IT WAS shocking to hear a BBC sports reporter telling us last week that the England women’s football team is too white.
After Monday’s 8-0 victory by the Lionesses over Norway in the Euro 2022 tournament, Eilidh Barbour admitted they had done well. But she added: ‘All starting 11 players and the five substitutes that came on to the pitch were white and that does point towards a lack of diversity in the women’s team.’ She went on to introduce an ‘investigation’ by presenter Alex Scott into the alleged diversity problem.
It was an outrageous piece of hypocrisy and wokery, and I can’t improve on the scathing takedown of Barbour’s remarks by Dan Wootton in Mail Online on Thursday.
He wrote: ‘To comment on [the racial makeup of the team] and make it a feature of its coverage feels to me like yet another bid to stoke racial divisions in this country . . . Is the BBC suggesting national sporting teams should now have ethnic quotas?’
He added: ‘Of course, the irony is that just as the BBC were lambasting the “all-white” Lionesses, a newly released official Rich List showed their own First XI was exclusively white. Leftie virtue-signaller-in-chief Gary Lineker topped the list with a sickening salary of at least £1.35million for reading the autocue for a few hours a month on Match of the Day. The other ten top earners were Zoe Ball (£980,000), Alan Shearer (£450,000), Steve Wright (£450,000), Steven Nolan (£415,000), Fiona Bruce (£410,000), Huw Edwards (£410,000), Vanessa Feltz (£400,000), Scott Mills (£400,000), Greg James (£390,000) and Ken Bruce (£385,000).’
Mike Graham on his Talk TV show also hit the nail on the head, asking whether Barbour would make a similar comment about the Nigerian team, saying it is too black. ‘Probably not,’ he added.
Probably not, indeed. To expand on that, would she have said the Mexican team was too Hispanic, the Indian team too Asian, or the Chinese team too Chinese? If Barbour checks out those teams, she won’t find any apparent diversity in any of them.
But there wasn’t a chance in hell of her commenting on them like she blithely did on the England team. In that case, the Wokery would have come down on her like a ton of bricks before you could say ‘Twitterstorm’.
As far as I know, while there has been criticism on social media, there’s been no backlash from the BBC for an implication that many will find offensive. But then I’m forgetting – white people are inherently racist, as far as our supposedly impartial, publicly-funded national broadcaster is concerned. And they must be constantly harangued to ‘celebrate’ diversity.
Barbour would perhaps do well to remember that the population of the United Kingdom is 87 per cent white and that of her native Scotland is a whopping 96 per cent white.
Presumably all the women who played against Norway were chosen on talent, not ethnicity. Any other way of picking them would surely have been racist, wouldn’t it, Ms Barbour? You can’t have it both ways.
