Black, White and Blue

Well it’s over. After dominating life and lunch for six weeks the World Cup finally ended with the French defeating a lacklustre Brazilian team 3-0 and initiating the biggest street party Paris has ever seen. I guess that should be that, but seeing as the football was followed by the cultural void that is golf, I’ve been forced to switch off the moronoscope and do some thinking about race, politics and the ‘beautiful game’.

The French team that won was everything Jean-Marie Le Pen and his racist National Front must hate. A real nightmare city for a man who said he didn’t think blacks were ‘real Frenchmen’ and shouldn’t be in the team. Why? Because without the non-white players like Thuram, Desailly, Viera, Henry and the Hero of France, Zidane, France would have gone belly up around the same time as Scotland - in the first week. The French got the message, Le Pen has been forced to eat his words and there’s just a chance that your average French xenophobe will see a young Algerian or African kid kicking a ball about in the street and not think ‘bloody foreigners’, but ‘I wonder if that’s the next Zidane or Thuram’.

Call to the bar

What lessons did we learn from the sport feast? Pubs learnt that hanging up a couple of flags, tuning the TV into permanent football and letting the lager flow made for packed pubs and bumper profits. The Scots and the Jamaicans had fun, even if they didn’t get past round one, and did it without rioting fighting or acting like it was an invasion rather than a game. Us English had to be different, didn’t we?

The hard men decided to trash Marsailles as part of their bid to make damned sure that football won’t be coming home to England in eight years time, but taking a holiday somewhere warm where the fans are peaceful. Once the team had started playing well, a stupid mistake by Spice Boy Beckham encouraged that streak of wonderfully English forgiveness that includes hanging effigies of the man outside his parents’ house and planning a campaign of vilification. What the morons can’t get their tiny brains round is the fact that Spice Boy made a mistake that he probably won’t make again and Argentina beat England because they were better at the joke, end of the pier show penalty shoot-out.

Unnoticed in the wave of football madness, something else was going on whilst the football was dominating the airwaves. This something else was as significant as the sudden sense of multi-cultural nationhood that swept France, but has no equivalent silver lining. What I’m talking about is the Stephen Lawrence enquiry.

Human race

In case you’ve forgotten, Stephen Lawrence was an 18-year-old who made the mistake of standing at a bus stop in Well Hall Road, Eltham on the evening of 22 April 1993. The mistake was less standing at the bus stop than being black. Because he was black, five or six white, racist thugs decided to kill him for no other reason than the colour of his skin. There should have been arrests and the thugs should be rotting in prison having been convicted of murder. Instead, despite the masses of evidence that the police received within the first two days, the five suspects are still swaggering about like the scum they are and someone, maybe them, maybe not, has got away with murder, because the police were inept, incompetent and quite possibly corrupt.

Stephen’s father, Neville Lawrence, has bravely fought police disinterest in an attempt to find out the truth about his son’s death and although the public enquiry didn’t give answers to that question, it has answered a number of others. We now know that if you are black and assaulted you’ve got a good chance of being treated as a criminal, that the police are incompetent, that a culture of racism pervades the entire Metropolitan Police Force and that five white racists have been allowed to get away with murder. A rather different black, white and blue from that which the French are celebrating.