In news that went largely under the radar, on May 7th the Garrick Club finally voted to allow women members – thus overturning almost 200 years of tradition. The vote, which passed with 60% in favour, came after a relentless campaign by The Guardian to shame the club into changing its membership policy.
The Guardian’s campaign began in March with the publication of a leaked membership list, characterised by the paper as a “roll-call of British Establishment”. The list’s publication undoubtedly caused immense embarrassment for various prominent members, who were suddenly forced to explain to their female colleagues how on earth they could be members of such a sexist, misogynistic, patriarchal organisation.
To give you a sense of how little people cared about the Garrick’s membership policy prior to the Guardian’s campaign, here’s a chart showing Google Search interest for ‘Garrick Club’ in the UK since 2004:
As you can see, the only major spike in the last 20 years occurred in March of 2024.
The obvious argument for maintaining the club’s long-standing traditions – as commentators such as myself, Alison Pearson and Georgia Gilholy noted – is that men and women are different. And so mixed-sex groups are different from all-male groups. This is an undeniable fact.
But dispiritingly few of the Garrick Club’s members have been willing to state it publicly. One wrote a piece for the Daily Mail ridiculing Simon Case and Richard Moore as “a pair of wimps” for resigning under pressure from the Guardian, but he wasn’t willing to reveal his own name. Even the rambunctious and gaffe-prone Boris Johnson, a former member, felt the need to state in an article defending the Garrick that “I would certainly have said that women should be admitted”.
Why? Why shouldn’t individuals voluntarily associate with members of their own sex? After all, the anti-Garrick arguments don’t stack up.
If it’s unfair for the club to exclude women, then it’s unfair for other single-sex organisations to do the same. And the membership policy was already profoundly ‘unfair’ – 99.9% of people could never hope to join due to being too poor and socially irrelevant. As regards the claim that female lawyers and politicians were at some kind of disadvantage, this is highly dubious. The vast majority of lawyers and politicians weren’t members to begin with.
Club convention apparently prevents members from talking about the club (like Fight Club, I guess). But it’s surely possible for them to make general arguments in favour of single-sex organisations. Some of the more right-thinking members, like the BBC’s John Simpson, have been opining in support of women members for years. So why couldn’t their opponents also speak out?
We aren’t privy to exactly what went on at the 7th May vote, but we do know the two-thirds majority required for previous votes to pass was abandoned in favour of a simple majority. (Recall that less than two thirds voted for the recent change.) This speaks of panic among senior members that, God forbid, the Guardian should run another unflattering article.
Why are leading men of Britain being ordered about by a left-wing newspaper? Maybe the Garrick’s roster isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
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“Disinformation is one of the gravest threats weighing on our democracies,” he says.
This is absolsutely true, but it is the Governments who are using it to push narrative and silence opposition. Ergo, the Governments are the gravest threats to our democracies.
I must say, I’ve had doubts about how far Musk will go in his ‘free speech’ campaign. I dont think it reasonable for him to withdraw from the EU, so I expect he will sail somewhere close to the line, without actually crossing it.
Withdrawing from the EU might get people’s attention, though most likely people would blame Musk not the EU.
Musk can’t take on the EU by himself.
If the population were ready to see him as a champion and rally behind him to fight for free speech, then obviously he could.
But we’ve seen how spineless the population is. Many of them have offered up their children as guinea pigs for untested jabs to appease a menacing state bureaucracy, so…
I think it would do more harm than good for him to take that step, yes.
There’s little support for freedom of speech, at least in the UK and Europe, among people I speak to. People will tell you they like the idea, but when you start quoting types of speech (“hate”, “misinformation”) and ask if they should be allowed they will tell you “no of course not”.
It would also probably be suicidal.
I don’t see Twitter’s withdrawal from the EU’s code of practice an empty gesture. It is a signal. Now, one can debate what the signal is.
It might just be to try to look good. Or it might be a signal of measured defiance which says – ok, you might be forcing me to comply by turning a code into law, but I will t least, with my gesture, show you I don’t agree with it or like it.
I don’t know how committed Musk really is to free speech. I doubt few do. But if one assumes he is, how he plays his cards is anything but simple. It would be fiendishly complicated to try to runTwitter as a free speech platform in today’s regulatory environment, if that was what one wanted to do, without being destroyed by the heavy hand of ever more oppressive and authoritarian states.
My guess is that he’s trying to do his best, but I am ready to be disappointed and discover I’ve been naive.
I’ve said it before and I will say it again – Musk doesn’t give a flying duck about Free Speech.
Surely Twitter need to replace the display of offending content with a message saying banned in the EU. If people are really interested they can use a VPN to avoid this. If enough people are annoyed then there will be push back.
The EU appears not to want Twitter being what it is but wants something else instead.
The EU should build its own ‘service’ as it wants it to be – I’m sure they could make it just as popular eventually.
I hope Elon has the power and the balls to withdraw Twitter from the EU territory.