Where would you rather come from, Pakistan or Liverpool? Assuming you were somehow given a retrospective choice in the matter. It is not too tough a call for me. I could just about suffer being accused of a ‘cheeky’ wit and perhaps a sense of victimhood — both qualities maybe unfairly associated with Scousers — simply for the benefit of being born in England: it’s Liverpool for me, all the livelong day.
This was the question posed, in an extremely offensive truncated form, by a minuscule sub-section of Millwall supporters during the side’s otherwise heroic victory over Everton in the FA Cup last Saturday. By minuscule I mean something well below 1 per cent of the home support. But it was picked up by the cameras and has made front-page news and filled the airwaves of the cretinous why-oh-why merchants on every talk-radio show in the country. How, the gobby interlocutors begged, can we stop these people from existing, these untermensch, these scum?
That it was a vanishingly small minority singing what used to be, until comparatively recently, a very familiar chant does not seem to matter to them. A certain hyperbole takes over. An Everton fan was slashed in the face with a Stanley knife during the same game, but this outrage gained far less coverage. Meanwhile, I have heard some of my fellow Millwall fans, accustomed to being perpetually in the dock, argue that singing ‘I’d rather be a Paki than a Scouse’ is not racist, or if it is, it’s racist towards Scousers. No, obviously not. The point of the chant is to say that there is only one thing lower in this world of ours than a Pakistani, and that’s a Scouser. The butt of the joke is the Pakistani.
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