Give Fury his jury
Scott Cuthbertson is a man in the news of late. Or, at least, his recent work is. Scott is the man who started the petition calling on the BBC to remove boxer Tyson Fury from the shortlist for the annual BBC Sports Personality of the Year award.
Now signed by more than 100,000 people, Scott’s petition argues that Fury’s rampant homophobia — he is in danger of making the Westboro Baptist Church’s take on sexuality look nuanced — should disqualify him from consideration, on the grounds that LGBTQ people already face all sorts of barriers in sport and our sporting icons should represent positive role models for young people.
Having worked in sport in the past, I know that what Scott says is true: sport, especially professional team sport, often struggles with sexuality; and role models matter. I also know Scott a little bit, because he works for the Equality Network, most recently celebrated for their fantastic work on equal marriage, and with whom we worked on various inclusion issues at the Glasgow 2014 Organising Committee.
That Fury is a backward wingnut is not in doubt. He basically equated homosexuality and abortion with paedophilia. He reckons that a woman’s “best place” is “on her back” or “in the kitchen”. His wife’s ‘job’ is “cooking, cleaning and looking after the kids”. She is ‘privileged’ to be married to him. It’s hard to know what to do with that, but if nothing else, I hope she’s OK.
Besides Scott’s petition, the general reaction to Fury’s attempt to single-handedly drag Britain backwards through however many decades of progress in gender and sexual equality has been one of not inconsiderable dismay. In fact, the Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport are planning to ask Tony Hall, Director General of the BBC, about the matter next week. Several politicians have joined in with the widespread raining down of opprobrium.
A big part of the BBC’s problem is that their line — that Fury’s inclusion is based on his sporting achievements — is undermined by the word ‘personality’. The person, as well as the sporting success, matters. It’s right there in the name of the award.
This is probably a good time to reflect on the importance of the award in general terms, which is to say, it is not important at all. Recipients, when they turn up, will say all the right things and profess their delight, and I guess to some extent they will mean it. Who doesn’t like to be recognised? But compare winning what is a concocted popularity contest with the actual genuine sporting victories to which anyone shortlisted can point: champions of all kinds, be it world, Olympic, European or so forth. Wins for which athletes have trained their whole lives, with a single-minded dedication and focus.
In that context, SPOTY doesn’t matter.
Still, we’re talking about it, so that’s by the by. The thing is this: for all that Fury is repugnant, now that he’s on the list, he should stay on it. At this point, if he was kicked off, he would probably regard it as a triumph in its own right. It would feed his narrative that he’s the only genuine ‘personality’, a good old rebel shooting from the hip in the face of conventional wisdom. His fans and supporters, of whom there are some — just look at Scott’s Twitter feed — would be simultaneously emboldened and marginalised. He’d be — for them — a scapegoat for, a victim of, an all-consuming social and political correctness. And he would lap it up.
But more importantly, wouldn’t his removal be showing a terrible lack of faith in the public? SPOTY is hardly a rigorous or meaningful exercise in democracy, but it’s voted for by ‘the people’. They know his views, they know what he thinks. Don’t we trust our fellow citizens, armed with their own sense of right and wrong and with the knowledge that Fury is a muppet, to act as they see fit? (Of course, many will exercise their right to ignore entirely the whole jamboree, and they’ll be decidedly justified in so doing.)
To exclude Fury at this stage would be to display a remarkable lack of confidence, in who we are and what we believe. Fury’s archaic condition is only a threat if we choose to elevate it to that status, and I think that to do so would be rather sad.
Rather than no-platform him, let’s have the conviction to adopt Mill’s marketplace of ideas, and allow Fury’s to compete. Won’t it be infinitely more powerful to give him enough rope to hang himself and, simply, to let him lose? And lose on his own terms.
Because he will. And no one will have laid a glove on him.
