On a filthy night three days before Christmas in 1978, I was sitting on a rather ancient coach travelling across the Pennines towards Lancashire, along with about 50 other football supporters. The Bradford branch of the Manchester United supporters club catered largely for a collection of brickies and other manual workers – and that evening we were all on our way to watch a dismal 0-3 defeat at Bolton. As torrential rain poured down on the M62, the bloke sitting immediately in front suddenly turned and, with a hint of menace, said to my brother and me: “You’re not really the same as us are you?”
It may have been the drink talking after some seasonal revelry during the day, but his analysis was on the money. The sons of an academic and a teacher, Paul and I read different papers, watched different stuff on TV and spoke in a different way. But as aspiring young lefties in the late 1970s, we imagined, or hoped, that this divergence in terms of social class would be redeemed and erased by politics: after all, it was only 10 years after 1968, when radical students and workers attempted to dream a revolutionary alliance into being. So it was mortifying to my teenage self to realise that, even in the context of supporting the same football team, there might be an underlying suspicion towards the middle-class interlopers on the bus.
