and that is just in Leeds and Sheffield, where they are not expecting much trouble. But 7,500 officers have had their leave cancelled. An enormous cost is falling on cities and the Government are offering no extra cash. Millions of pounds will be flooding into the country and there is a chance to put Britain's image in Europe into a far better perspective than the continual squabbles about beef and such stuff, yet we are missing out on it. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Mr. Pendry) said, the Government seem to have a non-interventionist policy. They might intervene in football, but in relation to tourism and to putting on a show, they could have done far more.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |