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.
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