Racism in Football

Damian Collins Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Adams]

The hon. Gentleman is correct: the severity of the penalty must match the offence. Clearly, this is a matter for UEFA, but that is why I have written to their president today. We expect the penalties to be severe. It is not the first incident; we experienced it with the Montenegro game. The idea that we have bunches of people making Nazi salutes and doing monkey chants—these are sub-human behaviours—cannot be tolerated. I look to UEFA in the strongest terms to deal with this particular incident as severely as possible.

[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

I completely support the comments from Members on both sides of the House on how UEFA should demonstrate that real sanctions will be applied against national FAs that allow this to happen in their stadiums. Does the Minister agree that the Government’s proposals to legislate on online harms is an opportunity to look at the vile racist abuse that many footballers in this country receive on social media, which is a growing problem, and that we should look again at the status of homophobic abuse in sports stadiums in this country, too? There are big concerns about the increase in homophobia, and we should look again at the Football (Offences) Act 1991 to make homophobic abuse illegal in the same way as racist abuse so that both have the same status in law.

[Nigel Adams]

I totally agree that any form of abuse is unacceptable. We have seen footballers like Paul Pogba, Troy Deeney and Tammy Abraham receive such abuse online through social media. We want to tackle it, and we will work closely with the Select Committee on Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. We have been clear that social media companies need to do more, and we will hold them to account on this issue.