Our society has taken a sinster turn. It has become more authoritarian, less tolerant and more draconian.
Organisations which should be providing a service to their customers get drawn into pseudo-political posturing and turn into Kafka-esque wielders of absurd and incomprehensible powers, producing helpless victims in their wake. One example (possibly not the best) was Nigel Farage being debanked by Coutts, owned by Natwest, still part owned by you and me through the government's 40% share. Since when is it a bank's role to decide what political views are acceptable?
The example I give to you today (though there are many others of much greater significance, I accept) is Linzi Smith, a Newcastle United football fan.
Smith is a lifelong Toon fan and has spent thousands of pounds on match tickets and merchandise. She also happens to be a lesbian who has concerns about the implications of gender self identification and its implications for women's rights. These are legitimate views which she has tweeted about, in ways which some might find radical, or even offensive.
Smith was dobbed by some faceless snitch to her football club, claiming that her presence at a match might make someone feel "unsafe". (Eh? In a 55,000 crowd?) The logic for that is elusive but one can suppose that the complainant wanted to disrupt the life of someone they happened to disagree with. And golly, they succeeded.
Despite never having expressed her legally held views at or in any way connected with her football club, or given any reason when at the ground that her conduct could be problematic, her club took the matter seriously and referred it to the Premier League. The 'corrupt as feck Premier League'* kicked its investigation unit, originally intended to root out racists, into action and it over-reacted like a footballer rolling over and over pretending they have been fouled.
It produced an "Online investigation and target profile", identifying where Smith lives and works and even where she walks her dog, along with something called personal "vulnerabilities". I have no idea what the last of these points means but it sounds more than sinister.
Once they received the Premier League's report Newcastle United banned Smith from matches, telling her that her tweets constituted harassment and were contrary to the club's diversity and inclusion policy. They passed the dossier to the Northumberland Police for investigation as a possible hate crime offence. Officers came to her home, said they had grounds to arrest her and interviewed her under caution - before concluding there were no grounds for action.
Smith is now taking the club to court to assert her right to hold and express her opinions.
Mark Wallace, writing in the digital news distributor Pressreader, noted that he had been a fool to worry that Newcastle United or the Premier League might be tempted to abandon historic values like freedom of expression and respect for privacy in return for Saudi money. "It turns out they were absolutely gagging to go the full Stasi off their own bat, no Saudi money required" he said.
The views of the barcodes' owners on the issue haven't been promulgated but one might assume they would be inclined to agree with prejudice against people who choose a different gender from the one they were assigned at birth. Perhaps the journalists should inquire what the views of Yassir Al-Rumayyan, the club's chairman, are on the club's reaction. Or, indeed, its policy on access to the women's toilets in the ground.
Wallace also noted just how sinister it is for someone to seek to uproot someone's private life as a punishment for their temerity to hold a personal belief. I would add at no risk to the anonymous complainant, who Wallace described as "mailicious".
It's not clear to me how we got into this mess, but what matters more is how we get out of it. Newcastle United could start by ensuring its diversity and inclusion policy doesn't prohibit the holding and expressing of views that are entirely legal. More significantly the government has work to do to bring rationality back into these matters. I'd have thought this couldn't happen in the USA: its less than perfect legal system at least writes some valuable protections into its constitution. We shall see whether our ad hoc system can deliver the protection of the First Amendment.
The oldest report I could see on this story was from 2 Feb in the Daily Telegraph. It was then covered by many other outlets regarded as somewhat of the right (The Daily Mail, GB News, The Spectator). The Times got round to it on 10 Feb in Rod Liddle's column. The report and comment in the Pressreader reference below has perhaps the best commentary.
Why am I not surprised that the Guardian doesn't appear to have covered the story at all? Maybe because they don't believe their newspaper should cover news about views contrary to their own editorial line. Presumably they think this is a non-story and see no problem with Newcastle's actions, or even support them. Now isn't that even more chilling?
PS The Linzi Smith story had eluded me but it was referred to in passing in Martin Samuel's Sunday Times column in which he noted that most things that matter in the Premier League are heading to be resolved in courts or off the pitch hearings of one kind or another. He instanced Manchester City's potential legal challenge to the League's new rules on associated party transactions. Samuel concluded that chief executive Richard Masters has "pretty much handed the competition over to the legal department". The league also succeeded in making this January's transfer window one of the most boring ever, as all the clubs seem to have got completely spooked by the charges against Everton and Nottingham Forest. The money spent was the least (barring the 2021 covid affected window) since 2012, when the domestic TV revenue was not much more than a quarter of what it is now. Everton broke the profit/loss limit by less than £20M over 4 years, not exactly big potatoes in the context of football club finance. It's as if the Premier League have decided that the threat of it being eclipsed by the Saudi Arabian league is an inevitability that can't be resisted. Shame on them.
*sorry for the vernacular but as an Everton fan these five words automatically link together for me at the moment by word association
Fan's treatment shames Newcastle and Premier League. Mark Wallace, Pressreader 6 Feb 2024 https://www.pressreader.com/uk/inews/20240206/282059101897168
Spied on and banned. Are any fans safe from football's political VAR? Rod Liddle. The Times 10 Feb 2024
Lawyers now the game's headline act. Martin Samuel, Sunday Times 11 February 2024
