West Yorkshire Police State

West Yorkshire's Chief Constable

In my post below (yesterday) I outlined the authorities' complete disregard for the public in the organisation of a football game, so I won't bore you with all the details again. This post is an update, it got a whole lot worse.

On Monday a meeting of club officials took place with the local council and the West Yorkshire Police. The council, treating the public with the usual disdain, slashed the ground capacity from 3,500 to 2000. That was a stupid move on safety grounds because if you reduce tickets to a well supported club then fans look elsewhere for tickets if their allocation is too small. Commonsense that seems not to exist on Bradford Council.

So today I went to get a ticket from Bradford worrying that I might not get a ticket from my own club's allocation, FC United of Manchester. There is a good relationship between our fans and Bradford's so I knew there would be no problem, and I certainly wouldn't put my 80 year old dad, who comes to games with me, in any danger. Nor is he a danger to people I must add!

I joined the queue but tickets hadn't gone on sale at 12-00 as announced. At 12-50 an official came out and informed those of us waiting that the police were trying to move the match to Monday rather than this Saturday. I got chatting to other fans in the queue and the consensus was that as Bradford City are also at home on Saturday, the police couldn't deal with both games. Bullshit!

Our game is restricted to 2000 spectators, Bradford City will be lucky to get much over 10,000. The clubs must be a good three miles apart. Bradford has a population of around 290,000. If the police cannot deal with two football games, attended by less than 15,000 people, in a city that size then the police force is quite obviously not fit for purpose. If I lived in Bradford I would get out now because it is obviously not a safe place to live.

Well here is the big news. The West Yorkshire Police have had the game moved from this Saturday to Sunday at 2-00pm. The West Yorkshire Police are so crap they cannot police two games with less than 15,000 people attending. That, or they are just fascistic and enjoy throwing their weight around and pissing people off.

If you think the authorities in this country, be that the local council or the police, work in your interests then get real, they don't. How long until people say enough and fight back?