Last Saturday, I made the 400-mile round trip to Burnley with my 16-year-old son Charlie to see Queens Park Rangers play the Clarets. Quite a long way to go, given that Burnley was one of three teams relegated from the Premier League last season and are expected to go straight back up, while QPR are struggling to remain in the second tier. Nevertheless, we managed to hold them to a goalless draw, which the visiting fans celebrated as if we’d just won the FA Cup. ‘Worth the trip,’ declared Charlie as we embarked on the four-hour train ride home.
The cabinet of killjoys can’t stand the fact that the beautiful game hasn’t been captured by the puritans
I treasure these day trips with my youngest, crisscrossing the country to watch our beloved Rs, but there may not be many more. I don’t just mean that he’s getting older. I’m also thinking of the Football Governance Bill, resurrected by Sir Keir Starmer after falling by the wayside in the last parliament. Among the reams of red tape it will impose is a requirement that all clubs submit a ‘corporate governance statement’ to the newly created Independent Football Regulator that will explain ‘what action the club is taking to improve equality, diversity and inclusion’ (EDI). All this in the name of ‘protecting’ fans, if the government’s rhetoric is to be believed.
Judging from the behaviour of Newcastle United, this clause will do everything but protect fans. In fact, it could result in tens of thousands being banned from attending games because their political views put them at odds with their club’s EDI policy – which I imagine will include me. Last year, Newcastle slapped a two-season ban on a fan called Linzi Smith because she’d expressed her belief in the biological reality of sex. Now, if she’d marched up to a trans woman at a football match and told them that trans women cannot be women, perhaps the club might be justified. But Linzi aired her views on X, not at St James’ Park. Turns out fans are expected to comply with Newcastle’s ‘trans inclusion’ policy outside the ground as well as in.
The free speech advocacy group I run is helping Linzi challenge this decision in court, but if she loses I fear Newcastle’s policy will become a blueprint for the rest of the English Football League. That’s particularly likely when Labour’s Employment Rights Bill is passed, which imposes a legal duty on employers to take ‘all reasonable steps’ to protect their employees from being harassed by third parties – which in the case of football clubs means an obligation to protect their staff from overhearing disagreeable opinions expressed by fans. Not just chants, mind you, but so-called inappropriate jokes and problematic banter. Once that becomes law, banning people like Linzi from attending games on the grounds she might say something that upsets a trans employee might be considered a ‘reasonable’ step.
So what’s the government’s rationale for forcing football clubs to beef up their EDI policies? To find that, you have to go back to the ‘independent fan-led review of football governance’ produced three years ago by Tracey Crouch MP. Almost a tenth of the report is taken up by the chapter on EDI and among its arguments for ‘improving diversity’ is that a more diverse workforce will drive ‘better business decisions’. What’s the evidence for this? Why, it’s the ‘research’ done by McKinsey and Co, which purports to show a correlation between ‘diversity on executive teams’ and profitability. Unfortunately, this research was debunked by professors Jeremiah Green and John Hand in an academic journal this year.
Not that this collapse in the evidence will make the slightest difference, obviously. The business case for imposing this smelly little orthodoxy on the national game was only ever a fig leaf. The real reason is that equality, diversity and inclusion is the holy trinity of the new national religion. And don’t be fooled into thinking it’s about helping ‘oppressed’ minorities – that too is smoke and mirrors. It’s about punishing fans like Linzi – classed as ‘privileged’ by the high priests of this new cult, even though she’s working-class – for not toeing the line.
One of the things I love about football is its out-of-school quality – that sense of freedom you get when you enter the stadium. It’s an opportunity to let off steam, to role-play in a pantomime of sectarian conflict that ends as soon as the game is over. It’s surely no coincidence that the summer riots stopped as soon as the football season began. But Starmer and his cabinet of killjoys can’t stand the fact that the beautiful game hasn’t been fully captured by the scolds and puritans. Hence the Football Governance Bill. They’ll cancel Christmas next.
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