I remember the glorious promotion season of 1992/93. It was Kevin Keegan’s first full season, and our team of young Geordies and experienced professionals started the season in the second level, that consoled us by still being called the “First Division”.
Newcastle United
Our match at St. James on the launch of the premiership still had the highest attendance in England. We beat Southend Utd and witnessed a sublime goal by Paul Bracewell and then won all of our first 11 matches, the last one being away at Roker Park where I cavorted with joy when Liam O’Brien’s free kick from outside the box hit the back of the net to see us win at Sunderland for the first time in 35 years. There’s an autographed picture of that goal in the Gallowgate Lounge of the Tyneside Irish Centre and he even visited “The Club” for the odd lock-in back in the day. I remember his tales of playing in internationals against “The White Gulit”, Carlos Valderama and worse than that, Vinny Jones. It heralded a wonderful time that saw the formerly prostrate Newcastle United escape relegation to the disgrace of the Third Division in May 1992 then get promoted that season as Champions of the First Division and then finish third in The Premiership the season after. Those that were there remember a city and its people draped in black and white, the constant chanting of the “Andy Cole Song”, the victory’s with Robert Lee, David Kelly, Killer Kilcline, the Geordie kids coming through like Lee Clark, Steve Watson and Robbie Elliott, the absolute defeat of terrace racism helped by Cole and legendary Sir Les Ferdinand and the community joy of Joseph Kevin Keegan who’s grandad was a hero in the Stanley Pit Disaster of 1909 and a man who “got us” and led us with courage, standards and passion.
Anyway, we were just about to beat the record for most consecutive wins to start the season by riding our invincible bandwagon over the top of the unfashionable even then, Grimsby Town and guess what? They howked us is what. Played us off the park and won deservedly. One of our old goalkeepers the huge ex-Wimbledon cup winning keeper, Dave Beasant a man who, when he played for us, resembled nothing more than a man wearing trousers on his arms and flapping, as we conceded four goals away at Goodison in our first match and cost me 26 Australian dollars for the radio-phone from the Whitsunday Islands to find out the (disbelieved until seen in print) score, organised their defence well and hardly had a shot to save. Their goal was a shot boomed in by Jim Dobbin and, even though he was a fine player and a good feller probably, our collective curiosity ceased like an unpersonning totalitarian expunging with that agricultural name. Us the mighty magpie metropolitans with our city-centre based, multinational club had just been battered (sorry) by Grimsby. Even Newcastle United, especially Newcastle United, and all of the mighty works of humanity were and are vulnerable to almighty hubris, where our excessive pride will always be humbled by Dobbins.
Unity of Newcastle communities
Maybe the few happy people in the world are classical professors made redundant from closed arts departments at universities who can sit at bus stops and laugh at the ignorance that deems their knowledge obsolete. They know all about Hubris and Dobbins, them and barbed wire salespeople or anyone who’s business profits from CCTV, insecurity, fear or food delivery. This long wet summer of discontent isn’t over by a long shot and those that celebrate the unity of Newcastle communities, as heralded by the magnificent display outside The Beacon Centre last Wednesday and the counter-demo on Newgate Street are perhaps guilty of being tempted by the glorious aftermath of an easy home win. I’m not for one second criticising anyone who attended either of those events but remarking that on Saturday anyway, the peaceful carnival atmosphere in the c 2000 people at the demo was really guaranteed by a phalanx of Welsh police officers who had about as much idea about the general geography of urban Tyneside as the group of Ebbsfleet fans I found who were seeking a Metro to the Gateshead match outside The Gate. The action-squad of Northumbria police’s tough guys was, we heard, parked up in vans at the Gateshead Angel, or tooled up ready above Stanhope Street or walking in smiling pairs around Greys Monument and St. James where 33,000 fans assembled in a blissful family carnival atmosphere to see NUFC beat Brest 1-0.
My observance of the demo, where I tried to see my wonderful sister Bridget’s speech, was enlivened by a farcical outbreak of tannoy-wars when someone from the SWP stall broke free with a megaphone to criticise the Labour Party whilst an unidentified main speaker tried to continue on the main PA System. I didn’t hang around long as I was needed at the NUFC Fans Foodbank stall but Newcastle was remarkably beautiful that day so it rewarded a happy strolling romantic. Pre-season friendly matches in the sunshine let the kids of all ages wear their kits and the atmosphere at the foodbank collection was as ever, generous and humbling as we collected in excess of £1,500 from the people. We hope it’s our last season of having to do this, but hubris has kicked me up the backside plenty of times before and there are threats out there that require our attention.
The lesson for the rioters?
First, we need to remember that the lesson fascists learn from being confronted on the streets then locked up for riot and sedition is not to go home and behave but to organise themselves better. Hitler was locked up for treason in 1923 and was still Chancellor in 1933. He learned to present his message with a better PA System (damn the roadie), by repeating lies about victimisation and injustice, and took power via lying to the establishment and letting proportional representation elevate him to national attention. If we’re going to lock people up who have had nothing but hatred in them and have so little to lose that they will perform online and on camera thus making any legal defence futile, then we should try to educate them inside and show them a better way so they can make a better life when they emerge. Making criminals better criminals and more convinced martyrs when they’re out in time for summer 2026 isn’t a plan for peace. Meanwhile, there are tougher cold-eyed leaders who will learn to inflict pain on society’s weak points.
Secondly, we need to emphasise the horror, cowardice and waste of these fearful crimes. Trying to burn people alive in a howling mob at a hotel, or throwing bricks through families’ windows, the arson of a Citizens Advice Centre, library and police station shows nothing heroic or worthy of anything but a full public inquiry. The perpetrators of the above will claim and are claiming that they were expressing free speech and say they’ve been persecuted for “disagreeing with the government”. If that was the case, we’d all be in prison by now so it’s obviously lies told by cowards who try to hide their responsibility.
We should be careful with riots; Tyneside didn’t riot in 2011 because of community cohesion and because what everyone’s mam would have done to them for breaking Fenwick’s windows; it didn’t riot in 2024 I think because it recognised the horrific consequences of damaging our own home, but it did riot in 1991 due to a difference of opinion about ram-raiding vs joy-riding in the Meadowell and copycat rage in Elswick. There was no discussion of immigration or multi-cultural boat stopping then, but Henaghan’s old pub got burned down, telegraph poles were sawed down and (allegedly) a police helicopter was shot at it. As ever those who know don’t usually get quoted in The Guardian.
Truth and trolling
However, when we try to work out what just happened in deprived working class communities who feel isolated, downtrodden and ignored is unlikely to just be the saloon bar commentary of Stephen Yaxley Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) and Andrew Tate. That has some of the hallmarks of asymmetric warfare beloved by some people in Moscow and Langley, Virginia. Whilst I’m sure that the CIA has infiltrated institutions, parties and culture all over Europe and that would explain many things about “The Arts”, the last 15 years of confident right wing social media trolling has the hallmarks of Putin’s smirking cynics getting back at us through internal division. It is only unmentionable in mass media because it sounds so paranoid and, more importantly it reveals how weak and helpless we really are to nasty words on your phone.
The international situation
Then there’s the international situation. Five out of five of the permanent members of the UN Security Council are fighting or threatening wars. US and UK in Yemen vs the Houthis, US in the Middle East, UK delivering material to Israel, Russia in Ukraine, China vs Taiwan and France with Mali and Niger. The continuing raid into Kursk by Ukraine will either end in encirclement or carnage, the Houthis are difficult to frighten with bombs, although their people can starve, and the desperate of Saharan Africa will shame the world by its continual inability to do anything other than complain about the poor souls who manage to escape to become Deliveroo riders dodging anti-immigrant riots in England. If they have faced down warlords in Sudan, or dodged death-squads in Syria, they’ll probably survive Hartlepool. But that’s not the question; it’s will Hartlepool, (or anywhere where a race riot could happen), survive the fatal combination of neglect, ignorance, lies, malice and opportunism precipitating the emigration of its clever young people with options? It’s why access to culture is vital.
Unifying culture
Maybe we need more unifying culture? Instead of the various identity fests like Pride, Mela, or Ouseburn why not a return of the Tyneside Summer Exhibition? We could have everyone together smiling and enjoying the familiar and also a chance to explore the unfamiliar in peace with the world’s cultural heritage on the Town Moor. As an example of where this goes wrong, I remember getting a metro to Sunderland after a Newcastle home match, covering my colours after Brockley Whins and sorting my Dad’s Folk Band’s PA System at Sunderland University. There were five in the audience for this Sunderland Folk Festival at St. Peter’s Campus. I was given to understand that the audience figure wasn’t unrepresentative and was no reflection of the talent on display. I asked them why they didn’t play to the people at any of the many Working Men’s Clubs and let Benny sing the songs of the pits and pitmen that the communities were built on? That maybe we’d get a bigger audience and a give a bit of recognition to the culture of the people, and possibly build something. No one listens to roadies and they didn’t listen to me, and it’s not my town, but if you play the songs of the people at karaoke or on the guitar at the pub on the corner, or the stadium, you can have the threads that keep a society from breaking. I have no academic value in the following statement but the destruction of Sunderland in the very places that have benefitted from cultural development may have something to do with the disaffected from the angry estates nearby don’t feel welcome in The Fire Station and the rest of it and perceive that their local club got nothing whilst the arty bourgeois got a piazza to stop them from travelling to Grey Street in Newcastle. I know, it’s absurd isn’t it, but it might reflect opinion.
The first illusion is that power listens to the people. They don’t, they listen to or strike down the mob, they take calls from their donors, or the advertisers or the lawyers or even sometimes the PR people, but that nice, polite, clever, experienced woman who knows the situation? She can stay waiting in reception and be diverted to the Under-Secretary of State, or the Assistant Deputy Director-General or the senior(ish) general assistant who will assure her that what she has to say is very, very important. “Well, I have another meeting in five minutes, thank you so much, do pop by again… Next”. So if you want attention, or destruction, cause mayhem with minions online. Nobody reads newspapers except my dad, and even they print what you saw on Twitter two days ago, so we’ve opened up our national, regional and local media to Putin and his hirelings and US libertarians and their weird agenda. I’ll not repeat what that is, but none of it includes fair wages for work, decent state and community provision and proper trade union negotiating powers.
That’s the eternal question isn’t it? Being tough on crime is easy if you have enough police and prison places, and we don’t. Being tough on the causes of crime is easy if you have Surestart, kids fed at school, bobbies on the beat and decent jobs to graduate to, and we don’t. We all want money spent which has already gone to PPE billionaires, or needs to go to blood poisoned or the post office victims and the wage deals overhanging like holes in the roof. We might call ourselves the sixth richest country but most of that wealth is in private banks, private equity or offshore and it won’t be investing in Hartlepool anytime soon. So getting resources to enable positive change is vital; it’s like General Bradley said, “amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.” The logistics of a better worldwide economic and social future revolve around trade. Low wages in half-jobs, people will starve in the precariat economy of benefits and underemployment.
40% of the clients of the Newcastle Foodbank are working somewhere at some time and still can’t feed their kids. Major UK corporates employ people who claim “in-work benefits” to allow them to survive, which is a direct governmental subsidy to those corporates, their private shareholders and their pension funds. Any increase in inflation or interest rates will exacerbate a terrible situation where society will break as the numbers of police are, as we saw recently, insufficient to enforce order in city centres. An increase in oil prices caused by say war increases first the cost of transport and then, the cost of manufacturing fertiliser, which then means food is more expensive to produce and to transport thus we get famine, emigration as land dies, immigration, poverty and fascist threats to our society. Then there will be no inward investment, no discretionary spending, no trade and no hope. Cities will shrink and the future will die; that’s what they say online…emigrate to Hungary if you don’t like it here…except for Brexit…
24 – hour media
The last century of mass media from The Zinoviev Letter to the Russia Report shows us that our 24-hour media doesn’t help with the truth; it merely shows that as Mark Twain said that “if you don’t read the newspaper then you’re uninformed, but if you do read it then you’re misinformed.” We’re now multiply misinformed because we have multiple sources of media and all of them misinform to a certain extent. Our own history shows it; we still don’t have access to significant documents from 1941, when Hess landed or from 1987 when a Berlin Police Detective was prevented from starting his murder investigation following a witness swearing a statement as he didn’t have jurisdiction over his still technically occupied city.
But, even for a cynical heart like mine, one thing I heard from a fund manager recently froze my blood. Apparently the India Middle East Europe Corridor (IMEC) was due to open in November 2023. It was going to compete with the Chinese Belt and Road system and the International North-South Transport Corridor from St. Petersburg to Mumbai. IMEC was going to take the Mumbai to The Med route via Saudi Arabia and Israel. The plan was that maybe Saudi and the Sunni Arab states would recognise Israel and there would be some kind of economic opportunities for poor Palestine. Anyway it didn’t happen because a few weeks before it was supposed to, Hamas invaded Israel and the horror of that, and the Israeli reaction continues to destroy innocent people and humanities hopes. Did they do that because they were encouraged by an economic decision made by Iran, China and Russia that it would benefit their trade, and all the poor souls dead since 7 October are collateral damage for exports? Maybe, as you need to be an academic or a spy to be able to track that rabbithole. I have no way of authenticating these opinions of mine, but there are clues around that suggest that a parallel war is going on underneath the mass media.
The Germans recently issued an arrest warrant for a man described as a “Ukrainian driving instructor”, who apparently donned a diving suit and then blew up the Nordstream pipeline. I hope they make more progress than in the ’87 Hess case, and I wonder who gets the blame for the destruction of the Gaza Mulberry Harbour apart from the weather but if there was malign intent behind Brexit facebook adverts, if there was Russian, or other countries, (and I can think of four), penetration of political parties in the UK, then we should not be complacent about thinking they’ve stopped operations because they feel sorry for us. If it serves the interest of a foreign power to have riots swamping our cities, people frightened, communities terrified and those with youth, money or talent planning to leave then they will be in Sunderland, Hartlepool or down your street looking for the next opportunity. They won’t be in South Kensington, they’ll be living near the kebab shops or next door to the bookies.
Blame everyone but ourselves?
Those potential operatives will predate on defeat and encourage us to blame everyone but ourselves. Combating this will require a remorseless honesty about what we can do better to make a fairer society for all and a willingness to remember that friendship and humour are weapons that can defeat the foul stench of fascist hatred. The very “British virtues” of compassion, strength, resourcefulness, humour and kindness that I was taught were so important at junior school will be essential. We need to walk our streets and communities to explore Byker, Benwell, Scotswood, Walker, Newbiggin Hall, Elswick, West Denton, North Kenton and Wallsend. We need to go into the cafes and shops selling the foods of different countries and talk as if we were in Mrs McGhee’s or Manors on Chilly Road, we still need to check the allotments, the churches, the bingo halls and the social clubs and tell people where we’ve been and what a good time we had.
We need to be consulted about the area, the buses, the traffic and the plans. Immigration, integration and aspiration all comes easy to the rich, young and talented; it is a dangerous, frightening and long process for those trying to do it with nothing and can frighten (or make people feel uncomfortable), the people who still read the real paper Chronicle, because the news frightens the ones who have experience. They know that no matter how good it all looks, we can lose at home to Grimsby. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again. We were very close to losing all the progress that we ever made in 30 years the other week. A few lads with a few bricks and a couple of bottles of petrol could have lit the neighbourhood touchpaper and destroyed everything. Some of them probably thought about it, but swift police action and extremely credible threats from Starmer convinced them this time. That disaffection is real and isn’t going to go away by showing videos of stupid vulnerable criminals committing crime with wheely-bins as a liberal version of “Benefit Street” and “Cops with Cameras” because the ones pulling the strings will soon be showing your crime, whether it’s dope smoking or cycling on the pavement.
One of our virtues has to be forgiveness and it might help understand the next riot threat caused by the next outrage real or conflated will only be stopped if there is enough collective goodwill, community response and legal power to stop it. That goodwill comes from real knowledge of all our communities, and a sense of proper unity. Unity that is strong enough to face collective disappointment without faltering or arguing. We’re in danger right here, right now and we need to stay vigilant and walk softly seeking out that which makes us happy and content. We lost at home to Grimsby, but we still won the Championship that year. We can have peace and justice combined with law and order. That is worth striving for.
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