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.
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Actually, she shows up in the dictionary under “deluded t**t”.
Who are these mysterious downvoters? And why do they never have the courage to say why they are doing so?
‘liberty’
VARIABLE NOUN
Liberty is the freedom to live your life in the way that you want, without interference from other people or the authorities.
Collins English Dictionary.
Presumably Martha Spurrier and her gang of layabouts and chancers have taken an extended furlough these last three years.
They are despicable.
Oh dear. How worried should we be? Is it time to panic buy the loo rolls yet? Actually I’m using the Royal ”we” given I don’t even live in the UK now…Just forewarning you guys though!
”UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace confirmed today that the government has provided the Storm Shadow missiles to Ukraine’s military.
‘The donation of these weapons systems gives Ukraine the best chance to defend themselves against Russia’s continued brutality, especially the deliberate targeting of Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, which is against international law,’ he told the House of Commons.
‘Ukraine has a right to be able to defend itself against this.’
Storm Shadow, the Royal Air Force’s (RAF) long-range cruise missile, has a sprawling range of up to 190 miles and could reach deep into occupied territory.
Wallace said the missiles will only be used ‘within Ukranian sovereign territory’.
The UK prime minister Rishi Sunak’s official spokesman said earlier today: ‘The Prime Minister announced (the UK) would be the first country to provide long-range weapons to Ukraine.
‘That has not changed.”’
https://metro.co.uk/2023/05/11/russia-vows-adequate-response-after-uk-supplies-cruise-missiles-to-ukraine-18766189/
Providing Ukraine with Really Expensive Shit[tm] that’s therefore only available in Really Limited Numbers[tm] is a token measure. Presumably, the idea is that the Ukrainians can do some field testing to determine if these missiles can actually be used for something.
These ar#eholes have no damned right spaffing our money like this. Who the hell gave them the right to declare war?
I am not at war with Russia but apparently we have to give money and weapons, which we haven’t got, to a wholly corrupt, gangster government so that more people can be killed. We are fighting a war by the back door then.
Doubtless everything we do is wholly compliant with International law so that’s alright.
It’s a bit like the situation of the USA in the first world war until 1917: Formally neutral but in the really big business of lending money to England and France so that they could buy loads and loads of weapons and ammunition from American companies. Except that there’s no money to be made here and hence, nothing has been privatized here so far.
There’s also a second aspect here people with no military experience are probably not aware of: The shelf-life of ammunition is limited. This means Ukraine is probably getting a lof of stuff which would otherwise need to be destroyed in a more expensive way in order to get rid of it.
With no environmental impact at all ! NOT
I really only know this for the German navy but the usual method to get rid of old shells or rockets is fire/ start them in an area of the ocean where all other ships are a safe distance away and let the remains fall into the sea.
From fighting against compulsory ID cards to campaigning for trans equality – Liberty stands on the side of freedom and justice.
What’s the meaning of trans equality? All men must be forced to put on lipstick and dress in miniskirts so that the few who do so voluntarily no longer stand out?
I had to look up the meaning of “gender critical feminist”!
Honestly, I’m so out of the loop and getting left behind, it was always just plain old “feminist” in my lifetime. It’s like the term has evolved and now there’s spin-off versions fgs! I’m a 
It’s like the “men who have sex with men” thing though. It was always just “gay/homosexual” up until now. To my mind, if it’s not broke don’t fix it. And stop highjacking a term such as “feminism” and bastardizing it to suit your own ends. Truly unnecessary. Stupid labels and terminology man…
‘Feminism’ is broke, hugely split over the trans issue and the definition of ‘woman’.
Yes it feels almost like a meaningless term nowadays. Especially as I certainly don’t identify with the loony, fringe-radicals. Good old-fashioned equal rights and opportunities is what I signed up for and now that has been accomplished it seems, due to society being remolded into something altogether crazy, warped and sinister, I think I’ll take a rain check on the current edition. You shouldn’t have to label yourself as anything in order to be against this trans activist lunacy that threatens our kids and society as a whole. Any decent, compassionate person with an ounce of common sense would prioritize children’s welfare above all else, especially above the pseudo-rights of a bunch of crazy, screaming banshees dressed as pantomime dames.
Can’t fault you there Mogs.I
In the UK and countries like it women do have equal rights and have had so for years – which I hasten to add is a good thing.
Do we still need feminism then?
Well not that I’m very up to date on it all, as previously stated, but I’d say two things. Firstly, feminism seems to have evolved so much that it’s now basically unrecognizable from what it was intended to be at the outset. I think a lot of women are not comfortable aligning themselves with something which has forgotten its roots and has basically lost sight of its most fundamental objectives. Said objectives have been achieved in the main and so it could be argued, especially given the direction the movement is going, that many want to get off the bus because it’s been highjacked and we didn’t sign up for this. Is feminism now irrelevant in most countries where equality of the sexes has been recognized for years? Very possibly, but I’m not remotely a scholar on the subject so I’ll leave it to others who are more well-read than me.
Which brings me on to the second point; I don’t like labels or being labelled. I don’t think it’s appropriate to pigeon-hole people, as if they stay neatly defined within rigid borders and never move. For instance, I’m not religious but I don’t call myself an atheist. I believe equal rights for all are a basic human right in this day and age but I don’t think I need to choose a camp and wave a flag to signal my allegiance to that particular group. I’m just sick to the back teeth of labels everywhere tbh, like everybody has to choose a team, a cause, then defend it like some hostile, rabid dog just because that’s how it’s done nowadays. It just seems insane and entirely unnecessary to me. Just be a decent, compassionate person who’s in possession of integrity and let no label place limitations on you.
Anyway, you didn’t ask for an essay but I gave you a mini-essay, in true wind-up toy style anyway! lol I’ll leave it at that I think.
I applaud and share your dislike of being labelled and hanging labels on people.
I’m cautiously optimistic you won’t be calling me a misogynist again any time soon
Can’t beat a huge split !
Never sink to the level of using our oppressors language because that allows them to control the argument.
You are so right and it is more important that most people realise.
I never ever let anyone refer to the last three years as a “pandemic” without asking what they mean.
it’s tiring and if I’m honest tiresome, but language is the arena on which so many battles are lost.
Stop it, I’ve smudged me nail varnish now
“The strange kind of Left-progressive managerialism-cum-authoritarianism of our ‘new’ governing elite”
Interesting article, and one of the best descriptions (however clunky) I’ve seen yet for something with no accurate precedent, so no accurate way to define. Though I wonder if ‘class’ might not be a better word than ‘elite’.
Totalitarianism has been defined partly as a state in which a growing number of people, disaffected with their lot and disconnected from each other, find a sense of purpose in an intertwined set of ideological beliefs. The nature of the individual beliefs, or even the whole set doesn’t matter; they’re subject to the whims of the totalitarian bloc as a whole as well as its governing class. But the sense of purpose in holding and actualising them takes on a total power of its own when, crucially, this sense of purpose is shared by a significant group of people. The significance can lie in the size, or degree of influence of this group.
As the this sense of purpose located in the holding of a shared ideology, rather than the components of the ideology spreads amongst a population, it becomes to the advantage of the bloc to stoke the disaffection and disconnection in the wider population that can act as a recruiting tool – hence the primacy of the more disruptive and divisive elements that make up its belief system (envy was traditionally its chief emotive weapon, though nowadays shame seems to have taken precedent). This phenomena looks from the outside like it is driven by the elite of this bloc. As chief beneficiaries of the bloc’s expansion, it is, but not exclusively: the whole body of the bloc perpetuates it, consciously and unconsciously.
This sense of purpose without conscious direction, apart from a belief in belief itself, is easy to see in smaller groups like communal cults. Its psychological grip is obvious. It subordinates to itself all other governors and regulators of behaviour, including relational rules and individual reason. Honesty to others, but particularly the self (which always takes some effort) can be more easily shelved with the reassurance this shared purpose provides, filling the vacuum it leaves. This manifests as a subjectivist mindset, where reality becomes whatever adherents need it to be; where there is no objective truth, just an endlessly mutating series of relativistic relationships based on a liquid moral ground defined by the needs of the group. Postmodernism and cultural Marxism were both products of this subjectivist mindset on a societal level.
Here lies the other reason, not covered in the main article, why the dominant class this nascent totalitarianism creates is so prone (to the point it can use it as a tool) to projection of its own behaviour, fears and neuroses onto outside groups. Loss of the core sense of self is a consequence of the pathological self-deception of subjectivism. It leaves you with no reference point for reality. Where a need to believe takes precedent over what is believed, the individual components of a belief system become too circular, shifting, irrational and externally defined to provide any solid ground to act as a reference point.
But some sort of objective reference point is always necessary to relate to the world in any practical way. Where to find it? Because it can no longer be found in yourself, you naturally start locating it in others. You’re more likely to start seeing other people’s struggles; other people’s experience of unfairness or triumph as your own (as we see in Gender Ideology / Critical Race Theory). In relation to the main article, you’re also more likely (and find it easier) to locate the negative consequences of your behaviour towards others in yourself. Therefore others become containers for all the negative parts of your behaviour which under totalitarianism can go unacknowledged and unexamined. Hence historical and current censorship, bullying, purges, support of policies with devastating consequences for vulnerable people and ultimately murder, all with the glowing feeling of a noble, shared cause.
Under a subjectivist mindset, which is a natural, organic endpoint of totalitarianism, and what I think we’re seeing in the mishmash of dishonest, relativistic, nihilistic, divisive, regressive set of convictions that seem to have become a unified motivational force in the culturally and politically influential class, life and reality become and endless, disorienting hall of mirrors.
Oops, in the penultimate paragraph, I meant ‘In relation to the main article, you’re also more likely (and find it easier) to locate the negative consequences of your behaviour towards others in them rather than yourself’.
That’s cleared that up then.
I finally get to the point, then sausage fingers engage!
Great points extremely eloquently put. Liquid morality is a great way of putting it.
I think this might even more simply boil down to basic narcissism and the fact that it’s almost become a mainstream virtue these days. And it doesn’t matter how ludicrous or removed from reality the stuff you’re spouting, as long as involves ‘feeling good’, ‘fighting injustice’ and ‘being kind’, anything goes if it keeps you in the club.
I don’t think it’s ever been this bad. Narcissism is a modern day global brain cancer that has been allowed to grow and fester like a fungus through the death of proper social interaction and people spending vast amounts of time under the illusion that they’re king shit of turd mountain but ultimately they’re staring at a slim brick of plastic and rubber that they can use to manipulate their perceptions of the world to suit whatever they want to feel like or whatever they see as fashionable and making them look good at the time. As opposed to real life social interactions round a table in a pub for example, where their junk science fear mongering Nostradamus shtick or pompous race baiting would automatically be met with any number of uncomfortable floor staring indications that they’re being an obnoxious bore or a hectoring prick. And our global ruling class and their corporate gimps put billions into cynically nurturing this behaviour to suit their agenda and they feed it like a giant pet Medusa. The returns on their investments are enormous.
All reason, judgement and critical perception have been overwritten by the desire to be in an anti-human cult of moronism called ‘Be Kind’ and it suits our global cartel to a tee.
I find few people actually believe in free speech really.
Most people would prefer to draw the line somewhere before the actual right to say anything you like, literally anything.
I find that is for two reasons.
First people tend to equate saying something with the consequences that follow. For example, shouting fire in a crowded theatre that leads to a stampede that injures people.
Second, some things are so completely objectionable that one struggles to imagine how anyone in their right mind would think otherwise and so limiting speech in relation to that couldn’t be a problem For example, someone standing up in defence of rape.
Seems sensible but shouting fire in a crowded theatre may not always cause a fatal stampede, so the problem is not the speech in and of itself. And as far as the highly objectionable goes, the problem is that drawing the line of what is highly objectionable eventually gets highly subjective, There are people out there who appear to be convinced that CO2 is going to destroy humanity…
As I already wrote in a past comment: Human communication can functional or informative. The Shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre is an example of functional communication: The audience is not supposed to be informed about the fact that there’s a fire in the theatre but urgently asked, if not ordered, to do something to avoid falling prey to the fire. It’s perfectly sensible to limit such functional communication.
OTOH, someone standing on a soapbox and holding a speech about gender as social construct or the manifold advantages of gas heaters doesn’t plan to accomplish anything as direct consequence of his words save influencing the opinions of whoever listens to him. It’s this kind of purely informative communication freedom of speech applies to.
The woke pseudo-argument against freedom of speech is usually to deny that informative communication exists, ie, to claim that merely seeking to influence the opinions of an audience is already a potentially harmful real-world effect which thus needs to be limited to prevent such harm.
I’m not sure that the distinction you make between those two types of speech is useful.
When someone says that covid jabs are dangerous and should be avoided, is he being informative or is he just trying to influence opinion?
If you ask people, they will say they do, and then when you quote more and more taboo examples of speech the number who stay with you tails off and you’re left with the lunatic fringe represented by people like us.
Liberty doesn’t believe in Liberty
************************************
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Wokingham RG40 2FE
It´s a shame that the environmentalist lobby and the climate doom lobby are so often conflated. They are quite independent of one another.
Few dispute the impact of humans on the environment. The reduction in animal species and numbers is well known, as is the tearing down of jungles for mass cash-crops.
But the alleged warming of the climate is just another blip in the earth´s ever-cycling climate and it has at times been far hotter without disaster. Nor is CO₂ the demon it´s claimed to be. In fact plant life flourishes in high CO₂ levels.
I´m for care and attention to the environment and our natural world.
But I´m unconvinced that there´s unprecedented, human-caused climate change.
It´s worth distinguishing between the two issues.
Thanks for this very interesting and informative article. I shall have to reread it a couple of times to let it really sink in.