The Great British Yob is going out of fashion

The Euro 2020 championships were a boon for social media: for spite, wit, or a mix of both. One popular meme – or crafted image – doing the rounds purported to contrast the cultures of the two countries in the finals. Michaelangelo’s David graced the “Italian Culture” window, whereas “English Culture” was represented by a contemporary snapshot of a naked Englishman, no better endowed than David, brandishing a Union Jack above the crowd of ticketless fans massing outside Wembley Stadium. 

This is how others see us. The Great British Yob (GBY) is as much an iconic cliché, and national export, as the French Seducer or the Stolid German. As long ago as 1980, I remember a DJ in Washington DC, in recovery from a recent encounter, telling his listeners, “if you want to meet a pathetic bunch of British yobs, go and see the Troggs”. 

The term “football yobs” is commonplace, but it seems that the two worlds of professional sport and bacchanalia are rapidly spinning away from each other following last week’s upsets. With thirty officers nursing their injuries, the Metropolitan Police led the chorus insisting, “these are not football fans, they are thugs”. More significantly, the disciplined young England Team that Gareth Southgate built up could not contrast more with the rabble who claim to support them. Now the party is over lean times beckon for the Great British Yob. 

The man pictured firing a red smoke flare from his bared bum in Leicester Square has reached “legend” status, featured in several newspapers. Such transgressive behaviour is a British, rather than exclusively English, phenomenon, as anyone can attest who has seen the video of a hefty half-naked Scotsman body surfing on the floor before his team’s fixture – traumatising confirmation of what they don’t wear under their kilts.

“Oh, I see throwing beer has become a thing,” Gary Lineker observed weakly as the BBC played back audience reaction to the first goal from around the country. As we tut-tut, we almost relish this vulgar aspect of the British character. Private Eye features a regular cartoon strip dedicated simply to Yobs or Yobettes, depending on whether the blokes or “their birds” are depicted.

Foreigners are not so indulgent. They find GBYs less amusing than we do. Leicester Square was a home fixture; their city centres have already been trashed by visiting bands of British fans. Many European countries – especially in the Northern rim and the old Warsaw pact East have football thugs of their own. They are not celebrated by civil society, except in Putin’s Russia.  

It wasn’t just stoking culture wars that led Boris Johnson and Priti Patel to stick up for those booing the England team for taking the knee. Nor does he need to ask the white overweight, shaven-headed and maskless males whether they approve of his plans to loosen Covid-19 regulations. A few years ago, the same spirit led him to tell mums to post pies through school railings to subvert their children’s healthy eating regimes. 

The Prime Minister’s old newspaper columns are a window into his mind, partly because they were dashed off without much premeditation. In them, he dismisses Tony Blair’s measures against anti-social behaviour with a jeer, or maybe a cheer: “The reality is the whole of the new anti-yobbo programme, parenting classes and all, will be about as much use to thug-plagued estates as Blair’s doomed plan to march them to cashpoints for on-the-spot fines – i.e. no use whatever.” 

Elsewhere, Johnson boasted about a night spent in police cells after “high jinks” with the Bullingdon Club: “I remember something to do with a bicycle and dark deeds involving plastic cones. And letterboxes — though I wish to stress that nothing approaching criminal damage took place. It was all deeply pathetic.” Just as well, David Cameron had gone to bed. 

Johnson’s lurid tales of a chase by police dogs and arrest are disputed. 

He was last “seen legging it across a bridge”, according to another club member. But his version exposes the fraternal affinity between upper-class twits and what he calls “yobboes…quite large numbers of ill-educated and ill-disciplined young people… lost in the bottom 20% of the heap simultaneously over-taxed and over-dependent on welfare, and who do not always have a sense of social responsibility, to put it mildly.” 

Judging by those who have been named and shamed, it is not proven that GBYs are all drawn from the poorer sections of society, but they indeed share a taste for destruction. Bumflare Man boasted to the Sun about spending £250 to bribe his way into Wembley on top of a cider and cocaine binge. 

Hooray Henrys will be pleased to know that their vandalism has a long pedigree. Describing Oxford undergraduate life in his 1928 novel Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh famously shudders at “the sound of English county families baying for broken glass.”

Both branches of the Great British Yob movement like a good costume. Having long outgrown his silk-fronted tails, Prime Minister Johnson is seldom out of the dressing-up box, donning a high-vis jacket or lab coat, preferably with a silly hat, in his frequent photo opportunities. Pulling on the England strip would have been irresistible to such a man in spite of his hitherto well-documented indifference to the round-ball game. Hamming it up is working well for the Prime Minister; he still seems popular, granted licence because “Boris is Boris”, and he amuses people.

As with other GBYs, the implicit message is a v-sign to authority figures, confident that the consequences won’t be serious. Those predicting a wild Prince Hal to stern Henry V transformation in this Prime Minister have been disappointed. Dominic Cummings and Matt Hancock were not condemned like Bardolph. Their chief defended their behaviour even as they made their own rope and hanged themselves. 

After clashes between French police and English fans in Marseille in 1998, the former Conservative Defence Minister Alan Clarke refused to condemn their “martial spirit”. He said: “Football matches are now a substitute for the old medieval tournaments. They are in their nature aggressive and confrontational, so it is perfectly natural some of the fans should be obstreperous.”

Agincourt, Crecy and “Two World Wars” are invoked in the GBY mythology- why else dress up in tunics and chain mail? But they seem to have little resonance with the diverse team of England players on the pitch, playing a European style of football alongside mostly foreign teammates. 

The present England squad reflect the normal backgrounds from which they come. They are not yobs. For all their riches, they are more like the hard-bitten heroes of 1966, born of the Second World War and the £20 a week maximum wage. 

Paul Gascoigne, Wayne Rooney, and David Beckham were transitional figures from a petulant loadsamoney generation. Excess has been reigned in now thanks to tighter management at club and national level. Controlled diets and fitness are enforced, and social responsibility to the community is often written into contracts. 

Covid helped Southgate keep WAGs away from the training bubble, but there seems to be less appetite for nightclubs and showy girlfriends.

England was more fouled against than fouling in the final games; the cup winners, older Italian men, were the ones who looked feral. At the post-defeat news conference, a journalist from The Times asked Southgate if the team was “too nice”. The manager replied that you didn’t get to a final by being nice. 

Ambitious, woke, multi-cultural, socially responsible, disciplined and painfully willing to take responsibility, the England team members were the antithesis of the Great British Yob. 

The Great British Yob will always be part of the national culture, but he is going out of fashion for now. The squad are more representative of the rising generations. That should worry yobs in borrowed England shirts, whatever their social station.