Jacob Rees-Mogg has warned the U.S. tech giant PayPal to stop “pushing” its “political opinions” on the British public. The Telegraph has more.
Mr. Rees-Mogg, the Business Secretary, has waded into a growing row over cancel culture following PayPal’s decision to shut down the account of the Free Speech Union (FSU).
PayPal, the digital payments firm, closed down all accounts linked to Toby Young, the FSU’s founder. The group defends gender-critical academics and people who have lost work for expressing opinions.
In an intervention that will be welcomed by free-speech campaigners, Mr Rees-Mogg said: “Corporations such as PayPal should not take part in cancel culture and push political opinions on the British public.
“It is particularly concerning that it appears to have censored the Free Speech Union. They need to justify their behaviour.”
PayPal has declined to tell Mr. Young why his accounts are being blocked. In an email to Mr Young last week, the company said: “PayPal’s policy is not to allow our services to be used for activities that promote hate, violence or racial intolerance.” But it did not give any specific examples of how Mr. Young had violated PayPal’s acceptable use policy.
Dozens of MPs – including former Conservative party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith and ex-cabinet ministers Michael Gove and David Davis – have written to Mr Rees-Mogg accusing PayPal of a “politically motivated move to silence critical or dissenting views”.
Mr Rees-Mogg’s backing will give impetus to backbench MPs to force through legal safeguards to prevent tech and financial services firms from blacklisting voices they don’t agree with. The MPs could seek an amendment to either the Online Safety Bill or Digital Markets Bill to prevent accounts being blocked for political or free-speech reasons.
PayPal’s chief executive Dan Schulman said as recently as last week that “major consumer brands” could no longer “avoid the cultural wars”, insisting that “the fight against any kind of discrimination” was a core value of the $100 billion tech company.
Mr. Schulman first rose to prominence in political circles when he announced that PayPal was withdrawing plans to build a global headquarters in North Carolina after the state passed a law that required people to use toilets or changing rooms that matched the gender on their birth certificate rather than the gender they identified with.
Mr. Young believes he is a victim of Mr Schulman’s new edict. Mr. Young said: “We did recently publish an article on the Free Speech Union website about the rights of individuals if an employer requests they declare their preferred gender pronouns and that might have attracted the attention of Dan Schulman or one of his trans-rights activist advisers.”
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The Free Speech Union has created a template email that people can send to their MP asking him or her to raise PayPal’s censorious behaviour in the House of Commons and to ask the Chancellor and the Chair of the Treasury Select Committee to demand an explanation of PayPal and consider putting legal safeguards in place to stop this kind of thing happening again. Click here to send this email to your MP. Only takes two minutes.
Stop Press 2: Read an interview I’ve given to Disruption Banking about PayPal’s attempt to cancel me and what we can do to stop it cancelling others.
Stop Press 3: Freddie Attenborough, the Communications Officer of the Free Speech Union has written an excellent piece for the Critic about the PayPal affair.
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Stuart Andrew is floppier than a damp dishcloth. Nobody cares what he has to say.
Pudsey can do better: Pudsey Bear.
The government are frightened of a not-that-famous retired footballer sounding off. I think we can win this war – the enemy are rattled. They know their lies can collapse their house of cards.
Won’t be long before they do an Andrew Tate on him, mark my words.
Don’t care about footy, didn’t know about Barton until this story broke and have no opinion on footy pundits – but what I do care about is the increasing and overt use of govt power to shut down anyone who doesn’t agree with The Narrative™, which seems to be closing in on more and more of us. Assange is of course the pinnacle of this massive totalitarian overreach, but they recently tried it with Russell Brand, now Barton and god knows who else. We must resist.
The standard of senior women’s football is around the standard of 14 to 15 year old boys. The England senior women’s team, for example, might be able to give an under 15 academy team a good game, if the boys aren’t too physically. developed yet. That’s just a fact that can be and pretty much has been demonstrated.
That is not to say that women can’t be good at commenting on football games or giving insight. It’s definitely possible. Plenty of men who haven’t played to a high standard do so.
But generally, in the case of men in that position, they know who they are and, for example, if faced with an ex-pro will defer to him.
The problem I see with these women pundits, the ex-player types, is that they seem to present themselves as equals of the men pros. And they just aren’t. Not in that field. And it’s grating.
It would be like some 15 year old academy boy being on a panel with ex-professional men and speaking as if he was one of them. He’d look ridiculous.
That, I think, is the problem.
The question is, why women’s football? Is there huge public demand for it?
Yes but it is the same with women’s tennis (kind of) I remember Serena Williams being asked on TV how she thought she would against the men. ——She replied ” If I played Andy Murray I would lose 6-0 6-0″. ——But this is simply the reality in physical sport. Men are stronger. The current arguments about women in football though to me are related to the stuffing of women on the telly where formerly it would be men talking about men’s football. But not because a woman’s opinion is necessarily a bad thing, but because they are being shoehorned onto programmes for (a) for political purposes of gender equality and (b) to try and promote the women’s game and get more women into football. Then ofcourse you can also tick few other boxes if the woman happens to be black or lesbian. —-It is quite sad really but it pervades all of society now.
Why do we need pundits or commentary anyway? Football, like lots of sports, doesn’t need commentary. Why can’t we just watch the game?
I am always struck by how little conversation about football seems to focus on… football. How many millions Team A paid Team B for a player seems infinitely more important. And the private lives of Managers.
Or whether the player has come out as gay. Or whether there are enough black football managers or you sometimes have to wait 15 minutes to hear about sport because the channel has decided to rant on about race first.
Darts commentary on ITV. Absolutely appalling. The commentators simply will not shut up. It’s not as if they have anything useful to say. Utter crap.
Yep I think it was Dan Maskell who said (something along the lines of) “the best commentators know when to talk and when to shut up.”
Peter Allis was a phenomenal commentator and he learnt from the master himself – Henry Longhurst. A pleasure to listen to.
And it’s all so tediously predictable…’game of two halves etc’. I don’t really watch sport – don’t have a telly for a start – but on occasion, big occasion, I may visit a friend and watch a 6 nations match, and the silences are the golden bit when the commentator shuts the F up and allows you to view the spectacle with your own inner commentary or not.
The BBC do have a second agenda here. They’ve been priced out of most sports coverage. About the only sport they can still afford the rights to is women’s football. As such they’ve been attempting to build an audience for women’s football for years, though not too much in case Sky or Amazon gazump them.
To support the putative audience they need commentators & pundits. It’s possible that the BBC lose MOTD soon & all they’ll be left with is women’s football.
You have to accept that women’s football & rugby are very different to the men’s game. Women’s rugby is often very good. The girls can’t kick the ball very far so they can’t get out of trouble with a 60m kick to touch, consequently they invariably have to run the ball from the deep, so there tend to be more running moves. The England team have some fabulous athletes in the back line. Accept it’s different & enjoy it for what it is. Unless you’re prepared to pay for Sky it’s all you’re gonna get.
An excellent article. Joey Barton is correct. DEI is shit. Tokenism is actually psychologiclly draining.
The gold standard for football punditry was set by Saint and Greavsie, since then nothing has come close.
Joey Barton rightly lambasts the female “pundits” but the dross churned out by the likes of the crisp salesman and his bunch of nonentities is equally boring. Actually unwatchable which is partly why I don’t bother.
The real problem here is not Joey Barton’s opinions it is the thicko MP’s who believe they have a right to regulate those opinions.
By God I wish I could regulate some MP’s
Excellent stuff, HP!
Thanks Aethelred
“By God I wish I could regulate some MP’s”
In the past you could it’s called an Election, sadly nowadays as we seem to be in a one party state it’s getting harder.
Very true.
I enjoy Steven Tucker’s Daily Sceptic articles, always very well-written and entertaining.
Me too. Especially because they’re not solely entertaining, like, say, a typical Mark Steyn rant, but actually have something to say, too.
I seem to recall SoccerAM on Sky having a female co-presenter, i can’t remember her name but nobody batted an eyelid because she was genuinely knowledgeable, entertaining and did a good job. Barton is correct, the current crop are not entertaining and it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that they where hired for reasons other than being the best person for the role.
It was Helen Chamberlain, who was the eye candy, but also a genuine football fan of Torquay United (I think later a Director). I was talking about it with a friend only a couple of days ago. It was a bit risque, a bit ‘Carry On…’, but it was fun and good to watch. With the current crop of females, the lead guy asks them a question, and their response always seems to start ‘Absolutely…’, before they reiterate what the last person said. I want interesting opinions and contrary positions, which is why Soccer Saturday with Jeff Stelling was so bloody good. Jeff was also a mad supporter of a tiny team, Hartlepool in his case, man and boy. Maybe theres something in that.
Helen yes, that’s who I was thinking of.
“… critics like Barton don’t want to see any female sports presenters at all…”
Blokes like to go down the pub and discuss the footie with their mates, not the girls of St Trinians. I doubt there is much support for female presenters in men’s sports among the general male public.
Sexist? Don’t women want men kept out of their sports and their spaces? Sauce for goose, sauce for gander.
don’t want to see any female sports presenters at all
Well, what’s wrong with that? Do I have to want to see something just because BBC or ITV want to put it up? For illustration, let’s assume the BBC would want to put gay porn on TV, something that’s absolutely not far-fetched as these days, few movies about anything seem to be able to do without very explicit sex scenes and diversity obviously requires that gay couples must also feature in them, am I required to want to watch this? I absolutely don’t and nobody is going to tell me that I’m not equally absolutely entitled to that.
There are quite a few walks of life which easily escape woke tentacles, namely all which are neither glorious nor particularly lucrative in terms of amount of work needed to get paid. Eg, there are no diversity hires in areas like rubbish collection or brick laying or roofing.
As a woman I’m glad that there aren’t any diversity hires in these areas. I want the job done properly, and I’m grateful to the men who do it.
Have you thought about running for Prime Minster, Virginia?
Virginia wouldn’t stand a chance MAk – she talks sense.
But diversity isn’t just about women. It is about other things like race, and minorities
Well actually my mate is a fireman, and he tells me they insist on employing a 5’2″ woman whose feet cannot reach the floor of the fire engine. They have quotas. So who would you like to climb up a ladder and rescue a five year old child from the burning fire? A 5’2″ woman or a 6’3″ man? ———If you look hard enough you will find wokery, and you will find it even if you don’t look very hard. I suspect you are wrong about “diversity hires” in those areas like brick laying etc though as all companies these days are finding themselves ostracised if they don’t sign up to ESG and eg hire more black brick layers.
Fire brigade is a public glory – relatively little work role (that’s not supposed to communicate that it’s unimportant, just that the amount of time spent waiting for emergencies is a lot larger than the amount of time spent handling them). The wokesters are just people, after all, and they want their share of the cream whereever cream is to be had. They can do without their share of dog poo. I bet there are also preciously little ‘intersectional victims’ spending their time with carrying around pig and cow halves in abbatoir freezing rooms all night.
I reckon your sister has about the same knowledge of and interest in football as I do. And, just for the record (checks underpants) I am not of the female persuasion
Our politicians are becoming obsessed with closing down free speech. Joey is just expressing his views. No one has any right to call for him being shut down and MPs talking about preventing harms are very, very dangerous. Do they realise they are behaving like communists?
And, some people are not very good at certain things. I am afraid to say that lots of girls are rubbish at sports and engineering and science. And warriors do not have wombs. We can keep pretending and propagandising about women being just men with different sexual organs, but we all know it really isn’t true. Reality does not care about what you feel or believe.
Jeez, you’d think MPs had bigger fish to fry.
Never been a Joey Barton fan as my Old Man would have said he’s uncouth, but on this occasion 100% behind him despite his profanities.
As I recall Jeremy Clarkson saying “you have precious little chance these days getting a job in television if you have a scrotum”!