Letter From the UK (About the Gulag)

First Clarkson; now the FA's Richard Scudamore

The Left's Language Stasi are on the March

by James Delingpole  

17 May 2014

Breitbart London

Here is a viewpoint I think you ought to read. It's by someone to whose politically correct idiocies you ought never, ever to have been exposed in your entire life. But unfortunately - a bit like the cockroaches that inherit the earth when the Apocalypse comes - he is the kind of person who is very much part of your new future. So get used to it, Edward Lord and his ilk are here to stay.

Edward Lord has a job you probably never imagined could possibly exist. He is on the Football Association's Inclusion Advisory Board. And, as you can see from this blogpost, he is currently agitating for the sacking of the FA's chief executive Richard Scudamore.

If Scudamore doesn’t accept the heinous nature of his sexist remarks and the impact they have had, not only on women in the game, but on the perception they create of football’s commitment to equality and inclusion in general, then regrettably I must reach the conclusion that he may be in the wrong job.

Heinous, eh? Let's have a look at these "sexist remarks" more closely, shall we, so that we can judge their awfulness for ourselves.

It's surprisingly hard to find them online. Both Twitter and the various MSM news sites abound with self-righteous harpies and progressive milquetoasts expressing outrage at what Scudamore said. But they seem oddly reluctant to tell us what it was.

So far as I can gather, the scandal concerns some private emails Scudamore exchanged with a lawyer friend called Nicholas West. In one of them, Scudamore ventured to mock "female irrationality." In another, the men discussed a woman involved in the Premier League's planning and projects department, whom they nicknamed Edna. Scudamore blokeishly advised West that where Edna was concerned he should: "Keep off your shaft." West referred to women in another email using the not necessarily flattering term "gash."

Were the two men's exchanges demeaning and offensive to women? Well quite possibly but that's why the men chose to use these phrases in private emails rather than, say, in the Souvenir Issue of the FA Cup Final. Like Clarkson's "n-word" nursery rhyme, the words were never meant for public consumption. The only reason they got out was because some mole decided that it would be in the public interest for them to be exposed in the media, so that we could all be properly appalled by the dog bites man story that two blokes involved in arguably the most laddish industry on earth - football - talk to one another privately in laddish language.

Well, I think it's a dog-bites-man story, anyway. I'm trying to think what job Richard Scudamore would have to hold for it not be. Maybe if he were Minister For Women, that would be mildly ironic. Or if he were PA to Polly Toynbee - that would be amusing. Or if he were head of the Campaign for the Abolition of Sexist Language in Emails (Private or Otherwise) - that would definitely make it a goer, I'd say, if I were a news editor.

But "Bloke In Charge of Football Association Uses Sexist Language In Private"? Does anyone claiming to be shocked by this actually know anything about football? I don't personally. Not a lot. But I do know enough to be aware that footballers are often shockingly overpaid yobs who get up to any number of unconscionable overpaid-young-men antics such as glassing people in night clubs and "kebabbing" groupies in foreign hotels. And that the people who generally follow football can sometimes be a bit laddish and lairy too. So what kind of person, exactly, would you expect to be in charge of the body responsible for regulating this yob's game? Jeremy Paxman? Stephen Fry?

What we have here, I fear, is yet another scary example of the media being whipped up into confected outrage by the pressure groups of the cultural Marxist left. In the Clarkson case it was the "r" word that was invoked. In this one it happens to be the "s" word, but really whether the charge is "racism" or "sexism" (or "disablism" or "Islamophobia" or "homophobia" or "transphobia") it all amounts to the same thing. This is part of an ongoing linguistic and socio-political terror campaign designed to create a world in which, not even in private, can anyone engage in unseemly banter.

Why, though, would anyone wish to do such a thing? Well, philosophically it's part of that Year Zero thing that has long exercised leftists from Pol Pot to Tony ("Britain is a young country") Blair. But more specifically in this case - see the views of this chap from the FA's Inclusion Advisory Board, above - it's about the bizarre ongoing campaign to persuade us all of something we know in our hearts just isn't true and never will be: that women's football is as exciting, important, interesting and generally worthy of support as men's football and that the only reason it's not is because of society's ingrained sexism which must be eradicated by whatever means necessary.

This is what's so ugly and dishonest about the current witchhunt against Scudamore: various vested interests with a political axe to grind - the goalkeeper of the women's England football team; a woman on the FA board called Heather Rabbatts; etc - are being granted the luxury of taking the moral high ground in support of what is a blatant lie.