For forty years, English football supporters have lived under a legal restriction that no other sports crowd in Britain faces — a ban born of a more turbulent era, now questioned by a Prime Minister who sees in it not protection, but prejudice. Andy Burnham, himself a lifelong fan, has called the 1985 prohibition on drinking in football stands a form of discrimination, suggesting the time may have come to test whether the law still serves its purpose. The debate that follows is an old one dressed in new clothes: how much of our present order is wisdom, and how much is merely the residue of a f