Mission: make cricket into an EDI bureaucracy
The ‘Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket’ is a classic stitch-up
The Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket is quite a mouthful, featuring those rather interesting concepts ‘Independent’ and ‘Equity’ alongside its actual subject matter: ‘Cricket’.
Also pushing forward is this word ‘Commission’, the traditional name for a body appointed by a government or governing body to either,
Examine a difficult issue dispassionately and report back with its findings,
Deliver the conclusions desired by that body without it having to take responsibility for them; or
Throw a difficult issue into the long grass, hopefully leaving it there after the commissioners finally report many months later.
This particular Commission’s report, ‘HOLDING UP A MIRROR TO CRICKET’, released on 27th June in a blaze of publicity denouncing the whole game of cricket and demanding sweeping changes at all levels, seems to fit neither of those categories.
Firstly, it is anything but dispassionate, though it may appear that way on a superficial level. Secondly, it demands action from the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) that would transform this governing body into something else entirely, where hardly anyone currently there is going to be welcome. Thirdly, if it was indeed thrown into the long grass, what was thrown turned out to be a cluster bomb that ended up setting the whole place on fire.
Instead, what seems to have happened here is a classic example of what I called, in my first book, ‘the system of diversity’ in action: of a governing body deferring to activists based on their claims to represent groups who have been victims of oppression (so racism, sexism, etc). It’s what the liberal-left does by reflex; and since the liberal-left dominates our public sphere, this reflex has become almost universal among those who run things. (Funnily enough, I reckon traditionally conservative institutions are probably most vulnerable in embracing this reflex, not being so used to how interest groups seek to exploit it).
Along these lines, the ECB seems to have been pressured by activists into appointing other activists to show it how to improve on matters of discrimination and culture. This has unwittingly given said activists carte blanche to dictate terms back, demanding the organisation change to fit their identity and indeed to become a permanent source of income to them.
Going through the report itself, at least that latter reality became obvious: that its real purpose is to integrate the ECB into the system of diversity, to make it a political organisation and indeed a captive client of the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) industry.
So how does this whole thing work? I’m going to explore it from four angles.
1. A PR job well done
To understand what the Commission was up to, the fact that it released its (delayed) report the day before the flagship Lord’s Test Match between England and Australia, completely overshadowing probably the most important day in this year’s English cricket calendar, seems crucial. Doing so secured maximum publicity, with chair Cindy Butts giving an interview to the BBC claiming that, ‘Absolutely horrific’ stories show ‘culture is rotten’ . Another BBC headline was titled, ‘Equity in Cricket report: Discrimination 'widespread’ in English and Welsh cricket’. The game itself barely figured.
You can hardly get a bigger impact than this. This was a PR job very well done, that PR job being the promotion of the familiar messaging that pretty much the whole of cricket culture – and by extension English culture, is irredeemably racist and sexist and needs to be replaced by an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) bureaucracy reaching into every corner of its existence.
The timing of release also gave people at the top level of the game little time to digest the thing because they were preoccupied with the match. I’m thinking that this is not a coincidence. It meant there could be little serious examination and critique in the moment (as indeed was the case), leaving a free run to Butts and her denunciations. The seemingly intentional damage done to the game (and I’m guessing to the morale of the England team at such a crucial moment in the series) seems consistent with what the report is trying to achieve, which is nothing less than the destruction of cricket as currently constituted in England and Wales.
2. A different form of ‘independence’ and expertise
As a source of authority in our world, you don’t get much bigger than this notion of the ‘independent report’. But Butts and fellow commissioners are quite frank that they are applying a specific political ideology. At one point they say, “we consider – and it is often defined as such – that being ‘woke’ or doing ‘woke work’ simply means being alive to injustice.” Also, on the virtues of the EDI industry: “Cricket is a game with fairness written into its laws and ‘fairness’ is what ultimately underpins EDI work.”
Butts herself says that ‘equity’ is one of her passions; and the report doesn’t hold back on stressing its centrality (indeed it forms part of the Commission’s name). Here is the definition they give:
Equity relates to the use of targeted and differentiated strategies to redress current and historic unfairness, inequality and injustice. In the context of cricket and this Report, ‘equity’ means the intentional and continuous practice of changing policies, practices, systems and structures to reduce (and ultimately eliminate) inequalities and injustices faced by people who have been marginalised and discriminated against within the sport due to their background or identity.
To advocate this is to commit to a specific belief system, seeing the world as something fallen that needs to be repaired by “the intentional and continuous practice of changing policies, practices, systems and structures…” It’s a statement pregnant with progressive ideological assumptions: that change must be continuous and applied to pretty much everything. It also gives us an alternative version of ‘independence’, which is that of something inexorable, inevitable; part of the forces of history, rather like a God leading us to the Promised Land. This is not ‘independence’ as neutrality; it is independence as omnipotence, standing above the world and guiding it.
The treatment of factual evidence conforms to this approach. As far as I could discern, none of the commissioners has any expertise in statistics or data analysis. Yet Butts said in her interviews that the findings of their report are ‘unequivocal’, which is to say unquestionable; beyond contradiction, like that of a higher being.
The method they applied was to issue a ‘call for evidence’, which is to say seeking evidence of discrimination and other bad things. They then used the accounts submitted, which were mostly of discrimination, to claim that such things are almost universal. Those reporting incidents of discrimination are painted as incredibly brave and truthful while those who say such incidents are rare and warning against applying woke ideology are dismissed and sneered at.
To say this is not a credible way of reaching accurate conclusions is an understatement I think.
3. The uses of bad theory
Butts was heavily involved in how the Metropolitan Police reacted to the Macpherson report on the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence in South-East London in 1993: a response dominated by the concept of ‘institutional racism’. This sort of concept provides the core theoretical background to this report too.
As Butts says in her Foreword,
we make a number of wide-ranging findings that point to the fact that deeply rooted and widespread forms of structural and institutional racism continue to exist across the game. But this is not just about racism; as importantly, our work on gender and class also starkly highlights deeply rooted and widespread forms of structural and institutional sexism and class-based discrimination across the game.
She adds,
The focus of this Report is about whole systems institutional change and not about finding fault with individuals; it is for this reason we have taken a ‘game-wide’ approach to optimise the opportunity for achieving systemic change.
This structural, systemic approach allows the Commissioners to jump from individual incidents of unpleasantness, unkindness and genuine discrimination and abuse to the level at which the whole game is guilty. While not blaming individuals, it allows them (or her) to present an overarching structure of horror which in turn justifies overturning the whole thing and ultimately taking over the governing body.
In fact, much of what is attacked and criticised in the report does not involve discrimination per se but certain traits which are presented as exclusionary. It refers to, for example, ‘A prevalent culture of sexism’. In support of this we read, “There was evidence of unwanted and uninvited advances from men towards women.” This seems to show the unrealism and unworldly attitude underlying much of the report. It’s as if we should be living in a utopian world in which everything proceeds exactly to order, where there is never any lack of understanding, never any conflict and everything is fully calculated and aligned properly. A similar attitude is displayed towards the ‘drinking culture’ of mostly white-skinned men in cricket, which can indeed be distinctly unattractive and indeed exclusionary (which is the nature of any culture - it is what it is and not what it’s not), but is presented here as being illegitimate and fit for abolition.
The report even employs the phrase ‘racial literacy’, so presenting its own ideology of race as something foundational and basic, as a form of knowledge that we should pick up naturally growing up, like language.
It had me thinking about how the same sorts of judgements and attitudes attended European and American colonisers’ views of the ‘native’ cultures they encountered. It’s a conquering attitude: of those who preside and judge and tell others how to behave; then using their authority to impose change on them and ultimately destroy their existing cultures.
4. Establishing cricket as an EDI bureaucracy
The report assumes that everything that is not framed by EDI work in cricket is grounded in a culture that is prejudiced and discriminatory and needs to be abolished and replaced with EDI bureaucracy. It regards EDI (again, for those at the back: Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) as the solution to any and every problem.
The Commissioners claim that they are trying to combat racism and other forms of discrimination, but their work shows that they are really looking to combat opponents of an ideological, bureaucratic approach based around progressive identity politics. Hence the way they advocate punishment of counties that do not implement an EDI bureaucracy in their own organisations. This is about exercising social and political control; in the process creating more significant and secure income streams for the EDI industry.
It really looks like a stitch-up, exploiting the naivety of a governing body to demand a political, bureaucratic takeover. The power of this perspective should not be underestimated. Its power lies largely in how people in positions of power defer to it: which is one of the core relations of the system of diversity I have talked about.
This perspective is not really concerned with eliminating genuine unfairness and unjustified discrimination, but rather imposing an untouchable political and bureaucratic system which will always be fighting and campaigning ‘for justice’ (and therefore needs what it is apparently fighting against), rather than nurturing and conserving the area of life it is notionally responsible for.
Look at the way other institutions have been going in Britain: the NHS, police, legal system, the media, Civil Service and all the rest. They spend an awful lot of their time and money now talking and dictating rather than doing the jobs they are meant to be doing.
That’s precisely where this ‘Independent Commission’ wants English cricket to go.
This is an important article and needs more wide spread coverage- can you not get it in the spectator, unheard or the critic? Or even a mainstream media outlet
Your remarks about colonialism reminded me of an exchange I had with a historian on twitter who had just posted a hostile review of Nigel Biggar's book on the subject. I queried his assigning 'bad faith' to all British colonialists. His response was: "I'm afraid one can't lord over natives while simultaneously feeling good about oneself without a bad faith prophylactic." This applies pretty well to most of our institutions and NGOs now I'd say.