If you need any reminder of the abyss into which we’re falling, look no further than football.
However, if you do want to look further than football, you may. Why, you can even cast your eye across the Atlantic. You’ll find the same nonsense there.
But football first. Greg Dyke, the FA chairman, has put together a commission to pull English football out of its dire straits. Now he has been forced to make an abject apology.
Not for putting a commission together, you understand, but for including only white males in it, eight of them.
Helen Grant, who combines two portfolios (Sports and Equality) no sane country should have at all, piled her two hats one on top of the other. “Sports’ governing bodies,” she decreed, “must reflect the make-up of the diverse society that we live in.”
Presumably this means that four of the members ought to be women and at least one black. To everyone’s regret, the commission is too small to be comprehensively representative, which suggests only two possible solutions.
First, some members of the new-fangled body should combine in their bodies several of the groups demanding a fair shake. One, for example, could be a crippled black Muslim lesbian, while another could be an Indian homosexual Buddhist. This is just a suggestion – the possibilities are endless.
Another solution, and this is probably the one our government would prefer, is to enlarge the august body, let’s say by a factor of 10. That way Helen could have a broader canvas on which to paint her demographic picture. And while at it, she could also insist that Greg Dyke change his surname to a more politically correct Alternative-Lifestyle.
Interestingly, the competence of the prospective candidates to do the job didn’t even come into it. Never mind the suitability, feel the calculator.
This kind of madness isn’t confined to football. In politics too, our governing bodies, executive, judicial or legislative, must have this piebald quality before anything else, or rather to the exclusion of anything else. By anything else I mean the actual ability to govern, which is no longer an essential requirement.
Yet relying on actuarial techniques in composing any governing body is neither grownup nor clever. Like most PC perversions, including the notion of political correctness itself, we got this one second-hand, courtesy of our partners in the ‘special relationship’.
Americans, being as they are a genuine melting pot of a nation, are obsessed with calculating proportions of various groups, for example those serving in Congress or sitting on the Supreme Court. It’s as if the 27 current amendments to the US Constitution have been augmented by a 28th: “The demographic composition of every political institution shall faithfully reflect that of the nation at large.”
This type of thinking is seen not only among assorted lefties, who don’t know any better, but also among conservatives, who should. Thus American ‘paleoconservatives’ routinely accuse the neoconservatives of being more loyal to Israel than to the good ole US of A.
This accusation is based on nothing other than the high proportion of Jews, all secular, among the neocons. Amazingly the neocons themselves agree to think along the same lines.
Thus spake the founder of their movement Irving Kristol: “…a disproportionate number of neoconservatives are Jews.” The word ‘disproportionate’ suggests some transgression against the 28th Amendment, yet unwritten.
By using this word, Kristol, who was himself of Jewish origin, regurgitated the old anti-Semitic arguments used against pernicious cabals, such as Russian revolutionaries, to name one. These arguments are usually unsound even on the crude level at which they are pitched.
For example, the proportion of Jews in the first Soviet governments, while higher than in the whole country, was roughly the same as the proportion of Jews in the urban (in other words literate) population – and actually lower than the proportion of those with secondary education or higher. It was these groups whence most Bolsheviks came.
There are enough valid reasons to criticise the neocons not to have to take issue with their ethnic make-up. Similarly, our craven, incompetent, self-serving political parties – and the bodies they put together – must be not only criticised but, in an ideal world, disbanded for the damage they do.
Anticipating such criticism, and trying to preempt the more decisive steps, they try to do exactly what Helen has accused Greg of not doing: making sure they incorporate a satisfactory number of those from the groups perceived as oppressed minorities (women qualify as such, whatever the calculator says).
Personally, I wouldn’t mind having a cabinet exclusively made up of camp black cripples, provided they could do the job better than the current lot (not a tall order, actually). Conversely, if eight white men is the best the FA can do, fine. I mean I don’t know many women who possess world-class expertise in training generations of footballers.
Alas, such views are in a despised minority. Which is why our government will continue to do what it sees as best for the country. In other words, sweet FA.