Online racists to be banned from matches????

Yes, a VPN could be used to mask the location of the poster - either inside or outside the UK. Anyone with an ounce of sense would do that - especially in future seeing what happened to some of those caught publicly.

There is also the possibility/probability (depending on your paranoia levels) of foreign government-led interference to forment societal unrest within the UK. If we are fighting with ourselves, we are weaker as a society and a country.

And, importantly (especially for the Home Office), Indians can be racist against Africans, Chinese can be racist against Indians, Indians can be racist against Pakistanis, Japanese can be racist against Chinese, etc, ad infinitum. Racism isn't just a white or western problem.

 

Absolutely, there is some dreadful racism across Asia. It's a global problem.

Obviously we see whats closest (especially with our media) but the rise in racism and xenophobia in England since 2016 is evident and should be a worry to all with a shred of decency.

 

Again my favourite visionary…

“The early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the information might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.”

Huxley was writing in 1958 about TV and radio. He thought democracy would fail when in the future some new method of distraction was invented. Internet anybody?

 

And not much of a lover at that...so I've heard

 

It makes me angry that this is being seen exclusively as a football problem. It is a society-wide problem, but one which manifests itself through targeting any high profile black, or minority ethnic target, in this case three footballers. The penalty misses just gave them an excuse as a means to try to influence people into adopting their toxic attitudes. It has given me heart that there has been a significant counter-swing of decent folks who are openly and manifestly supporting the players concerned. Those of us who abhor racist also need to be influencers of wider public opinion. Keep it up, so that love wins over hate.