The Times' opinion writer suggests that unquestioning obedience is no way of teaching true respect for the law.

England's defeat on Tuesday was not the fault of Beckham, Batty or Hoddle, or any of the other players. It was the fault of an apparently stupid and vain referee.	This article is about to say something controversial. If you are unwilling to be irritated and shocked, please stop reading now. A health warning seems necessary because there are certain opinions that even a professional polemicist is not supposed to express, at least in Britain. It is all right to attack government ministers, civil servants, businessmen, foreign leaders, army officers, sportsmen, bishops, central bankers, trade unionists, arts administrators and, above all, members of the Royal Family. It is perfectly acceptable to suggest that schoolchildren should not be taught mathematics and science, or to muse whether rape is really a serious crime. But even by the standards of open debate which fortunately prevail in Britain, what I feel impelled to say after watching the football match on Tuesday - and especially after watching it with my three impressionable young children - may be branded outrageous and politically incorrect. England's defeat on Tuesday was not the fault of Beckham, Batty or Hoddle, or any of the other players. It was the fault of an apparently stupid and vain referee. The game, for me at least, was not ruined by Beckham's modest outrage. It was ruined by the referee's disproportionate response. One had only to look into the eyes of both protagonists to realise that the man whose judgment had been most seriously clouded by vanity and bad temper was not Beckham, but Kim Milton Nielsen, the Danish referee. What made this incident particularly affecting, especially when watching the match with children, was the moral lesson it seemed to convey. The lesson intended was, of course, that rules had to be obeyed and authority respected. The real message was very different. Justice was arbitrary, capricious and unconnected to fair play. Authority should never be openly questioned. And the only appropriate response to injustice was hypocrisy. In my post-match depression - after struggling vainly to convince my distraight sons that the real responsibility for England's defeat lay not with the luckless Batty, but with the wicked Beckham - it suddenly struck me that some lessons of the red-card incident might be relevant not only to football (in which I have had little interest for 28 years, since I was distracted from my A-level revision by Pele's performance in the 1970 World Cup) but also to some of the political and economic developments observable today in Britain, Europe and the world at large.
Only one commentator had the courage to say openly what millions of people believed - that "the action of the Danish referee was wholly without justification".	Take hypocrisy first. Within minutes of expressing their astonishment at Beckham's dismissal, the TV commentators were describing the decision as inevitable, reasonable and fair. In yesterday morning's newspapers, Beckham, the victim of judicial overreaction, had been unanimously branded as the guilty party. As far as I could see, only one commentator, David Miller in The Daily Telegraph, had the courage to say openly what millions of people (including even my mother-in-law) believed - that "the action of the Danish referee was wholly without justification". Worst of all, there seemed to be widespread agreement among the media and the fans on the true nature of Beckham's crime. His real transgression lay not in the malice of aiming a modest and probably painless kick at an Argentine opponent, but in doing this "so stupidly" in direct sight of the referee. This hypocritical attitude - that rules exist not so much to ensure fair play as to test the players' ability to exploit them - has been prevalent throughout the World Cup, with histrionic shows of agony, reminiscent of professional wrestling, now taken for granted as a part of football technique. It was hardly surprising, from this point of view, that three of the four goals scored on Tuesday, plus the goal disallowed, resulted directly from referee's decisions, all of them open to question. What broader lessons does all this convey, especially for our children? That authority must be feared, certainly. But not necessarily that the laws and the rule of law are to be respected. Respect for the law is not the same as a hypocritical and exploitative acquiescence - a lesson that will be instantly recognised by anyone who follows regulatory politics, especially in the European Union, but also in America. At the risk of some gross over-simplification, European societies can broadly be divided into three groups in terms of their attitudes to the law. First, there are the naturally orderly societies, such as Germany, where instinctive obedience and respect for the law is a quintessential feature of education and national culture.
For every law, there is a loophole. And for every loophole there is a competitive advantage to be gained.	Secondly, there are highly individualistic countries, such as Italy and to some extent France, where the attitude to law is one of exploitative acquiescence. Northern Italy is home to the most entrepreneurial business culture in Europe - despite vast panoplies of regulations - because of this attitude to law. For every law, there is a loophole. And for every loophole there is a competitive advantage to be gained. This is especially true when government officials accept that a slightly hypocritical flexibility in enforcement is the quid pro quo for a huge codex of detailed regulations and laws. Then there is Britain. The British attitude to law has traditionally been exactly the opposite to that of Italy. Laws exist to be obeyed. Government officials and judges see one of their principal duties as the strict enforcement of all regulations and laws. But Germany's unquestioning obedience is also alien to British culture. The quid pro quo for strict, universal enforcement, at least in Britain, has traditionally been a limit to the amount of detailed regulation and a genuine respect for the law. This respect is based, in turn, on a combination of long historical traditions and on the openness to public criticism of those who make and administer the rules. To be properly respected, at least in an individualistic society such as ours, the laws must be comprehensible and they must appeal to common sense. Equally, the people who impose and adminster these laws must command confidence and trust.
To say that children should not be discouraged from questioning authority is not the same as denying the practical virtues of discipline.	To instil the habit of respect for the law is, of course, one of the main reasons for encouraging children to play sports, with their strict rules and unquestioning obedience to judges. This is why criticising the referee in football or any other game is considered worse than unsporting. It is somehow deeply immoral. It is also why even the most aggressive media commentators and politicians rarely question the wisdom of judges. But judges are frequently responsible for gross miscarriages of justice and refs, I dare say, are even more likely to make grotesque mistakes. So should referees never be publicly criticised? And should we be trying to instil in our children a counter-intuitive and irrational belief that figures of authority, be they judges, referees or teachers, are always right? The answer is definitely not - at least if we want Britain to remain a country that lives on its wits and prospers in the world, through individualism and creativity, even if this occasionally requires some help from foreign management. To say that children, at least in Britain, should not be discouraged from questioning authority is not the same as to deny the practical virtues of discipline. On the sports field, there is an obvious practical reason why referees must be immune to criticism. Any game would grind to a halt if all referees' decisions were subject to discussion and appeal. But this practical objection, which also applies to the judge in his own courtroom and the teacher in his own class, says nothing about the ethics of questioning, criticising and occasionally even deriding, the views of referees, judges and teachers, when circumstances are less fraught. Every child can understand the difference between arguing with a referee on the sports field and questioning his judgment after the event. But every child, at least in a self-consciously individualistic society such as Britain, should also understand that referees, judges, teachers (and even parents) are obeyed for practical reasons of social cohesion - and not because they are always right. To show children the difference between unquestioning obedience and conscious self-control is the way to instil a proper respect both for authority and for individual conscience. A good place to start is by criticising stupid referees.