Euro 2012: A message to Panorama and Sol Campbell
I see Panorama is at it again.
For non UK readers, this a current affairs program on the BBC that specializes in using investigative journalism – much like our friendly neighbourhood tabloid press – to present stories that typically feature exposes of bribery and corruption in high places. Politicians are favourite targets. Over the years it has provided a valuable service in exposing all kinds of malpractice for the public good, but has equally suffered from plenty of criticism. It is sometimes accused of being less than accurate in the way it presents its case, and has also been accused more than once of lying or paying people to stage acts to illustrate a particular theme. I watch it sometimes on BBC World and always enjoy it.
Sometimes it moves away from the political arena and presents sports stories, and on football in particular, and invariably focuses on some of the less savoury aspects of the sport. Now this is not always a bad thing. However, sometimes the timing, to gain maximum publicity and exposure, can lead to consequences that are less than agreeable to football fans. The classic example was a couple of years ago, when England was among the bidders to stage the World Cup in 2018 or 2022.
Now the bid process for this, like that for both Olympics and the UEFA football Championships, is always fertile ground for this sort of program, as the amounts of money being spent by bidders to try and win the prize are invariably huge (although paling into insignificance against the costs of actually delivering a successful event, or indeed the potential profits generated by it), and wide open to all kinds of abuse. Fertile ground then, and a fair target for Panorama and any other similar program, and of course newspapers of all description.
One of the program‘s journalists made a very good report that basically presented “proof” that a number of high-ranking FIFA executives involved in this particular bidding process had been paying significant bribes in order to secure the tournament for their countries, and that the organization’s general secretary, the odious Swiss Sepp Blatter had been aware of it all along. All well and good: stuff like that needs to be out in the public domain: FIFA has had a reputation for years for corruption – the subject is a blog post in itself. However, the BBC chose to screen the program the night before voting was to take place – with predictable results. England, favourites to win the bid for 2018, with an infrastructure in place, and after a highly impressive campaign featuring among others David Beckham and Prince William, came nowhere – the voting members of FIFA, extremely pissed off at their dirty laundry being aired so publicly, voted elsewhere. The fact that most of the allegation were subsequently found to be true, and a number of the accused (including the head of the successful Qatar bid for 2022) suspended or kicked out of the organization was immaterial. Despite being proved right all along, Panorama and the BBC were vilified by the majority of the country’s football fans, accused of having a political agenda and labeled a national disgrace for losing England’s World Cup bid. The criticism was second only to that poured on FIFA itself.
Earlier the same year the program had further ruffled feathers with a report that looked at the political and security situation in South Africa, who was hosting that year’s World Cup. High levels of violent crime including rape and armed robbery were reported from across the country, but especially around Johannesburg. The infrastructure – roads, railways, hotels – was criticized as being unable to cope with the expected influx of fans from around the world. Of course, there were allegations of corruption, with city officials and FIFA creaming off huge sums of money from construction projects that were running behind schedule. Fans were solemnly warned not to travel because of the dangers. In the event, the tournament went off without a hitch, and apart from the mostly dire quality of the football was largely seen as a roaring success.
So that’s 1-1 then.
* * *
Now their latest effort is a cracker.
Next week sees the start of the latest Euro championship, jointly hosted by Poland and Ukraine – the first time Eastern European and ex-Soviet bloc nations have hosted an event of this stature. From the start, voices have been raised against their choice – the countries can’t cope with all the people coming to watch, the stadiums are shit, the roads are terrible……the list of complaints goes on and on. In actual fact, both countries over the past few years, since being awarded the tournament, have been working flat out to prepare, and mostly things look pretty good. To their credit, UEFA, the governing body, has insisted all along that the choice is the right one and stressed that it will have great long term benefit for both countries – this despite the occasional warning to both governments that preparations are running late.
The host cities have either updated existing, or built brand new, stadia that are as good as anything in the world – there are some wonderful looking venues. They are all ready and in use. Billions of euros have been spent improving road and rail networks, extending and re-furbishing airports or opening new ones. Those too are up and running – although admittedly some of the road improvements will not be completed in time. In most cities there are good hotels ready and waiting, and huge efforts have been put into adding additional accommodation as required – there are campsites in some areas, including Gdansk on Poland’s Baltic Coast that from personal experience I know is very nice at this time of year. In both countries beer and food is cheap and excellent, and there are plenty of activities to do and places to go between matches. Most importantly, I think, the average Pole or Ukrainian is excited about the tournament (even though both national teams are crap and unlikely to get out of their respective groups) and looking forward to welcoming fans from across the continent and enjoying the tournament with them. Everywhere you go there are shops and stalls selling souvenirs, special hats, footballs, replica kits of all the competing nations, fanzones set up to enjoy the game in the open air with a beer and a burger – there are special concerts and entertainment laid on in some places and of course wall-to-wall publicity and tv coverage. It’s all set fair then to be roaring success.
And then along comes Panorama. This week it aired a program that focused on apparent racism, anti-Semitism and neo-Nazi violence at matches in both countries. Let me be straight here: as I’m in Cairo right now I haven’t seen the program. What I have seen is extensive coverage on the BBC website, the Guardian Online and other sites and blogs, and frankly I’ve never seen such a poisonous amount of tosh in all my life. It doesn’t help that Sol Campbell, ex-Arsenal and England international and in his day a fine player, comes out and advises people not to travel to Poland and Ukraine “because you might come home in a coffin”. What a bunch of ill-informed sensationalist bullshit! Nor does it help when the families of Theo Walcott and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, also both of Arsenal and in the England squad, announce to the press that they are not going to see their kids play because they are frightened they will be the victims of racist violence and abuse. Note that all three players are black.
From what I have read, the program contained footage of football supporters giving Nazi salutes and chanting anti-Semitic abuse, making monkey noises at black players and in one case attacking a group of Indian fans at a match in Kharkiv, one of the Ukrainian venues. The thrust of it seems to be that we in England have eradicated this sort of behaviour, that Poland and Ukraine have failed badly in not taking sterner action to eradicate it themselves, and they should never have been awarded the games because they are both racist and anti-Semitic societies who don’t deserve it. That is certainly a point of view widely aired on the blogs, and could hardly be further from the truth. My assumption is that most of the clowns posting these comments are either from non-white ethnicity, have never been to either country to experience them themselves, are easily led – or a combination of all three.
The governments of both countries have predictably reacted angrily. Having lived in Warsaw for getting on for 12 years now, and recently visited Kiev, I can understand their anger, and that of the people in both countries. Now I’m not accusing the BBC or the program of lying or fabricating events to make good television – although it’s not impossible that is what happened. I can only speak for what I have seen – and never in all the years I’ve been here have I witnessed anything remotely like the footage that Panorama apparently aired – at least not since I went to Crystal Palace v Leeds back in the early 1970s. I have never come across any racism – overt or otherwise – in Warsaw. There are an increasing number of black and Asian people living in the country – there is even a black MP, an immigrant from the Caribbean (I wonder if the program sought his views at all?) – and I can’t remember any cases of violence or abuse against them. I have come across no anti-Semitism either, and after the suffering that both countries went through during the Second World War and since, under Communism, when the vast majority of both their Jewish populations was, in one way or another, wiped out I would not expect to.
* * *
That is not to say racism and anti-Semitism doesn’t exist there – it probably does, just as it does in Britain and France and Germany and pretty much every country in the world. Anyone who suggests otherwise is an idiot. But to suggest as Campbell does that if you go to Poland or Ukraine to a football match you might be killed because of your skin colour is not only wildly inaccurate but is deeply deeply offensive. The man really should shut up and not discuss things he has no clue about – I can only assume he’s running short of cash and needed a top up from his BBC fee.
The people currently yelling from the rooftops and posting on various blogs and websites that this year’s host nations are a disgrace to humanity, and so on, should take a look around them first. Last year many people, mainly black but from other enthnicities as well, including white, rioted and burned swathes of London and elsewhere in protest at alleged police victimization. Don’t see that in Warsaw and Kiev. France has recently passed laws that ban Moslem women from wearing the burqua in public and in the recent Presidential election an anti-immigration party leader came very close to a place in the run-off. That too seems to be a little racist. It works in reverse too – there are areas of some inner cities still where the local immigrant community is openly hostile towards white people and not a good place to be after dark. In football, there have been two high profile cases of racial abuse in the Premier League last season – one has resulted in legal action being taken (the case is scheduled for the week after the tournament ends) and yet the accused is in the England squad.
A point that many of the critics are missing in their complaints that the Polish and Ukrainian governments are not being proactive enough in this problem is that the countries themselves, as democracies, are relatively new. England, France, Spain and so on have perhaps hundreds of years of “exposure” to non-white cultures, and with mass immigration over perhaps 70 years or so, plenty of time to assimilate those cultures into their own societies (not always with total success, it has to be said). Poland and Ukraine, both locked behind the Iron Curtain, have only freed themselves and become open, democratic societies in the last 20 years or so, and up until that time non-white faces were like snow in the Sahara. Of course it will take time for some parts of their societies to adapt and accept the non-white immigrants, in the same way as it took western society many years to do so – and arguably is still trying to do. To expect Poland and Ukraine to adapt in twenty years to something that the West has spent a couple of hundred years doing (the US is still struggling in some parts) is fatuous.
The other point being missed is that despite the great advances made in recent years, Poland and Ukraine are both relatively poor countries, with above average rates of unemployment and below average earnings, especially in rural areas. Horse drawn carts and ploughs are still used in many places (especially in Ukraine). The thing here is that tickets for matches are priced at a level that is likely to be beyond the reach of many of the, shall we say, lesser educated elements who normally go to watch matches and from whom typically these hooligan gangs draw their membership. The majority of tickets sold for the tournament have gone to the competing – and generally wealthier (with the exception of Greece) - nations and it is highly unlikely that their own hooligan elements that still exist will get close to the stadia, such is the security being put in place – that’s if they even bother to travel.
* * *
My own feeling, based solely on what I’ve seen in my travels in both countries, is that Panorama has this time overplayed its hand. I’m convinced that anyone who does travel to either country for this football festival will not only be safe but have a great time too, and be warmly welcomed by the locals. Just because they remain outside of “mainstream” Europe if you like, and are a little off the normal tourist trail does not make them bad people – quite the contrary, in my experience they are more friendly and generous than most English people I know. It’s a shame the Walcott and Oxlade-Chamberlain families have decided not travel, for they would have had just as good a time as everyone else.
Panorama – keep up the good work, but please be a little less sensationalist and scare-mongering in the future. It does your reputation for free and impartial journalism no good at all and tarnishes the good work you do.
Sol – shut up. You idiot.
For non UK readers, this a current affairs program on the BBC that specializes in using investigative journalism – much like our friendly neighbourhood tabloid press – to present stories that typically feature exposes of bribery and corruption in high places. Politicians are favourite targets. Over the years it has provided a valuable service in exposing all kinds of malpractice for the public good, but has equally suffered from plenty of criticism. It is sometimes accused of being less than accurate in the way it presents its case, and has also been accused more than once of lying or paying people to stage acts to illustrate a particular theme. I watch it sometimes on BBC World and always enjoy it.
Sometimes it moves away from the political arena and presents sports stories, and on football in particular, and invariably focuses on some of the less savoury aspects of the sport. Now this is not always a bad thing. However, sometimes the timing, to gain maximum publicity and exposure, can lead to consequences that are less than agreeable to football fans. The classic example was a couple of years ago, when England was among the bidders to stage the World Cup in 2018 or 2022.
Now the bid process for this, like that for both Olympics and the UEFA football Championships, is always fertile ground for this sort of program, as the amounts of money being spent by bidders to try and win the prize are invariably huge (although paling into insignificance against the costs of actually delivering a successful event, or indeed the potential profits generated by it), and wide open to all kinds of abuse. Fertile ground then, and a fair target for Panorama and any other similar program, and of course newspapers of all description.
One of the program‘s journalists made a very good report that basically presented “proof” that a number of high-ranking FIFA executives involved in this particular bidding process had been paying significant bribes in order to secure the tournament for their countries, and that the organization’s general secretary, the odious Swiss Sepp Blatter had been aware of it all along. All well and good: stuff like that needs to be out in the public domain: FIFA has had a reputation for years for corruption – the subject is a blog post in itself. However, the BBC chose to screen the program the night before voting was to take place – with predictable results. England, favourites to win the bid for 2018, with an infrastructure in place, and after a highly impressive campaign featuring among others David Beckham and Prince William, came nowhere – the voting members of FIFA, extremely pissed off at their dirty laundry being aired so publicly, voted elsewhere. The fact that most of the allegation were subsequently found to be true, and a number of the accused (including the head of the successful Qatar bid for 2022) suspended or kicked out of the organization was immaterial. Despite being proved right all along, Panorama and the BBC were vilified by the majority of the country’s football fans, accused of having a political agenda and labeled a national disgrace for losing England’s World Cup bid. The criticism was second only to that poured on FIFA itself.
Earlier the same year the program had further ruffled feathers with a report that looked at the political and security situation in South Africa, who was hosting that year’s World Cup. High levels of violent crime including rape and armed robbery were reported from across the country, but especially around Johannesburg. The infrastructure – roads, railways, hotels – was criticized as being unable to cope with the expected influx of fans from around the world. Of course, there were allegations of corruption, with city officials and FIFA creaming off huge sums of money from construction projects that were running behind schedule. Fans were solemnly warned not to travel because of the dangers. In the event, the tournament went off without a hitch, and apart from the mostly dire quality of the football was largely seen as a roaring success.
So that’s 1-1 then.
* * *
Now their latest effort is a cracker.
Next week sees the start of the latest Euro championship, jointly hosted by Poland and Ukraine – the first time Eastern European and ex-Soviet bloc nations have hosted an event of this stature. From the start, voices have been raised against their choice – the countries can’t cope with all the people coming to watch, the stadiums are shit, the roads are terrible……the list of complaints goes on and on. In actual fact, both countries over the past few years, since being awarded the tournament, have been working flat out to prepare, and mostly things look pretty good. To their credit, UEFA, the governing body, has insisted all along that the choice is the right one and stressed that it will have great long term benefit for both countries – this despite the occasional warning to both governments that preparations are running late.
The host cities have either updated existing, or built brand new, stadia that are as good as anything in the world – there are some wonderful looking venues. They are all ready and in use. Billions of euros have been spent improving road and rail networks, extending and re-furbishing airports or opening new ones. Those too are up and running – although admittedly some of the road improvements will not be completed in time. In most cities there are good hotels ready and waiting, and huge efforts have been put into adding additional accommodation as required – there are campsites in some areas, including Gdansk on Poland’s Baltic Coast that from personal experience I know is very nice at this time of year. In both countries beer and food is cheap and excellent, and there are plenty of activities to do and places to go between matches. Most importantly, I think, the average Pole or Ukrainian is excited about the tournament (even though both national teams are crap and unlikely to get out of their respective groups) and looking forward to welcoming fans from across the continent and enjoying the tournament with them. Everywhere you go there are shops and stalls selling souvenirs, special hats, footballs, replica kits of all the competing nations, fanzones set up to enjoy the game in the open air with a beer and a burger – there are special concerts and entertainment laid on in some places and of course wall-to-wall publicity and tv coverage. It’s all set fair then to be roaring success.
And then along comes Panorama. This week it aired a program that focused on apparent racism, anti-Semitism and neo-Nazi violence at matches in both countries. Let me be straight here: as I’m in Cairo right now I haven’t seen the program. What I have seen is extensive coverage on the BBC website, the Guardian Online and other sites and blogs, and frankly I’ve never seen such a poisonous amount of tosh in all my life. It doesn’t help that Sol Campbell, ex-Arsenal and England international and in his day a fine player, comes out and advises people not to travel to Poland and Ukraine “because you might come home in a coffin”. What a bunch of ill-informed sensationalist bullshit! Nor does it help when the families of Theo Walcott and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, also both of Arsenal and in the England squad, announce to the press that they are not going to see their kids play because they are frightened they will be the victims of racist violence and abuse. Note that all three players are black.
From what I have read, the program contained footage of football supporters giving Nazi salutes and chanting anti-Semitic abuse, making monkey noises at black players and in one case attacking a group of Indian fans at a match in Kharkiv, one of the Ukrainian venues. The thrust of it seems to be that we in England have eradicated this sort of behaviour, that Poland and Ukraine have failed badly in not taking sterner action to eradicate it themselves, and they should never have been awarded the games because they are both racist and anti-Semitic societies who don’t deserve it. That is certainly a point of view widely aired on the blogs, and could hardly be further from the truth. My assumption is that most of the clowns posting these comments are either from non-white ethnicity, have never been to either country to experience them themselves, are easily led – or a combination of all three.
The governments of both countries have predictably reacted angrily. Having lived in Warsaw for getting on for 12 years now, and recently visited Kiev, I can understand their anger, and that of the people in both countries. Now I’m not accusing the BBC or the program of lying or fabricating events to make good television – although it’s not impossible that is what happened. I can only speak for what I have seen – and never in all the years I’ve been here have I witnessed anything remotely like the footage that Panorama apparently aired – at least not since I went to Crystal Palace v Leeds back in the early 1970s. I have never come across any racism – overt or otherwise – in Warsaw. There are an increasing number of black and Asian people living in the country – there is even a black MP, an immigrant from the Caribbean (I wonder if the program sought his views at all?) – and I can’t remember any cases of violence or abuse against them. I have come across no anti-Semitism either, and after the suffering that both countries went through during the Second World War and since, under Communism, when the vast majority of both their Jewish populations was, in one way or another, wiped out I would not expect to.
* * *
That is not to say racism and anti-Semitism doesn’t exist there – it probably does, just as it does in Britain and France and Germany and pretty much every country in the world. Anyone who suggests otherwise is an idiot. But to suggest as Campbell does that if you go to Poland or Ukraine to a football match you might be killed because of your skin colour is not only wildly inaccurate but is deeply deeply offensive. The man really should shut up and not discuss things he has no clue about – I can only assume he’s running short of cash and needed a top up from his BBC fee.
The people currently yelling from the rooftops and posting on various blogs and websites that this year’s host nations are a disgrace to humanity, and so on, should take a look around them first. Last year many people, mainly black but from other enthnicities as well, including white, rioted and burned swathes of London and elsewhere in protest at alleged police victimization. Don’t see that in Warsaw and Kiev. France has recently passed laws that ban Moslem women from wearing the burqua in public and in the recent Presidential election an anti-immigration party leader came very close to a place in the run-off. That too seems to be a little racist. It works in reverse too – there are areas of some inner cities still where the local immigrant community is openly hostile towards white people and not a good place to be after dark. In football, there have been two high profile cases of racial abuse in the Premier League last season – one has resulted in legal action being taken (the case is scheduled for the week after the tournament ends) and yet the accused is in the England squad.
A point that many of the critics are missing in their complaints that the Polish and Ukrainian governments are not being proactive enough in this problem is that the countries themselves, as democracies, are relatively new. England, France, Spain and so on have perhaps hundreds of years of “exposure” to non-white cultures, and with mass immigration over perhaps 70 years or so, plenty of time to assimilate those cultures into their own societies (not always with total success, it has to be said). Poland and Ukraine, both locked behind the Iron Curtain, have only freed themselves and become open, democratic societies in the last 20 years or so, and up until that time non-white faces were like snow in the Sahara. Of course it will take time for some parts of their societies to adapt and accept the non-white immigrants, in the same way as it took western society many years to do so – and arguably is still trying to do. To expect Poland and Ukraine to adapt in twenty years to something that the West has spent a couple of hundred years doing (the US is still struggling in some parts) is fatuous.
The other point being missed is that despite the great advances made in recent years, Poland and Ukraine are both relatively poor countries, with above average rates of unemployment and below average earnings, especially in rural areas. Horse drawn carts and ploughs are still used in many places (especially in Ukraine). The thing here is that tickets for matches are priced at a level that is likely to be beyond the reach of many of the, shall we say, lesser educated elements who normally go to watch matches and from whom typically these hooligan gangs draw their membership. The majority of tickets sold for the tournament have gone to the competing – and generally wealthier (with the exception of Greece) - nations and it is highly unlikely that their own hooligan elements that still exist will get close to the stadia, such is the security being put in place – that’s if they even bother to travel.
* * *
My own feeling, based solely on what I’ve seen in my travels in both countries, is that Panorama has this time overplayed its hand. I’m convinced that anyone who does travel to either country for this football festival will not only be safe but have a great time too, and be warmly welcomed by the locals. Just because they remain outside of “mainstream” Europe if you like, and are a little off the normal tourist trail does not make them bad people – quite the contrary, in my experience they are more friendly and generous than most English people I know. It’s a shame the Walcott and Oxlade-Chamberlain families have decided not travel, for they would have had just as good a time as everyone else.
Panorama – keep up the good work, but please be a little less sensationalist and scare-mongering in the future. It does your reputation for free and impartial journalism no good at all and tarnishes the good work you do.
Sol – shut up. You idiot.
posted by Travellin' Bob @ June 01, 2012
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