Discrimination in Football — House of Lords, 2019-04-11
Topic: Civil Rights
Leslie John Griffiths (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, we are all grateful to the noble Lord for repeating the Statement. I will begin a response and ask some questions by echoing the Minister’s remarks and those in the Statement that honour the remarkable courage of the three players—Zaha, Sterling and Rose—who have stood up for proper values when it is enormously difficult to do so in the environment in which they work. They are young men and their courage needs to be commended Secondly, I honour the work of a Member of this House, the noble Lord, Lord Ouseley, who, with Kick It Out, has worked so hard for decades to address the questions implicit in the Statement. As a House, we should be proud that he is one of us. He is stepping down from the front line of those responsibilities, but his work has been very considerable I note from the Statement the various measures that are taken reactively to incidents that occurred in Montenegro, Chelsea or wherever. Of course, we must frame responses that are appropriate to incidents of that kind. I also note that there is every desire to create conditions and have a discussion with the appropriate people that will try to keep in check the outbursts that we all so much regret I have a question for those of us whose responsibilities overlap with the DCMS. We hear that some football club fans are using closed Facebook groups to promote racist ideology. With the publication of the Online Harms White Paper this week, will the use of this type of technology be looked at as it applies to football I was responsible for an activity that reached out to and included people from a vast variety of racial and ethnic groups—55 at one time—for a number of years. When I took up my responsibilities in that arena, I noticed that, with all the diversity in front of us, those of us running the show were about half a dozen very white people I knew then that a bigger job had to be done if we were to work away at the culture that we seek to change. I set myself a target: to diversify the leadership offered to this group within three or four years. In the end, we brought in a variety of faces from Fiji, Korea, various countries in west Africa and the Indian subcontinent. I noticed and can attest to—indeed, we measured it—the change in the nature of engagement on the part of those who had previously been talked to or over but now felt that they owned the operation That leads me to ask my question—which, apart from the Facebook one, is perhaps my only serious one: how do we change a culture? A culture in the support of our national game permits and encourages these subversive activities. I remember having a close association in the 1980s with those neo-fascist groups of hooligans that went round causing trouble at various football stadiums across the land. How do we change a culture and allow a diverse population to feel that it has ownership of this game, rather than it being in the hands of multimillionaires from other places? Seriously, how do we stop black players on the pitch being used, in a sense, as icons, heroes or puppets for people’s own prejudices? There is deep work to be done. We could apply what I have said to homophobia, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Changing a culture is difficult; in football, that seems to be the number one question to address.