Back when I was a Sixth Former, aged 16-18, one of my fellow male students happened to support Celtic, despite our college being in northwest England, where, in those pre-internet days, Scottish football shirts were hard to find. One day, the boy’s mother happened to be in Glasgow, so thought she’d try and buy him a Celtic shirt as a surprise – by going into the Rangers Megastore and asking if they sold any there. When told this story later, all the boys present laughed uproariously, understanding immediately why the mother was lucky to escape the shop with her life and skull intact, whereas none of the girls present so much as smiled except in bemused puzzlement, not understanding the implications of this particular sectarian sporting faux pas at all.
The allegedly “dangerous” – more on that word in a moment – stereotype supported by this tale is that females know absolutely nothing about football. This would certainly appear at first glance to be the opinion of Joey Barton, an ex-footballer from the men’s game (i.e., the real one), who has made headlines recently after criticising what he views as the excessive number of female commentators and pundits now being used in TV coverage of his old sport. In particular, he was condemned for a tweet made to his 2.8 million followers about two female ITV pundits, the ex-pros Eni Aluko and Lucy Ward, whom he mockingly called “the Fred and Rose West of football commentary”.
When ITV then put out a tweet of their own, lambasting his “vindictive remarks”, Joey stepped up and apologised, admitting that, “on reflection, I’ve been a tad harsh on Eni Aluko by comparing her to Rose West”. In fact, he said, rather than comparing her to someone part-responsible for merely a few innocent human deaths, he should “clearly” have really placed her in the “Josef Stalin/Pol Pot category”, as “she’s murdered hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of football fans’ ears in the last few years” with her allegedly knowledgeless wittering.
A Dangerous Game
Joey has a new podcast series out soon, Common Sense With Joey Barton, to be hosted by Facebook/Meta, and some have speculated he may simply have been trying to drum up some free publicity for it by making deliberately provocative comments. If so, then another individual in the public eye apparently eager for free media attention was Labour MP Julie Elliott, who called Barton’s words “very, very disturbing”, as opposed to “mildly amusing and ultimately completely insignificant”, as I would have done, before a Commons Select Committee last week.
Elliott then asked Stuart Andrew, who is apparently the Minister for Sport this month, “What do you think can be done from a Government point of view to actually bring pressure on these social media companies not to support people who put out things that are so offensive and so disgusting as he [Barton] has done?”
Instead of answering, “Nothing, love, with attitudes towards free speech like that, it should have been you Joey Barton compared to Stalin, not Eni Aluko”, Mr. Andrew agreed that Barton’s posts were “dangerous comments that open the floodgates for abuse and that’s not acceptable”. He then added that he would “happily” speak to the social media companies hosting Barton’s tweets and forthcoming podcast, also observing that, under the new Online Safety Act, the media regulator Ofcom would in the near future be obliged to intervene and offer guidance on such matters. In other words, Andrew agreed to use both legislation and his own personal influence as an official representative of His Majesty’s Government to attempt to censor and shut down the opinions and jokes of a man whose opinions he personally – or, more likely, fashionable Establishment opinion in general – happened to disagree with.
To judge by subsequent reports, most mainstream media appeared to be basically on the MPs’ side here, not that of Joey Barton. Yet the framing through which Barton’s offences were reported seemed somewhat disingenuous in nature to me. For example, in what precise way were Barton’s comments supposed to actually be “dangerous”, as Stuart Andrew claimed they were?
Tokens of Disaffection
The basic idea seemed to be that, by cruelly criticising female pundits online, Barton was potentially opening them up to social media pile-ons, potentially impacting their mental health and well-being: words are harmful, as the Left continually now say (except when they’re hounding people online themselves, obviously). Furthermore, Joey was painted as promulgating a patronising and outdated stereotype that women were constitutionally incapable of knowing anything about sport whatsoever and should stick to their true home in the kitchen, not the sports studio. As the current Chelsea Women’s coach, Emma Hayes, put it about some of Barton’s earlier comments back in December, using several classic elements of contemporary woke-speak:
If you haven’t experienced systemic misogyny, like lots of us have, you can’t for one moment understand how detrimental some of these conversations are knowing that anything anyone says just enables an absolute pile-on, particularly on social media.
Except, if you actually look at what Barton has been saying, he has not just been handing out random sexist abuse as part of a pointless campaign of “systemic misogyny” at all. I can’t pretend to have read every single one of his tweets, and at times he does just seem to insult people for the sake of it – he’s Joey Barton, after all. Yet, examined in toto, there is a consistent underlying rationale to his arguments overall. Most media reports have misrepresented and obscured his overall point. But why might this be? Well, just look at the following (admittedly expletive-ridden) tweet Joey posted in further response to ITV’s criticism of his Fred and Rose West gibe:
Forget all the distractions about swearing and serial killers, it is those words about Eni Aluko and Lucy Ward being “under-qualified, under-prepared [and] tokenistic” that are actually what our current governing class object to the most. As Joey says, the “fucking idiots” at ITV expose viewers to Aluko and Ward’s words by “force”, not due to popular demand, as in his view there is no popular demand for them. General consensus (at least amongst the general public as opposed to amongst the media and political classes) is that they are tedious and simply not very good at their job. It is not necessarily so much that critics like Barton don’t want to see any female sports presenters at all, it’s just that they think those who do get employed should be chosen for their innate presenting skills or expertise at communicating knowledge, not for spurious social engineering reasons.
Joey therefore actually suggests such useless female presenters are serial killers like Fred and Rose West not simply as an arbitrary sexist insult, but because they are killing the game for viewers like him who want to see pundits and commentators chosen to front games on the basis of how interesting/well-informed/entertaining they are, not simply on the basis of how many woke boxes they happen to tick.
Media and politicians would prefer to paint Joey as a neanderthal sexist, rather than someone with a rational objection to general politically correct trends in society here. Then, they don’t have to address his actual arguments, which is very handy for them, because his actual arguments, once you strip all the obscenities out of them, happen quite often to be correct.
There’s No ‘DEI’ in Team
Barton is a consistent long-term critic of the current Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) mania currently being foisted upon society, as can be seen in another of his tweets, celebrating the recent highly pleasing removal of Claudine Gay from her post at Harvard University:
Like many critics, Barton feels Gay only got the job on the grounds of being black and female (and probably even her surname too, these days), something which apparently outranked her complete uselessness and unsuitability for the role – and that ITV’s employment of the similarly black and female Eni Aluko as a pundit proceeded on the same basic grounds. Here, in response to footage of a very poor shot at goal indeed from Aluko during an old training session, is Barton’s withering assessment of why he thinks she is really being employed by ITV as a pundit:
Just look at those disgraceful opinions: “DEI is a load of shit” which has only been imposed upon society “All off the back of the BLM/George Floyd nonsense”. Well, now we can see why his comments are really so dangerous, can’t we? DEI doesn’t work, and inherently meritocratic fields like sport and live TV broadcasting reveal the sad fact to the world for all to see, in a way which simply cannot be hidden – except by forcibly shutting up anyone like Mr. Barton who happens to draw attention to such awkward truths.
Disorder of Merit
Essentially, Barton’s argument is that all sports-related programming has had its former roster of pundits and experts replaced with athletic avatars of Claudine Gay. For example, the BBC’s long-running A Question of Sport show was recently cancelled after over 50 years of broadcasting, something Barton blames primarily on producers replacing the old presenters beloved of its traditional audience with new, more diverse (i.e., tokenistic) but less entertaining ones, who drove the audience away through sheer tediousness.
He thinks the same fate soon awaits the Beeb’s weekly Football Focus fixture-previews programme, which has been shedding viewers since its previous host, a white male named Dan Walker, was replaced by a black female ex-pro, Alex Scott. In Barton’s view, Scott got this job more for her genitals than her journalism, leading the show to degenerate into “Drivel and nonsense served with a side order of boring”. As he says: “Well done to all involved. Another flagship destroyed by The Tokens.”
Of course, Barton’s qualitative assessment of Scott’s presenting style is by definition subjective: maybe some people find her punditry fascinating. Yet, following Barton’s criticism of her, Scott seemed to let the cat out of the bag by ending coverage of a women’s match with the words: “Just before we say goodbye, to all the women in football, in front of the camera, behind it, the players on the pitch, to everyone that attends games, keep being the role models that you continue to be.”
But that attitude is the whole problem in microcosm, isn’t it? It is not the purpose of TV sports presenters to act as “role models”, demonstrating to all and sundry that persons in possession of XX chromosomes are indeed capable of fronting football shows: it is their job to inform and entertain viewers, regardless of whether they are black, female, male, white or whatever. If you think your primary purpose as a presenter is to be a “role model”, however, then your primary purpose on-screen is actually propagandistic, not journalistic. You are acting as a walking avatar of DEI.
It seems that, when it comes to TV coverage of our national game, our broadcasters have increasingly chosen to replace professional footballers with professional victims instead. And, if you choose to stand up and criticise this lamentable trend, it now appears Ofcom and the Government stand poised to try to intervene to stop you from doing so.
Stuart Andrew MP and Julie Elliott MP apparently consider Joey Barton’s online antics to be “dangerous” and “disturbing”. Personally, I think it’s the official response to them which is far more deserving of having those particular words applied to them. But what do you expect from our increasingly censorious political class these days?
Forget Fred and Rose West, Stuart Andrew and Julie Elliott are nothing more than Fred and Rose Westminster.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
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”!