Soccer hooligans
From Professor John Hargreaves Sir: Daniel Wolf ('England's thugs and losers', 12 June) makes rather too much of the English working class's economic deprivation, the loss of empire and delusions of superiority induced by victory in two world wars, and misses the key factor. Catalonia, Lombardy and Belgium industrialised as early as Britain with more working people suffering than here, and France, Holland and Belgium lost colonial empires after the second world war. Yet in none of these cases is football characterised by the sort of hooliganism and backwardness that we find here.
The key factor that makes England different is the long-term cultural deprivation endured by the working class at the hands of the governing class, which has produced the least cultured, worst educated working class in the whole of industrialised Europe.
John Hargreaves
London SW4
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