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Lily Allen and the woke hatred for football fans

Is anyone else sick of Guardianista snobs who view England fans as dumb, racist ‘gammon’?

Brendan O'Neill

Brendan O'Neill
chief political writer

Topics Culture Sport UK

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And just like that, the bourgeois pricks have gone from cheering England to sneering at England fans. The minute it became clear that football wasn’t coming home, Britain’s phoney luvvie footie fans went from crooning ‘Hey Jude’ at Jude Bellingham to spitting snobbish bile at the somewhat podgier, more follically challenged blokes in the stands. Nepo baby and all-round cultural irritant Lily Allen led the charge. She took to X to share an AI image of morbidly fat, gammon-hued, bald-as-hell English men blubbing into their beers. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. This one was worth six: ‘I fucking hate the working class’, it essentially said.

The mask hadn’t only slipped, it had completely disintegrated. The woman who made a pop career out of mimicking the working-class accent – warbling ‘Fuck you very much’ like Dick Van Dyke on helium – had revealed her true self. It seems mockney daughters of privilege love the idea of the working class – with their earthy chatter and bolshy style – but not the working class itself. Red-faced patriots chanting ‘En-ger-land’ after a few too many warm lagers? Summon my driver! Ms Allen sums up the middle-class soccerati who love ‘the beautiful game’ but hate its ugly fans. Who cheer the nation but fear its fat natives. Who prefer the England of Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit lounging on a Union Jack bedspread to the England of working men and women who do boring shit like keep the lights on.

It’s shocking but not surprising. It’s shocking because – to put my pious hat on for a minute – to dehumanise an entire swathe of society is out of order. We would balk, I hope, if following a crunch basketball game in the US someone posted an image of caricatured black people wailing into buckets of fried chicken. And so we should bristle at the reduction of working-class men to those pig-coloured, obese creatures that haunt the empty heads of posh pop stars. It isn’t surprising, though, because Ms Allen hails from cut-glass quarters that have long been iffy about oiks. She was educated at Hill House School, for heaven’s sake, the junior alma mater of the literal king. A privately educated offspring of luvvies has a problem with the plebs? Don’t hold the front page.

‘I guess faux working-class accents are more useful than working-class people’, quipped one X user at Allen. Others have reminded her that her dad – actor Keith Allen – recorded the 1998 hooligan-chic football song, ‘Vindaloo’, with Fat Les. Although, Lily is not actually deviating from dad’s naff footie period as much as some seem to think. Featuring daddy Allen, BritArt bad boy Damien Hirst and yer man from Blur who now makes cheese, ‘Vindaloo’ was an early example of the bourgeois invasion of the working-class sport of football. ‘We all like vindaloo / We’re England and we’re gonna score one more than you’, sang those smug twats who were far more likely to be seen quaffing Cabernet with Stephen Fry at the Groucho than rubbing shoulders with men at The Den who might very well have recently consumed a vindaloo.

There’s a direct line from Keith’s hooligan cosplay of 1998 to Lily’s gammon-bashing of 2024. From the safari-like dabbling in the terraces culture by Allen Snr (Brentwood, £45,000 pa) to the mockery of football’s hoi polloi by Allen Jnr (Bedales, £24,000 pa). In both cases, a fascination with football exists alongside a horrible, haughty view of football’s fans. Only where Keith sought to ingratiate himself with this strange, exotic culture – by eating hot curries and singing ‘We’re from England / Where do you come from / Do you put the kettle on?’ (Jesus Christ) – Lily has opted to make fun of it for retweets from the middle-class millennials who follow her online and who love Jordan Pickford but can’t understand a word he says. Then and now, football has been colonised by the bourgeois, whether by their mimicry or their mockery.

This is the real scourge in English football right now – not the armies of working people who take to the terraces every weekend to cheer and swear and unleash their passion, but the posh Johnny Come Latelys who think the fact they read Fever Pitch once and that they retweet Marina Hyde’s Guardian sports column makes them Matt Busby. For these people seem hellbent on making football as square and sanitised as their social circles are. They want to ban offensive chants and raise awareness about homophobia and force the lower orders to watch players ‘take the knee’ in the hope that it might cleanse the ill-educated filth of their rough, bovine prejudices. They’re narks masquerading as fans, social workers in football shirts. Can’t they just go somewhere else, like the tennis?

Lily Allen wasn’t alone in her gammon-bashing. Robyn Vinter of the Guardian also found herself horrified by the sight of England’s fans during the Euros. She wrote of ‘the whiplash [you get] when you’re celebrating the lovely talented nice footballers and then it cuts to the stands and you remember what people in England actually look like’. Oof. A little too portly for you, are they Ms Vinter? A little too weathered? A little too red-skinned? That’s probably because they have real jobs, in food production, energy production, engineering, transport, care, and thus don’t always have time for pilates. A scribe for Britain’s most bourgeois paper feeling alarmed by the physical appearance of the men who keep the society she lives in stocked, secure and safe – seriously, it’s class privilege on steroids.

What’s really funny is the idea that Ms Vinter has never seen physically unimpressive males before. Are we meant to believe that the soy boys who do graphic design at the Guardian are Jack Grealishes in a suit? Or that the paper’s genderfluid night editors who need a week off if they’re misgendered are as fit as Bukayo Saka? Please. Where does Ms Vinter and the other snobs think England’s ‘lovely talented nice footballers’ come from? I’ll tell you: the working class. That section of society you caricature as red and fat and feckless also throws up such sporting gods. I honestly believe that a working-class youth in 21st-century Britain has more chance of becoming a top-flight footballer than he has of getting a column at the classist, Brexitphobic, Oxbridge propaganda sheet that is the insufferable Guardian.

Here’s the irony: the fake football fans of the bourgeoisie fancy themselves as implacable opponents of bigotry, and yet it’s bigotry that shapes their fan-bashing blather. Scratch a Nu Football type, find a classist no-mark. Behind the thin curtain of their progressivism there lurks a burning disdain for the speech, habits and even physical appearance of the little people, the lesser people, the unwashed people. Many bourgeois footie followers say they just want to purge football of its racism, yet even this missionary crusade is fuelled by a fact-lite, prejudice-heavy belief that Those People – people who wave the England flag, and have tattoos on their forearms, and don’t even read the Guardian – are fascists in the making. Really they aren’t. They’re good, decent folk. And they’re sick of you smuggling your classism into the terraces under the cover of anti-racism. They want you out, not because they’re bigots, but because they have self-respect. To quote Lily Allen: ‘Fuck you, fuck you very, very much.’

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy

Picture by: Getty.

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Topics Culture Sport UK

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