ON JULY 1 this year, smoking will be banned from all football grounds, under the government’s Vindictive Curtailment of Working Class Pleasures Act (2006). You will not be allowed to smoke when you’re sitting in your uncomfortable seat watching your useless team slump to yet another home defeat. You won’t be allowed to smoke as you queue for the entire duration of half-time for your gassy beaker of ersatz lager and faintly luminous balti pie. When the opposing team’s centre-forward has his legs chopped in two by one of your defenders and the game is held up for 10 minutes for the air ambulance to arrive, it’s no use nipping outside the ground for a quick gasper, because smoking is banned there too. Even in the bloody car park, according to the chap from Millwall’s management I spoke to, in quiet desperation, last week.

In short, there will be nothing to anaesthetise the utter misery of watching your team contrive, over 90 minutes, to frustrate and depress you. I suppose you could resort to a more socially acceptable drug — heroin, say. The government is considering giving skagheads shopping vouchers as an incentive to get them off the drug; maybe the football clubs could instigate a similar scheme. Free entry to the next home game and a safe needle exchange programme at half-time. Junkies, remember, are victims, whereas smokers victimise others. We’re all clear about that these days.

I’ve attended Millwall matches, every season, for 38 years, minus nine in the middle when I was exiled in Middlesbrough (where I learnt to smoke like a local). Like my fellow supporters, I’ve put up with a lot of hopeless teams, managers denser than a block of uranium, preening referees, Martin Keown in the opposition and so on. And we’ve put up with the strictures designed to sap our weekly enjoyment — seats rather than the rough camaraderie of the terraces, costly membership schemes, restrictions on away travel, mouthy jobsworth stewards who stop you swearing, grim, Hitler-faced coppers who make you march for five miles.

But still we turn up, paying more and more each year, without much in the way of complaint. The atmosphere has been horribly dampened (and gone entirely at some Premiership clubs), the experience is less than thrilling. But still we go. July 1, though, is a bridge too far.

Smoking is one of the very few things I’m truly good at. It’s taken me half a lifetime to reach this level of expertise. I am far, far better at smoking than the current Millwall team is at playing football. And now I will be forced to choose between these two great loves of mine. But what truly annoys me is the attitude behind the decision, the way in which this government — and previous governments — view football supporters. If you’re unsure what this attitude is, read JG Ballard’s new novel, Kingdom Come.

This is, as usual, a dystopian fantasy set in a fictitious chavtown, just off the M25, called Brooklands. The local population — save for a few concerned members of the professional classes — are a brutal and brutalised morass of plebs, dressed in identical St George’s shirts and interested only in consumerism and sport. Sport is what happens to a society mired in boredom and existing in a moral vacuum; it necessarily leads to a kind of fascism, or is a symptom of it, Ballard avers. After football matches, the workers go on rampages, attacking Asians and chanting nasty things. They are viewed as dumb animals, to be led, manipulated and exploited.

Kingdom Come is a deeply silly and patronising novel, but it does at least encapsulate the contempt and lack of understanding with which working-class pastimes are viewed by our political leaders and, in Ballard’s case, our intelligentsia. And, as a corollary, why successive administrations have sought to make football more middle-class by stripping it of all those things that once made it vital and compelling.

It is the passion and fervour and partisan loyalty — dangerous things! — that the middle class find most threatening about football, and so, gradually over these past 20 years, they have been eradicated from the game almost entirely. Football is a congenial entertainment best viewed through the medium of some kind of box (the directors’ box, for the chosen few, or the box in the corner of your living room for the rest), seems to be the attitude.

And other accoutrements of the Saturday afternoon ritual need to be got rid of — smoking, drinking, eating cheap and nourishing “bad” food. The first of these has now been abolished, the last is under constant attack, and believe me, it won’t be long before they start to clamp down on the drinking.

Of course the easiest way to abolish the Saturday afternoon ritual is simply to abolish Saturday afternoon itself, strip the day of its old communal flavour — play the games on a Sunday afternoon, say, or a Monday evening or Saturday lunchtime.

You see, it is tempting, when reviewing the way the game has changed in the past couple of decades, to start believing in conspiracy theories. I think I need a cigarette.