| THEY HAVE shown the video over and over again on the local news. A lonely figure in yellow police riot-gear stands his ground, hesitates, and then turns to run.
A bottle hits him on the arm. He stumbles and falls. A baying mob of Glasgow Rangers fans overwhelms him, and begins to kick him as he lies on the ground.
This is the aftermath of the UEFA Cup Final in Manchester, in which hundreds of thousands of fans without tickets flooded the city-centre streets. For 12 hours solid they drank alcohol. How many of them were able to focus properly when the giant city-centre screens began to show their team’s final is another question. When one of the screens broke down, the authorities launched a contingency plan to ferry them to another screen, but violence broke out, and bottles were thrown at the screen and then at the police.
We know the policeman’s name now. He was PC Mick Regan. We have seen him on the television since, and heard him talk about his terrible fear as he was overtaken. But to those in the mob he was just a symbol. Any policeman would have done. Possibly anyone at all who had become the focus of their rage.
I nearly wrote “frustration” rather than “rage”, but this was a full two bottle-throwing hours after the breakdown of the film. Frustration had transformed itself into something other.
Psychologists have various theories about crowds and power: that when we gain anonymity we lose identity and responsibility; others, though, argue that it is people subconsciously attracted to such behaviour who are attracted to becoming part of a crowd. Whichever, it is a frightening thing to watch, even if only on video.
But there is an obverse of this. We saw it in the footage of the Chinese earthquake. The old man sitting alone on a pile of rubble, after the rescuers have moved on. He sits, almost imperceptibly weeping for his only son, who had earlier answered his mobile phone from somewhere beneath.
Then there was the man in a black T-shirt wedged under a massive slab of masonry. He was still alive, and was lent a phone to speak to his wife. He told her he thought he would not make it. Rescuers later managed to extract him, but not in time. Though he is dead, the agony of his predicament, and the quiet resolution of his words, repeat and repeat in the memory of the viewer, as they will for ever in the mind of his wife.
It is only when the awful scale of a disaster is reduced to the suffering of one individual that we fully understand it. The horror of the Sichuan earthquake has in its terrible way done more to humanise the people of China than anything before, countering images of unfeeling inscrutability which have been generated by decades of film of blank massed ranks, or ruthless blue-suited guardians of the flickering Olympic flame, or paramilitaries cracking down on Buddhist protesters in Tibet.
What saved PC Regan was a different kind of psychology. A man was leaving an internet café just at that moment. Outside the mob group-think, he saw what was happening for what it was. Tom Bardsley, a 23-year-old former soldier, said the mob were like a “pack of wolves who had not been fed for days”. With extraordinary bravery he rushed towards them and, with bottles and bricks flying at him, knocked hooligans aside to drag the policeman to safety. The startled mob moved on.
The Chinese earthquake and the English mob have the same lesson to teach us. It is about the dangers of what psychologists call de-individuation. And it is lurking there for those of us who have never thrown a bottle in our lives. Fortunately, we have been given empathy as a counter, but sometimes we have to be shocked into deploying it.
Paul Vallely is associate editor of The Independent.
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