Former England cricket captain Michael Vaughan has seen racism charges against him dismissed. But the BBC still refuses to bring him back, showing that for the woke it’s not innocent till proven guilty but guilty even when proven innocent. The Mail has the story.
Vaughan was charged by the England and Wales Cricket Broad with making a racist comment towards Yorkshire team-mates of Asian descent Azeem Rafiq, Adil Rashid, Rana Naved-ul-Hasan and Ajmal Shahzad before a match in 2009.
It was alleged Vaughan told them: “There’s too many of you lot, we need to have a word about that.”
However, the Cricket Disciplinary Commission dismissed the charges against 2005 Ashes winner Vaughan in a verdict released on Friday morning.
The verdict said “on the balance of probabilities” Vaughan did not use racist language “at the time and in the specific circumstances alleged.” …
Vaughan has always categorically denied using racist language.
The CDC said in its verdict: “The Panel is not satisfied on the balance of probabilities that these words were spoken by MV [Vaughan] at the time and in the specific circumstances alleged.”
It added there were “significant inconsistencies” in the evidence given by primary witnesses Rafiq and Rashid.
It added its findings “do not in any way undermine the wider assertions” made by Rafiq about racism at Yorkshire CCC.
Vaughan’s lawyer Christopher Stoner KC had highlighted flaws in the ECB’s investigation during the CDC hearing in early March, specifically the fact that as many Yorkshire players in that 2009 team as possible weren’t sought out or interviewed. Rafiq’s main support came from team mate Adil Rashid, who is also his business partner, though Rafiq denied blackmailing him into supporting his position.
Vaughan issued the following statement this morning:
It has been both difficult and upsetting to hear about the painful experiences which Azeem has described over the past three years.
The outcome of these CDC proceedings must not be allowed to detract from the core message that there can be no place for racism in the game of cricket, or in society generally.
As with others who have spoken about their time at Yorkshire, I can only speak of my own experiences and of my own time there. The dismissal of the specific charge that concerned me takes nothing away from Azeem’s own lived experiences.
The hearing made public that Azeem and I met 18 months ago, well before the CDC proceedings came into existence.
I told him then that I am sorry for his unacceptable, negative experiences at the club I love and in the sport I love. We had what I thought was a really positive and constructive discussion.
We shook hands with a shared intention to work together in order to create positive change in cricket.
For my part, nothing has altered in that respect. There is still a job to do and I remain keen to help bring about positive change in any way that I can. Cricket has been my life. Particularly with an issue such as this, CDC proceedings were an inappropriate, inadequate and backwards step.
One of many reasons why I hold that view is because CDC proceedings are adversarial. They invite claim and counterclaim. They invite those involved to accuse each other of untruths or of lying.
The inevitable consequence of the ECB’s decision-making was that three former teammates, one of whom is a current England international player, were pitted against one another in what later became a public forum for the world at large to see.
Despite being criticised by the ECB for not accusing others of lying. I remain of the view that no good can come of that approach. There are no winners in this process and there are better ways — there have to be better ways — for cricket to move forward positively and effectively.
I have never wanted to do anything that runs contrary to genuine efforts to clean up the game of cricket. I truly hope people can understand why, on a personal level, I could not just accept, or apologise for, something which I know I did not do.
The CDC panel found a number of other figures guilty of charges which consist of the use of racist insults and language. Andrew Gale was found to have referred to Rafiq as “Rafa the Kaffir” and to have used the term ‘Paki’ including calling a player a “shit Paki”. Matthew Hoggard was found guilty of using the term ‘TBM’ or ‘token black man’ towards Ismail Dawood in 2004 and 2005 in the Yorkshire environment.
John Blain has said he will appeal being found guilty of using the term ‘Paki’ in 2010 and 2011, telling the Telegraph:
I’ll continue to fight this by whatever means are available. I guess there will be an appeals process and a subsequent process after that will have to be also considered. I’ve always said that I wouldn’t rule out having to go to the High Court to contest this because it’s a huge miscarriage of justice. It’s unfair and very difficult to digest when I’ve done nothing. I’ve done absolutely nothing wrong and that’s the hardest thing.
I’ve suffered north and south of the border. The collusion that was involved in England has obviously carried over into Scotland because of the characters involved. It’s a very difficult situation but the Lord has given me a cross to carry and I must try to carry that as best I can.
It’s an unfair and unjust situation. The process itself will be very difficult moving forward. These things take time but I have to move on and try to get justice. It’s hard to accept. I’ve done nothing wrong and I have the clear evidence to prove that.
Vaughan was stood down from the BBC’s coverage of England’s Ashes series in Australia after Rafiq made the allegation in November 2021; he also left his own BBC radio show. Despite being found innocent, the BBC pathetically said it “wouldn’t be appropriate for Vaughan to have a role in our Ashes team or wider coverage of the sport at the moment”. We might wonder what happened to innocent until proven guilty? This is more like guilty even when proven innocent. Where has the liberal love of rehabilitating offenders gone? The BBC won’t even ‘rehabilitate’ the acquitted.
The most obvious conclusion from this mess is that this is no way to address problems of a culture of racist language and banter at sports clubs. Why make the stakes so high? Why cancel people’s careers, bring sports clubs to the point of bankruptcy and invite a media circus? What an absurd over-reaction, one which is surely indicative of a moral panic and not a proportionate response to the problem. Of course cricket players need to clean up their language and stop using terms that make people feel belittled. But as Vaughan says in his statement, there must be a better way of doing it than this. The stakes need to come down, the publicity needs to go away (which only comes with the high stakes and public hearings), and the management just needs to take steps to end the gratuitous use of racist language and insults, even in jest. But is woke Britain capable of taking proportionate action anymore?
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A white middle aged man must be guilty of something – that’s enough for the totalitarian left.
You already said it. White, middle aged, man….
Insisting on “diversity” by colour/sex/religion/sexuality etc will obviously lead to tokenism.
Is it racist to say so?
No, it’s just common sense
Why must cricket players clean up their language? Should they perhaps best be forced to remain silent unless a political tribunal has decided that a particular utterance they were informally planning to make would be acceptable? There is no such thing as a right not to be belittled by other people the state ought to enforce when the targets were certain kinds of people. As a matter of politeness and more generally, manners, people shouldn’t verbally abuse others intentionally. However, they’re wont to do this nevertheless and in most cases, say, referring to someone from Wales as sheep shagger, this is not something the courts would or should handle.
People aren’t always nice to each other. That’s a fact of life other people, who certainly also weren’t always nice to others, will have to cope with.
Indeed. Why is the term “Paki” unacceptable whereas an Australian referring to Brits as “pommies” is just banter?
In Oldham the Pakistani community refer to their cousins the Bangladeshis as ‘deshies.’ When I first heard deshies I had to have it explained to me.
The Pakis hate the Deshies and vice versa.
Obviously a bit of inter-cultural banter is acceptable. I doubt I could use Paki or Deshi and not risk a visit from plod.
Which just shows us that “anti-racism” is being used as a cover for an attack on our country, or what’s left of it.
Without a doubt tof and blatantly.
An attack on the majority, white part of the country
Agree. For example, take a look at Parsi jokes, which frequently depict Gujeratis as the English depict the Irish or South Africans depict the Boers. The context varies, the core of the jokes is the same!
Damn right.
Bloody sick of this policing of language.
Yes it’s like the dreaded ”N” word that is OK if that word applies to you and you own it, using it to talk to others who also claim it as their own. Anybody else calling a person that and they’d get knocked out! LOL Context is everything. Which brings me on nicely to this fabulous act, which sums it up in a humorous way I think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVN_0qvuhhw&ab_channel=TimMinchin
The answer to your question is quite simple. ——–“Diversity” is not about getting all races together and removing discrimination etc. ———-It is about one thing only —-“Less White People”
Time to highjack this place with some next level nano-weirdness once more. Yes it’s Spartacus again with their latest installment of what our future looks like if we all sit back and allow humankind to be augmented. So if you want to know more about ”smart dust” or the use of ”neuralnanorobots” then read on;
”All of the tech necessary to reduce mankind to a state of absolute, irreversible technological slavery is being actively researched and there are numerous published papers on it, many of them in open-access journals.
By conducting searches with various keywords, like Internet of Bodies, Internet of Bio-Nano Things, intra-body nano-networks, Smart Cities, nanotransducer BCIs, biodigital convergence, synthetic biology, bionanotechnology, and so on, you will pull up paper after paper of literal mad science. Implantable tracking devices, methods to manipulate the membrane potentials of cells remotely, ways to self-assemble logic circuits and molecular Turing machines inside people’s bodies, and so on. These are not mere hypotheticals or flights of fancy. Test articles have been engineered and experiments have been conducted, with success.
It would be easy to write this all off as a result of simple scientific curiosity, were it not for the fact that insane billionaire Neo-Malthusians and anti-humanists of every stripe, as well as their WEF sycophants evangelizing about Net-Zero and Smart Cities, are grinning like Cheshire cats while openly spouting ethical monstrosities.
Smirking psychopaths are sitting in front of us on stages, fingers steepled, insinuating that they plan to use these technologies for blatantly immoral social control, menticide, and the reengineering of humans into their own personal pleasure-animals while they make themselves into literal gods using the same tech.”
https://iceni.substack.com/p/the-unrecognized-threat-of-human
I miss Danny Baker who was always very entertaining but got sacked by the BBC because of one “misjudged” joke he posted on Twitter – a picture of a couple holding hands with a chimpanzee dressed in clothes, with the comment “Royal baby leaves hospital”, shortly after the birth of Harry and Meghan’s son.
I think the only misjudgement was in not realising that his joke would be misconstrued as “racist” by some people lacking a sophisticated sense of humour, including the powers that be at the BBC, when it wasn’t in any real sense racist, it was absurdly beyond racist, and it was a joke!
Nevertheless, despite Danny Baker apologising, the BBC sacked him, the same organisation that never sacked Jimmy Savile.
It shouldn’t be forgotten that Azeem Raffiq was found guilty of using racist language insulting to Jews.
In other words he’s got form.
Oh, but he’s not white so that’s OK then.
“It has been both difficult and upsetting to hear about the painful experiences which Azeem has described over the past three years.”
You limp wristed idiot. Sympathy went out the window on reading that paragraph. Thereafter Vauggan persists in talking the same woke language has his accusers.
I have zero sympathy.
That was the reason for the comment I wrote: This is all about who did or didn’t say something, while everybody, including Will Jones, is taking the Dis is a fery zerious madder! BS at face value. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being of the opinion that there are more XY people living in one’s neighbourhood than one happens to be comfortable with. I’ve read interviews with Indians saying the same about Poles, ironically also, because Poles are racist to us! [despite we belong into this country while they certainly don’t !!1]. And insulting someone by referring to him as token black man (or sheep-shagging wanker, fwiw) is nothing but an insult targetted at a particular person. Depending on the context, this can be regarded as bad behaviour. But it could as well be a perfectly appropriate retort. And there certainly shouldn’t be official tribunals trying to regulate bad behaviour of adults. This would literally be a nanny state.
Exactly. I think we’re just poles apart from people who think that they have the right never to be offended by anything.
I tend to see feeling offended as a character flaw – if someone’s criticism of you is justified, suck it up and better yourself, if it is not justified why would it bother you?
I just don’t want to be on the same planet as these people.
Probably because of the hat….
One rule for Vaughan, another for Lineker. Whither the BBC? As this rate wither the BBC.
Hopefully
Mr Vaughn, tell the BBC to stick their job where the sun don’t shine. Who wants to work for this embarrassment of an organisation anyway? Except cretins like Lineker.
Vaughan is pathetic. He mouths all PC palaver like a good apparatchik hauled into a Soviet court. Listen, mate – you were on the sharp end of a race hustle. You know it, everyone knows it, have the balls to say it.
In other news, BBC Diversity and Hurty Feelings Executive stated that ex Azov Brigade Ukrainian Trans Adviser will be joining Match of the Day. His conviction for torturing POWs he asserts was incorrect and did not reflect his lived experience.