England’s horror at racism in Bulgarian football is pure hypocrisy – we’re more than guilty of the same sins

The overpowering tone of massive superiority over this game stems from willful blindness. By hinting that this is no longer a British problem, it diminishes the experiences of all people of colour

In Sofia, on another ugly night for the beautiful game, it fell to Gareth Southgate to cleanse the smug hypocrisy with the sunlight of undiluted truth. His counterpart, the Bulgarian coach, had turned a studiously deaf ear to the monkey chants. English supporters in the stadium did hear, and responded with more piety than historical or ironic awareness by singing an anti-racist chant.

The ensuing riot of virtual signalling complacency – from the media; from serious political thinkers like sports minister Nigel Adams (“Racism should never be tolerated,” was the searingly original offering from this Boris Johnson hireling; from the watermelon smiles statesman himself – came from an alternate reality.

It emanated from a utopian parallel Britain in which racism only exists either in that vast tract of uncivilised wasteland known as abroad, or domestically in that other country that is our past. And then, praise be, disdaining the glib synthetic outrage to speak the simple truth, there was Southgate. “Sadly, because of their own experiences in our country,” he said of the three splendid black players whose dignity on the pitch had pre-empted his own, “they are hardened to racism. I don’t know what that says about our society, but that’s the reality.”

What it says, as he was either too courteous to reveal he knows, or regarded as too demeaningly obvious to state, is that our society is not quite as luminously qualified to lecture others on the topic as all the collective outrage might have implied.

Reporters from endemically racist papers were as scandalised as everyone else. The day they call out their employers for lionising a prime minister who used racist nomenclature and memes in print, dog whistled about garments worn by Muslim women, and consorted with Steve Bannon, is the day their thoughts will be welcome.

ITV commentator Clive Tyldesley has been praised for his passionate denunciations of the abuse which twice caused the game to be suspended. The same Clive Tyldesley didn’t speak out publicly after his colleague Ron Atkinson described Marcel Dessaily as “what is known in some schools as a f****** lazy thick n*****”.

But writing in The Telegraph soon afterwards, he said: “You only have to look at the composition of Ron’s football teams to know he is not a practising racist.” That’s a mightily powerful argument. In Alabama of 1847, no doubt it was said of a plantation owner that you only have to look at the composition of his cotton-picking teams to know he is not a practising racist. “In a world where sticks and stones and worse are breaking the bones of black people,” Tyldesley’s analysis continued, “the careless utterances of a football pundit are not going to hurt anyone’s life but his own.”

Wise words indeed. Checking my privilege, I notice that I am not of Pakistani origin. But if I were, I’m sure that having “P***” screamed at me would have no detrimental effect on my life so long as they charitably eschewed sticks, stones or worse. Some 15 years after Big Ron’s open mic soliloquy, Tyldesley took a markedly different view about careless utterances by foreign savages on foreign soil.

Heaven loveth the sinner that repenteth… but hath all our racist sinners repenteth that much? Despite the chant of “You racist bastards, you know who you are” from travelling fans, some of whom we must assume were once banana-throwers, you have to share the nagging doubts of Southgate and Raheem Sterling. The last time I watched Spurs at Chelsea, the hissing designed to invoke Zyklon B escaping into the gas chambers began at kick-off. We are assured by administrators and others that sensibilities of this kind are deeply buried in the distant past.

It would be an intriguing social experiment to remove all the CCTV and TV cameras, mass stewarding and police from Stamford Bridge for one game, and offer the home crowd carte blanche to express itself. It might very well be that the 90 minutes would pass without a hiss, monkey noise or chant like the one I once heard there (“We all agree … our coons are better than your coons!”).

Equally, it might be that the attempted mass deportation to Jamaica of people who have lived most or all of their lives here on a documental technicality is heartwarmingly conclusive evidence of a post-racist society. Then again, it might be that “You racist bastards, you know what you are” is a chant more suitably directed at the British government, and those who would re-elect it despite the Windrush abomination, than neanderthal Bulgars who are less our concern.

The overpowering tone of massive superiority stems from willful blindness. By hinting that this is no longer a British problem, it diminishes or ignores the experience of almost every member of every dark-skinned minority. It is the enabler of racism itself. Gareth Southgate put it more succinctly. “It’s very easy to paint ourselves as above all that east European ‘backwardness’,” he said, and left it there. It is, and we aren’t. If the reaction to events in Sofia is almost as nauseating as the abuse itself, that could be the kind of altitude sickness by proxy you suffer on their behalf when those lethally ill-equipped for the climb storm the moral high ground.