Britain in the 1980s was the scene of class war. Fortified by a neoliberal intellectual current that viewed trade unions and the public sector as fetters on economic growth, the Thatcher government used the arms of the state to defeat the trade unions and roll back the social democratic settlement.
The organised working class were feared and despised by the establishment of the day. The miners were described as “a bunch of hoodlums” and “the enemy within”. Meanwhile football, still at that time a sport for working class people, was the subject of a moral panic. As described in When Saturday Comes, the police viewed football fans as “a mass entity, fuelled by drink and a single-minded resolve to wreak havoc by destroying property and attacking one another with murderous intent”.
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