I was sat in a bar in the commercial district of Beijing last Sunday night, keeping an eye on England’s progress on the final day of the Ashes on one television screen whilst watching Chelsea play Fulham on the other. The staff at the bar are all Chinese, but it is popular with expats, serving bangers and mash, pizzas, and draught beer, with live sport feeds always on the screens.

It was one of those splendid yet ever so slightly surreal coincidences that led me that night to meet a middle-aged businessman in China who just so happened to have been an old boy from my very own Leeds Grammar School. We spent much of the evening talking amiably about all manner of things, the knot of an old school tie evidently tighter than the bonds we all naturally share as human beings. But on a night like that, the sport kept on drawing our eyes back.

He was a rugby man, and told me he’d played in the first XV at school. At this particular bar, they had turned up the volume on the football and muted the cricket; he tried to complain. But for the rest of the evening, we had to sit there and listen to the chants from Craven Cottage jar with the steady tension of England’s approach to victory at The Oval.

The man couldn’t abide it. “Football,” he declared proudly, “is nothing but an opportunity for uneducated people to vent their social frustrations.”

For my part, I couldn’t summon the passion to disagree. I was introduced to football at a young age, and have loyally supported Leeds United as my local club and nobody else other than the national team ever since. The Leeds supporters are passionate people. If anyone ever dared invade Britain, I would put them on the front line – they’d scare the hell out of the enemy. Alex Ferguson, one of the most successful club managers in the history of the game, has described Leeds’s Elland Road stadium as the most intimidating place in Europe for an away team to visit.

When I saw the video footage of the violence at West Ham’s Carling Cup clash with Millwall on Tuesday night, there was nothing about it that had the power to shock me. One man was stabbed; three pitch invasions took place. The Football Association condemned the incident, and said anyone identified as being involved will be banned for life. The legendary former Chelsea player and current West Ham manager Gianfranco Zola spoke of his shock and upset, and went so far as to say how he has played in this country for seven years and has never seen an incident like this.

Whenever I visit Elland Road to watch Leeds United, as I do whenever I am at home, I am instantly caught up in the excitement, bellowing the club’s old anthem ‘Marching on Together’ from my lungs when the players come out of the tunnel for kick-off, yelling abuse at the referee for a poor decision, hurling an insult at a player if he dives and pretends he’s hurt. But when I take control of myself even for a fleeting moment and watch the dynamics of the crowd, it is a troubling spectacle. The football match is rather like the “two minutes’ hate” at the beginning of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’. At Elland Road, we all stand, raise our arms above our heads and sing to ‘Marching on Together’, rather like the party members rise to Oceania’s national anthem. During the game, there is always someone around whom the home crowd will gather and target with their venom; the referee, an opposing player, or occasionally someone even from their own side will become the Emmanuel Goldstein figure. When it is all over, most of the crowd will return home to their lives, and all will carry on as usual until the following Saturday afternoon.

And yet these are good days for English football. Elland Road in the seventies and eighties was a dangerous place, ruled by neo-fascist skinheads, and where blood-stained shirts were a sight that you had to take for granted. Nowadays, stewards are placed everywhere around the ground and will even take a tin or a glass bottle away from you if you are caught drinking from one for fear that you could use it as a weapon. Young children’s voices are used in adverts played over the speaker system, asking fans to refrain from swearing. Now more than any other time in recent memory, the sport aims to present itself as a family affair; the match is somewhere you can take your children for a pleasant Saturday afternoon out.

Much good was done for the game after the Hillsborough tragedy in 1989 when ninety-six Liverpool fans lost their lives. That was the inevitable climax of a culture in football in which supporters were herded like cattle onto terraces across the country by careless authorities and the police. The subsequent Taylor Report shook the game at the roots, bringing in much-needed new safety standards, including an end to the terraces which made fatal crushes possible. These recommendations required more cash to come into the sport, and this has had a dramatic effect which can not be understated.

Nowadays, England’s reputation has improved compared to that of other countries. Across Europe, and particularly in Italy, fanatical supporters known as Ultras intimidate opposition with flares, gathering on a massive scale with vocal support, defying the authorities, and are sometimes associated with extreme politics and racial violence. At Leeds United, the memory of a Champions League tie at Istanbul with Turkish team Galatasary nine years ago remains a scar on the collective memory for the fatal stabbing of two Leeds fans in violence preceding the match. The national team’s supporters are often the target of criticism from our home press; the experience of recent years has shown the English are pussy cats when compared with the rest of Europe.

But the spirit of the game in England, at its worst, has hardly changed. The problem is that the reasons why have very little to do with football. Violence at football matches can not be unconnected with a prevailing spirit of violence across our culture. To an extent, I agreed with my fellow Old Leo that football supporters are venting their “social frustrations”. (The first question to ask would be why do they have so many social frustrations, but that’s a question that deserves an article of its own – if not a whole book). It is true that the white working class makes up the majority of the English fans, but they are not the only ones. I usually visit Elland Road with my father; whilst given his background, his job and his status he certainly would be characterized as “white working class”, I am a bookish Oxford student and no matter what my history may be I’ll never be described as belonging to this class again in my life. Football crowds include huge numbers of teachers, students and professionals too.

Riot Police attempting to control Millwall fans

It is vital to realize that violence is not intrinsic to football. Before the war and for years after, visitors to the country would remark on the civility of people, and football crowds were as orderly as church congregations. In 1946-47, only ten players were sent off in matches in the top flight; by the mid-90s, the average figure per season had reached well over four-hundred. Statistics such as these are easy to spin any way you like, but the stories of players from former times which tell us of the better conduct in the sport then are too abundant to cast aside as sentimentality.

The real questions from the violence this week are not so much about football, but about everything else. How can we separate the casual insults at a football match from the mother who smacks her kid or the husband who loses his temper and shouts at his wife over something petty? Why do we ban supporters involved in fights such as these for life and yet let players who shout in referees’ faces get away sometimes without even a booking? Here’s the most challenging question: what is the difference between giving the V-sign to someone who tries to cut you up as you’re driving on the road, and stabbing someone in the chest?

Violence is nothing new in our culture. Anyone who thinks knife crime, for instance, is a modern problem needs to read some Shakespeare. But when so many people live in fear of violence – whether that’s at a football ground or walking down the street – we’ve got to challenge not just the laws of our land, but the way we behave ourselves as human beings.

The same as stabbing?

A few friends of mine were recently out together for another heavy night in the bars around Leeds. The evening started well enough, with everyone chatting happily. But after a couple of pints, one of them made some cheap remark about another's girlfriend. The other lad was upset, and started to get angry with his friend. It wasn't long before, inevitably, he was threatening to fight him outside. The two of them, their egos blown up by the drink and the traded insults, had to broken up by the rest of us. The night ended happily for nobody.

The next day, the two of them were both apologetic. And they both uttered variations on the same theme: "it was the drink talking" and "I don't know what came over me; I just lost control".

The first step might be to foster and nurture a culture of personal responsibility in all aspects of our society and our lives, so that wherever we are - at a football ground, out at a bar, at home with the family - we know that we are in control, that our actions have consequences, and that the individual is responsible for what he or she does.

I wonder how many of the fans at Upton Park on Tuesday woke up the following morning wondering what exactly came over them, blaming everyone and everything but themselves.