Fan Convicted Over Racist Chant

BBC ^ | 06/16/2003

[HennepinPrisoner]

A football fan who took part in racist chanting at a match has been convicted in a landmark court case. Two High Court judges ruled the 21-year-old fan should have been convicted of a criminal offence when he came before magistrates.

In what is understood to be the first case of its kind to reach the High Court, the judges ruled Sean Ratcliffe, from Cross Heath, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, was guilty of chanting in "a racialist nature".

The chanting came under the 1991 Football (Offences) Act, they said.

Ratcliffe was in a crowd of fans of second division Port Vale who used a chant containing the word "Paki" at Oldham Athletic supporters during a league match at the Port Vale ground at Stoke-on-Trent in October last year.

Lord Justice Auld, sitting with Mr Justice Goldring, said it was clear the word "Paki" - short for Pakistani - was "a slang expression which is racially offensive".

'Unpleasant context'

They dismissed any suggestion it could be used affectionately in the manner of "Aussie" or "Brit".

The judge said: "It is odd and a shame that this is so in this country, but the unpleasant context in which it is so often used has left it with a derogatory or insulting, racialist connotation."

The ruling overturned a decision by Stoke-on-Trent Magistrates' Court district judge Graham Richards in January to acquit Ratcliffe on the basis the chant was "mere doggerel" and need not be classed as an offence.

The judges also took the unusual step of telling the magistrates' court to pay the estimated £1,000 costs of the appeal by the Director of Public Prosecutions.

After the hearing, Maureen Shea, head of trials for the Crown Prosecution Service in north Staffordshire, said: "It is clarification of the fact that 'Paki' is derogatory and racialist within the terms of this Act.

"If any football crowd is chanting, and the word Paki, or Pakis, is in the chant, it is going to contravene the act."

[HennepinPrisoner]

And I thought political correctness on our side of the pond was bad.

[Texas_Jarhead]

that's messed up

[razorback-bert]

Does this mean stani is cool?

[ThinkDifferent]

This is why it's good to have a written Constitution. (Now, if it were only enforced regularly).

[Prodigal Son]

What's the sentence here? Anybody know?

[MonroeDNA]

Next thing you know, they will lose thier guns, and lose the right to self defense of their home or person.

Oh, wait...

[The KG9 Kid]

The amusing point is that 'PAKI' is really an acronym.

They named themselves and their country that, officially, for the world to use:

Questions from Kids - Pakistan Trade Network: "What is PAKISTAN an acronym for?"

I guess that if you say a word with a smart look on your face in England, that's a 'hate crime'.

If the convicted had attacked a Pakistani while saying it, that's another story.

[LurkedLongEnough]

"If any football crowd is chanting, and the word Paki, or Pakis, is in the chant, it is going to contravene the act."

The only cure is for the judge to spend all summer in Yankee Stadium.

[HennepinPrisoner]

I remember when President Bush used the word 'Paki' and Canadian and British press were all over him for it...yet the leaders of US Muslim groups did not take offense to it at all.

[Norse]

bloody pakis!

[ElkGroveDan]

Wow does this mean we can't listen to Monty Python's Tourist Complaint Sketch when we visit the UK in the future?

What's the point of going abroad if you're just another tourist carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea - "Oh they don't make it properly here, do they, not like at home" - and stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney's Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White's suncream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh 'cos they "overdid it on the first day."

And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Continentales with their modern international luxury roomettes and draught Red Barrel and swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending they're acrobats forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging into queues and if you're not at your table spot on seven you miss the bowl of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night the hotel has a bloody cabaret in the bar, featuring a tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some bloated fat tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners.

And adenoidal typists from Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhoea trying to pick up hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel and once a week there's an excursion to the local Roman Remains to buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleeding Watney's Red Barrel and one evening you visit the so called typical restaurant with local colour and atmosphere and you sit next to a party from Rhyl who keep singing "Torremolinos, torremolinos" and complaining about the food - "It's so greasy isn't it?" - and you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday's Daily Express and he drones on and on about how Mr. Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and then he throws up over the Cuba Libres.

And sending tinted postcards of places they don't realise they haven't even visited to "All at number 22, weather wonderful, our room is marked with an 'X'. Food very greasy but we've found a charming little local place hidden away in the back streets where they serve Watney's Red Barrel and cheese and onion crisps and the accordionist plays 'Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner'."

And spending four days on the tarmac at Luton airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dried BEA-type sandwiches and you can't even get a drink of Watney's Red Barrel because you're still in England and the bloody bar closes every time you're thirsty and there's nowhere to sleep and the kids are crying and vomiting and breaking the plastic ash-trays and they keep telling you it'll only be another hour although your plane is still in Iceland and has to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before it can load you up at 3 a.m. in the bloody morning and you sit on the tarmac till six because of "unforeseen difficulties", i.e. the permanent strike of Air Traffic Control in Paris - and nobody can go to the lavatory until you take off at 8, and when you get to Malaga airport everybody's swallowing "enterovioform" and queuing for the toilets and queuing for the armed customs officers, and queuing for the bloody bus that isn't there to take you to the hotel that hasn't yet been finished.

And when you finally get to the half-built Algerian ruin called the Hotel del Sol by paying half your holiday money to a licensed bandit in a taxi you find there's no water in the pool, there's no water in the taps, there's no water in the bog and there's only a bleeding lizard in the bidet.

And half the rooms are double booked and you can't sleep anyway because of the permanent twenty-four-hour drilling of the foundations of the hotel next door - and you're plagues by appalling apprentice chemists from Ealing pretending to be hippies, and middle-class stockbrokers' wives busily buying identical holiday villas in suburban development plots just like Esher, in case the Labour government gets in again, and fat American matrons with sloppy-buttocks and Hawaiian-patterned ski pants looking for any mulatto male who can keep it up long enough when they finally let it all flop out.

And the Spanish Tourist Board promises you that the raging cholera epidemic is merely a case of mild Spanish tummy, like the previous outbreak of Spanish tummy in 1660 which killed half London and decimated Europe - and meanwhile the bloody Guardia are busy arresting sixteen-year-olds for kissing in the streets and shooting anyone under nineteen who doesn't like Franco.

And then on the last day in the airport lounge everyone's comparing sunburns, drinking Nasty Spumante, buying cartons of duty free "cigarillos" and using up their last pesetas on horrid dolls in Spanish National costume and awful straw donkeys and bullfight posters with your name on "Ordoney, El Cordobes and Brian Pules of Norwich" and 3-D pictures of the Pope and Kennedy and Franco, and everybody's talking about coming again next year and you swear you never will although there you are tumbling bleary-eyed out of a tourist-tight antique Iberian airplane.....

[archy]

Does this mean stani is cool?

Better make a new plan, Stan....

So the Wogs don't care for being called Pakies, eh? Isn't that a Pak of manure....

-archy-/-

[Blue Leader]

Lord Justice Auld, sitting with Mr Justice Goldring, said it was clear the word "Paki" - short for Pakistani - was "a slang expression which is racially offensive".

The good Lord Justice would have done well to study the meaning of the Urdu word "paki". It means "pure" as Pakistan means "land of the pure".

It is, however, quite alright with the good Lord Justice to call people pommies, aussies, yankees and whatever else. As long as they are white.

[Blue Leader]

Lord Justice Auld, sitting with Mr Justice Goldring, said it was clear the word "Paki" - short for Pakistani - was "a slang expression which is racially offensive".

The good Lord Justice would have done well to study the meaning of the Urdu word "paki". It means "pure" as Pakistan means "land of the pure".

It is, however, quite alright with the good Lord Justice to call people pommies, aussies, yankees and whatever else. As long as they are white.

[just deserts]

Do you think anybody there has ever read 1984? After all, George Orwell was a Brit wasn't he? I think I just committed a punishable offense. Brit, Brit, Brit. What will that get me, life?

[Mr. Mojo]

What does "Paki" have to do with race? Pakistan is a country, and Pakistani is a nationality.

[Mo1]

Lord Justice Auld, sitting with Mr Justice Goldring, said it was clear the word "Paki" - short for Pakistani - was "a slang expression which is racially offensive".

I sure hope Lord Justice Auld never shows up at a home game for the Philaedelphia Eagles ..

He'll never survive the slang words there

[Wil H]

..That's Boventry you silly bunt...

[Wil H]

What does "Paki" have to do with race? Pakistan is a country, and Pakistani is a nationality.

you make a good point, however Britain has a history of discrimination and violence towards Pakistani's (among others) that was euthemistically known as "Paki-Bashing", a once favorite sport of drunken louts on a saturday night.

I'm sure that heritage helped color the perception, pardun the pun.

[Mr. Mojo]

So do you believe the conviction was fair?