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Comment by bb123 | Hacker News Reader

This comment is just the silly kind of bile that gets spewed on Fox News to convince Americans that countries like the UK and Canada as Dystopian Hellscapes. If you had any cultural context around the history of violent football hooliganism in the UK you might understand why those measures were considered necessary and a re supported by a large part of the public. Also there have been very significant anti-brexit, anti-austerity and anti-trump protests in recent years so I'm really sure what you're talking about there. I can only only assume this is some sort of hand wave to the idea that people in the UK aren't able to protest or express themselves like they are in The Land of The Free (TM).

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Except there's a core of truth in what they say, though I might differ on the point about protests. Football hooliganism was well on the way to being solved by the early 90s. The international ban ended in 1990. It was the seventies and eighties that most would have been hesitant to take the kids along to a match, and the big clubs had scary reputations. Most of the measures since have not been necessary, and most of the fixing of the problem wasn't down to cameras.

Police tactics, ground changes, putting responsibility more on to the clubs, and a good degree of managing the groups of supporters. Companies would once finish early if there was a Wednesday match and their office was even vaguely on a route to the ground. By the nineties and noughties, normality was far more expected.

Far more has been for security theatre and red top media campaigns that the "government must DO something!!!!". So government does do something. Like rings of steel around London. Tanks at airports (huh?) and all the rest. Despite this a man in a van can still perform a terrorist outrage on a bridge, or take a bomb to a teen pop concert.

We're far more likely to hear some days after that some perpetrator was known to police or security services, than all the security theatre prevented some atrocity, or the perpetrator was arrested en route.

> Football hooliganism was well on the way to being solved by the early 90s

I'm not old enough to remember football hooliganism in the 80s and before, but abroad at least, it was very far from solved by the 90s - which is why passports are taken away.

> than all the security theatre prevented some atrocity

Without commenting on how effective any of this is, you won't hear about prevention because it isn't news.

It was probably an order or two of magnitude worse in the seventies and eighties, and somewhat tied in with deprivation and NF racism of those decades. Dutch and British supporters were notorious for it. My father and uncles wouldn't take me to matches as a young 'un. Had they been interested and old enough, I'd have pretty comfortable taking my kids in the nineties.

By the nineties there was just a dwindling hard core minority of hooligans, that were starting to become removed from the clubs. Same for the international element, it had become some thugs being thugs, and mostly separated from grounds, matches and the general support. They tagged along with the footie event, for a good punch up in a city bar or city square. From a point of view of "everyone well behaved" it remained a problem. From a point of view of hundreds or thousands of opposing supporters kicking off, it was mostly solved.

Prevention isn't news, but arresting someone preparing a bomb, or caught on a bus with a machete on their way to wherever is. Yet for all the additional surveillance...

I think the problem is that we have no real way of knowing how many threats have been successfully countered by the security services, and no one knows how many potential bad actors have been dissuaded by them either. So it's easy to call them out as security theatre. People on this thread are talking about the rings of steel like there’s some sort of TSA checkpoint on every road into Greater London. Unfortunately the reality is a lot less exciting. It only surrounds the square mile (a much, much smaller and higher risk area) and is pretty uninteresting. It consists of some ram-raid bollards and police booths that have fallen into a pretty bad state of disrepair. I struggle to see the downside of ram-raid barriers in a pedestrianised area - you’ll note none of the van attacks occurred in the City.

it's the presentation as much as anything else that makes it theatre. Protecting pedestrianised streets from unauthorised traffic with pop up bollards happens in towns and cities everywhere. Presenting it as a terrorism ring of steel does not.

> If you had any cultural context around the history of violent football hooliganism in the UK you might understand why those measures were considered necessary