Apologies to anyone who thinks I'm becoming obsessive about freedom of speech, but the Guardian has waded further into the debate about Richard Scudamore and his sexist emails. The beleaguered Premier League chief exec "must go", rails the leader column today.
"Do we have the right to be repellent?", it begins by asking, concluding that while "perhaps people have the right to think appalling thoughts" Scudamore the Sexist's musings were inconsistent with his being the "public face committed to women in football".
It's big of the Graun to concede our right to think whatever we like, although that "perhaps" has an ominous ring to it which is symptomatic of its attitude. "He was lucky that the emails were sexist and not racist", it writes.
Would that be "lucky" as in "lucky for Scudmore that he isn't a racist"? Or "lucky" as in "lucky for racist Scudamore that his racist emails weren't stumbled upon by his temporary PA and leaked to the press"? Since the Guardian presumably has no idea whether Scudamore is racist or not, I'm presuming the former; but if I were him I'd be reaching for my lawyers and asking for clarification.
I suppose by this standard I'm lucky that the police haven't discovered corpses buried in my back garden. Lucky in the sense that I never had the urge to kill anyone and dispose of them beneath the lawn on a moonlit night.
Scudamore's pensees are fairly symptomatic of male attitudes which range from at one end of the continuum no more than a raised eyebrow and at the other disparaging and reductive attitudes to women which might make disgraced former Sky presenter Richard Keys blush. These no doubt have their equivalent in semi-humorous attitudes to my gender of the "all men are useless and can't multitask" variety, though since men have more power than women we can't complain that we sometimes face closer scrutiny.
If the Premier League clubs decide that Scudamore is more trouble than he's worth they could sack him for gross misconduct. Good luck with that. Sending emails on the firm's premises is not going to constitute gross misconduct, and as for lewd content the reason why the Premier League would be well advised not to do anything hasty is intimately connected with the reason Premier League clubs have thus far been conspicuously silent on the subject of Scudamore's embarrassment. One, they think he's a hard-boiled character who's doing a good job, and two, the upper reaches of football clubs are probably as intense a stew of sexism as any institutions I can think of. What, most of the chairmen will be wondering, is sexism? What expensive comedy would play out in an employment tribunal as Scudamore detailed some of the sexist shenanigans of his employers!
For me the tragedy of this attack on the right to be repellent - which really means the right to say things some other people find repellent - without fearing loss of liberty or livelihood is that it is coming from the liberal left. That is to say, the same political class which performed heroically in establishing the right to attack the certainties of empire, church, class, monarchy and the family. This group now has in mind certainties of its own. Woe betide you if you are a public figure and you traduce them.
Please please don't throw me to the liberals.
