[Judy Laybourn:] [music] Hello and welcome to Central Lobby. Later in the programme we ask are positive discrimination and chauvinism thriving in the Labour Party? But first there was time when reading a soccer report in a Sunday newspaper meant catching up on how many people were stabbed and how many pitches were invaded. The football authorities say we can now concentrate on what happens on the field rather than the terrace, because hooliganism is being forced out of the game. The introduction of all-seater stadiums along with the new football offences act which makes it illegal to run onto the pitch are believed to be responsible for the reduction in violence. But arrests relating to football have failed to show a consistent decline and actually increased by more than twenty percent in the ninety one ninety two season. And it's claimed the battle against the hooligans is still far from won. Yesterday Andrew Fox went to the hotly contested local derby between Wolves and Stoke. [music]
[Andrew Fox:] This was the image of football in the eighties... a game dogged by fans fighting on the terraces and running onto the pitch.... You might have thought this sort of behaviour was all over. It's not now.... Rotterdam this month brought it home the hooligans are continuing to plague the game. Soccer it's claimed is still a long way off finding a cure for violence.
[Peter Snape:] Anyone who er regularly attends soccer games knows full well that the game does attract a minority of er young men who for whom a punch-up on a Saturday afternoon is all part of the game. So I fear er that any decline is er theoretical rather than a real one.
[John Williams:] I still think we have... this problem, not as serious as it was... about established rivalries between particular groups of fans. what's interesting is that those rivalries are not focused as strongly as they used around the very big clubs, and we're talking less here about what's gonna happen at Manchester United and Chelsea and perhaps more about the difficulties of Wolves and and Stoke.
[Andrew Fox:] Wolves in fact have done more than most to provide evidence that the game is ridding itself of violence. The football authorities come to Molyneux to support their claims that grounds are now fit for families, not homes for hooligans. In just four seasons here the number of people arrested on charges connected with football have fallen from more than three hundred and fifty to just under one hundred.... It's been a long time since a league game was played at Molyneux against Stoke.
[Bob Jones:] Wolves themselves season have been quite well behaved. Er but there are a number of factors. Er for example it's erm it's a local derby. Er very strong rivalry between the two teams. And so er we're expecting perhaps it might be a little bit lively. On the day itself we had briefings er at the ground up here so everybody clearly understands what's expected of them.... And in addition to that of course we cover the safety aspects that are required up at Molyneux. Which is as important as preparing for disorder itself.
[Keith Pearson:] It would be nice to think that we don't have to consider this, we didn't have to have meetings with our local police to decide what we're going to do on the day of the match in case there is trouble. Er yeah by all means er we'd love that situation but er I'm afraid er that's not possible at the moment.
[Richard Faulkner:] Our main priority is to... stop trouble inside the ground. I think er the supporters like to be er looked after by the sort of their own people rather than er the the police force.
[Andrew Fox:] The club has more than two hundred stewards to control the crowds as well as search the ground before anyone gets through the turnstiles.... The police have decided to deploy more than one hundred officers on what called a tidal flow operation, slowly shifting their attention from outside to inside the stadium. But this elaborate operation it's claimed only goes to prove that hooliganism rather than disappearing is just lurking beneath the surface.
[speaker008:] Those of us who attend soccer matches as I do er regularly you've got to say that er it's not gone away, it's merely been contained. And containing it is extremely expensive and I personally feel that it's wrong to expect the community at large to go on paying week after week, month after month, year after year er in order to contain a problem which through no fault of its own belongs to the soccer. To imagine that there is er a great undercurrent of violence inside our football grounds is now quite wrong and I think the game isn't getting enough credit for the way in which it's tackled it. Or it may be there but the police and the stewards aren't allowing it to come out because they're keeping a lid on it so efficiently these days. No I think that's an unnecessarily pessimistic view. I think that crowd behaviour has improved, the clubs are catering much better for families. The climate of violence that used to be there inside football has diminished.
[Andrew Fox:] As the first fans takes their seats another operation is under way to ensure that some never get to see the game. The police have undercover intelligence officers with the job of spotting troublemakers in particular those who have been banned from Molyneux.
[speaker009:] We're always looking out for somebody who could cause er problems in Wolverhampton and problems generally. The er
[Andrew Fox:] How do you know what sort of person that is?
[speaker009:] Comes with experience.... Lot's of different factors go into it. Er sometimes what they're wearing you you find that er they tend to wear er a little bit of a uniform on occasions but they're not the normal people that we would be looking at. And not the ones with er I'm a hooligan tattooed on their heads.
[Andrew Fox:] With the fans now streaming through the turnstiles, many of them being stopped and searched before going any further, there's a final briefing for the man who could influence their mood, referee Paul Harrison.
[speaker010:] unclear we will only come on the pitch when you invite us... and we will deal with anything off the pitch.
[speaker008:] You give a decision instantaneously? An honest decision. And it's only after that decision that you are aware of any crowd reaction. Er not at the time that you did it. Always comes seconds later. Any more of that? [background crowd noise]
[Andrew Fox:] The atmosphere may as they say be electric but it's nothing compared with the nervous energy being generated in this box. From here police and stewards are directed to the slightest hint of trouble between the rival fans. [background crowd noise]
[Judy Laybourn:] let's er keep an eye on the bottom now.
[Andrew Fox:] Summat gone over the top now. give me the red give me the brown jerkin
[speaker008:] It's hard to see er er a situation in which the kind of young men that we routinely produce in this country er are not gonna be interested in some kind of group aggressive violent activities. It's hard to see er a change in their interest in this kind of thing. Football merely provides the opportunity because a match is taking place but if they we if the football matches weren't taking place those criminal acts would be committed in another context. Football has done it its best in order to cope with the problem inside the grounds. [crowd noise] You can see it's a tense game er we've said before it's a local derby and er there are one or two minor problems.
[Andrew Fox:] You've had arrests already?
[speaker008:] Yes we've had one or two arrests but they're disorder offences and minor disorder offences. We still have a small hard core of football supporters that are willing and able to create trouble if they're given the chance. But I think if we persist if the club and ourselves continue the way that we're going those numbers will become less and less.
[Andrew Fox:] As the game ends the police prepare to respond to any clash while supporters make their way home. Scuffles are reported but they're not given the chance to develop into any serious disturbance.... The Stoke coaches are escorted as far as the motorway. And within an hour of the final whistle the police operation is called off. Of course for the police the one one score line is not as important as these figures, eighteen arrests and thirteen ejections from the ground. That's out of a crowd of more than twenty thousand.
[speaker008:] I think it's it's fairly reasonable particularly when you consider what we've experienced over the last two three and four seasons.
[Andrew Fox:] What sort of offences were there?
[speaker008:] Erm people spitting er obscenities, obscene gestures, er we've had two assaults er but they have been relatively minor assaults as far as we're concerned. There is a violent undercurrent in our society which has got nothing at all to do with football and where football mustn't be complacent is to provide the opportunities at its matches to allow that undercurrent of violence to manifest itself. I think the game I think the game has done well in tackling that problem but I don't think we as a society have done very well in tackling it in the country at large. Football clubs, football supporters er and parliaments have got to talk between themselves to try and come up with a solution. At the moment all we're doing is keeping the lid on a still a pretty serious problem. [music]
[Judy Laybourn:] Well last night only three days after the shadow cabinet elections one of the women MPs who was thrown off John Smith's core team accused her male parliamentary colleagues of a cynical plot and a stitch-up.... Ann Clwyd who was not re-elected to her heritage post used her address to the Welsh Labour Women's Conference to attack macho M Ps. After the change in party rules forcing all Labour MPs to vote for four women in the shadow cabinet elections, has Labour's policy horribly backfired? I'm joined by Labour's Mel Reed M E P for Leicester and the Labour MP for Joe Ashton.... Mel Reed first of all what went wrong? Is positive discrimination the way forward?
[Peter Snape:] I think it still is the way forward and I don't think it was so much that things went wrong as that they didn't go as well as we had hoped for the women elections to the shadow cabinet. It may be that it's time to look again, even though this new rule has been enforced for only these elections, at this particular method of positive discrimination.
[Judy Laybourn:] Joe Ashton who did you vote for? And and is it is it a case of misogyny basically rife within the Labour Party?
[John Williams:] No no it isn't. There are some brilliant Labour women in parliament. I mean the speaker Betty Boothroyd is magnificent. Mel Reed is a superb M E P. It's nothing to do with with that sort of battle. It is the fact that if you change the goalposts you'd better make sure the ball still goes between 'em. And that's what the women did. And what they didn't understand was the basic experience of any trade union branch which says if you wanna get six or eight people elected you don't put fourteen up. The thirty seven strong women's could not agree among themselves on what's known as a. And if they had stuck six or eight pe eight women MPs up they'd have all been elected. But fourteen of 'em were saying, No, me me me, and it er spread the vote too thin.
[Judy Laybourn:] Joe Ashton are you saying that really there was no plot as such that there wasn't a sort of campaign that er some of the women MPs have claimed there was?
[John Williams:] There wasn't a plot. There was some disgruntlement because what happened they tr they changed the rules. Now the first time they tried to change them in May they lost the vote, the women, to increase it from three to four. Usually in the Labour party any other organization you're gonna have to wait a year but the women didn't. They went round the back door and got to John Smith and they got the chief whip and got the chairman of the party and had a rerun of the vote two weeks later. This time they won. And er the men then got resentful, they said this is not on. You know they they should they should abide by the rules and wait a year. And that's when the sort of backlash built up.
[Judy Laybourn:] Mel Reed do you think you could have predicted this sort of backlash? That perhaps things were moving too quickly?
[Peter Snape:] I don't think so and I I find it difficult to believe and disappointing to believe that as many man are would deliberately spoil their vote. This is a very serious matter the election to Labour's shadow cabinet and I do not want to believe that men would deliberately spoil their vote. But I think it's a little bit rich if I may say so Joe to blame the women for this because the parliamentary Labour party did vote for this new rule and the fact that a number of women very able women put themselves forward, I don't think it's right to say it is the women's fault. A large number of men put their names forward in a a perfectly proper way.
[Judy Laybourn:] What happened though did in in essentially basically dilute the vote and the spoiling tactics were allowed to happen. That surely was women's fault. Do you think the danger in positive discrimination is that er it's implying that women can't compete on equal terms with the men in the first place?
[Peter Snape:] No I don't think that is the problem. I think we have to face up to the fact in the Labour party that quotas, that positive discrimination are essentially clumsy. They can backfire they can lead to some injustices but what they are is a signal that other methods of getting a better representation of women in parliament, in local councils has really not worked. This is the real dilemma you see. I think either we as a Labour party are serious about having more women in the House of Commons and we do very badly compared with many of our European neighbours. We either say we are serious and look for ways to achieve that or we say we've failed. But we all we can do is reflect the position of women in society, and I do not think that what's we're about and I do not think it's what the parliamentary Labour party.
[John Williams:] No it wasn't a backlash against women. It was a backlash against quotas where you have got to vote for a certain number. We don't have a section for the disabled, but it hasn't stopped David Blunkett and Jack Ashley.
[Andrew Fox:] Joe just
[John Williams:] Doing tremendously well.
[Andrew Fox:] Just briefly how do you encourage more women into the Labour party, very briefly, when they constitute fifty two percent of the population?
[John Williams:] But they're not fifty two percent of the candidates. And what we've got in standing for a general election is about two and a half thousand men and about five hundred women. There is no way you're gonna get equality
[Andrew Fox:] Just
[John Williams:] with that volume.
[Andrew Fox:] Just very briefly Mel I suspect perhaps a lot of women would stand if conditions in parliament were more
[Peter Snape:] I'm sure that they would do. In the European Parliament for example we do have a nursery we have child-care facilities for seventy children which you don't have in the House of Commons.
[Andrew Fox:] Perhaps. I'm afraid there we must leave it but perhaps that is the way forward. Thank you both very much indeed for joining us.... Well here it is, part three of those memoirs. In today's serialization in the Sunday Times Lady Thatcher concentrates on the Falklands conflict. She criticizes the then Foreign Secretary Frances now Lord Pym for the part he played, he would have agreed to a negotiated settlement, she would have regarded that as nothing less than surrender. Lady Thatcher's been on the road promoting her book and a couple of nights ago she was in Birmingham at a dinner hosted by the Birmingham Post. There is of course nothing new in the battle by memoir.
[Bob Jones:] You have to go back a very long way indeed to a more decorous age when politicians didn't use the memoir as a weapon for reopening old wounds. There were nineteenth century memoirs and occasionally they were quite revealing but it's Lloyd George's memoirs of the Great War, the First World War that set in many ways the modern pattern... for old battles to be re-fought. And indeed as Lady Bracknell would say for ready money. That's not to say however that occasionally you don't get throwbacks to a gentler more courteous age. For example Alec Hume's memoirs were described them as this little book about fishing, a beautiful evocation of a countryman in Downing Street who would always rather have been with his fly on the river Tweed on the Scottish Borders. So it's not a progression all in one way... but I have to say that even by the standards of the Lloyd George era, the battle by memoir which we now see for considerable sums of money has become more than a cottage industry, it's a production line industry.
[Keith Pearson:] That industry probably started in nineteen seventy five with the diaries of Labour's Richard Crossman. After his death his executors decided to breach the convention of not disclosing private conversations with other ministers and officials.
[Bob Jones:] The ecology did change in mid seventy five. But I sometimes think it's earlier than that. It's now forgotten that when Hugh Dalton began to publish his memoirs with large chunks of his diary in in the late fifties and early sixties, particularly the the high tide volume that came out about the Labour government of forty five to fifty one which was very venomous. He was a deeply deeply unpleasant man Hugh Dalton.
[Keith Pearson:] What would you say have been the successes and the flops of more recent times?
[Bob Jones:] The ones that have done well in publishing terms quite rightly I think are those who have pl been plainly written by the person concerned, above all Dennis Healey and also Roy Jenkins.... Now I have to be careful what I say about Lady Thatcher's because of the laws of libel and also I don't know who's written which pieces but it's known she's had help you see. And when I see a wonderful phrase like William Waldegrave is like without the jokes I think now I wonder if she thought or said that? Is that quite her style of humour? Could it not be one of the two or three people who've helped her with the writings? Just touch that bit up. I may be entirely wrong but I'm going to be reading those when I'm allowed to put my hands on a copy finally. and I constantly wonder now is that Robin Harris speaking... or is that Mrs Thatcher? Is that John O'Sullivan with one of his ripe little one-liners or is that Mrs Thatcher? Or is this perhaps my old friend Bernard Ingham coming in one more time to help the lady of his adoration?
[Keith Pearson:] But if I can just quote a couple of cases. You would've thought wouldn't you that Cecil Parkinson's memoirs would've sold very well, in fact they were a complete flop.
[Bob Jones:] Again I don't want to be uncharitable but Cecil Parkinson I suspect in the public view is a man... somewhat but not entirely without trace. He just left a little trace of Brylcreem in any government seat he occupied. Now [LAUGHTER] by and large you don't want Brylcreem boys' memoirs do you? What people like is a brilliant bruiser like Dennis Healey, a character with a capital C. Parkinson is much too variety I think to appear more widely.
[Keith Pearson:] Why do you think they do it?
[Bob Jones:] Well the tom tiddlers of British political life I suppose write their memoirs for a couple of reasons because they can't ever admit to themselves they are tom tiddlers. Catharsis... there's nothing like reflecting in tranquillity to help heal those wounds, and most of them were pretty bruised by the nineteen eighties' experiences of the recent crop. And some of them think they're gonna make money. Even those that tend not to do very well attract some kind of an advance. And also... given the nature of the kind of people who want to wield authority over others they can't bear being out of the limelight, it gives them one last throw. Particularly if they get serialized in the Sunday newspaper. One last time the name is going to be talked about... in the circles that bother about these things and it's all to do with Mrs Thatcher who's prone to say about her enemies vanity, vanity, all is vanity.
[Andrew Fox:] Peter Hennessey talking to our reporter Philip Tibenham. With just two words, prison works, Home Secretary Michael Howard has upset some members of the judiciary. Next week we try to find out why. Till then goodbye. [music]