Skip to content

I think we can identify the problem here

Centrism is supposed to be all about moderation and balance, so it’s strange how extremely male its loudest voices are. In fact, a British centrist could go for months — years! — without being troubled by the sound of a single woman, save the one he happens to live with. And it’s not that his media intake is narrow; on the contrary, never before has the British moderate taken in so much news and opinion from so many sources.

He listens to James O’Brien and Andrew Marr on LBC; he subscribes to podcasts presented by Ian Dunt, Alastair Campbell, Rory Stewart and their ubiquitous like;

Of course, from Ms. Freeman’s point of view those are centrists.

For everyone else – and by the standards of the population as a whole – they’re all on the left.

As so often, the wisdom here is from Bernard Levin – the Fallacy of the Altered Standpoint.

26 thoughts on “I think we can identify the problem here”

  1. If she is correct this would mean either that British women overwhelmingly eschew (love using that word!) the centre or else that they have suddenly developed an uncharacteristic reluctance to share their views – in this instance via political podcasts and other media.

    As neither of these scenarios are remotely possible Ms Freeman appears to be living in a bubble and talking out of her posterior.

  2. Bloke in North Dorset

    Once again the left conflate the median member of the population with people they know.

    I listen to a lot of podcasts and quite a few of them are political podcasts that might even be considered centrist by the mythical median member of the population, but I’ve never listened to the ones she lists.

  3. Are those people far centrists, hard centrists or extreme centre?

    And why must opinion or political stance be subject to a test of diversity and inclusion before it can be considered valid?

  4. The Meissen Bison

    Does my disinclination to read a piece by Hadley Freeman prove that I’m the extreme moderate I always knew myself to be?

    Still, hats off to her – with a name like “Hadley” she might have oozed past my she-filter and “Freeman”, redolent as it is of slavery and colonialism is like cat-nip to a centrist.

  5. “Hey guithe you’re listening to an INSUFFICIENTLY DIVERSE selection of cocknosed fuckwits to rationalise your pathetically gay third hand political opinions”
    — some dopey moo

  6. with a name like “Hadley” she might have oozed past my she-filter

    Not my Wikipedia “Early Life” filter tho:

    In June 2018, Freeman denounced the treatment of undocumented child immigrants arriving in America, drawing parallels with her grandmother’s experience of escaping from the Holocaust. Freeman described it as deliberate cruelty by the Trump administration, and a reflection of latent racism amongst its supporters.

    Every damn time, amirite bigots?

  7. BiND:’ Once again the left conflate the median member of the population with people they know.’

    “I don’t understand it! Nobody I knew voted for Nixon!”

  8. Can anyone else sense that Hadley is pissed that she jumped into institutional media and is watching it crumbling as the barbarians of LBC and podcasting are getting all the audience? “Why aren’t there any women podcasting about politics?” Dunno love. Buy a good microphone, get set up on iTunes. What’s stopping you?

    Elite women are far more interested in the institution than the work. Men will see the internet and be blown away by it, walk out of career jobs and start Amazon. Women just don’t. And a decade later, they’re on course to oblivion and they can’t get across because those guys now have a decade of experience in the new world. Dale has been blogging/podding for 20 years. Ian Dunt for 7 years.

  9. Bloke in North Dorset

    Julia, I can’t tell a lie, that was in my mind

    BoM4, I half listened to an advert from Spotify the other day. From what I think I remember they were offering free access for anyone starting a podcast. Women do seem to want to join mature industries, I wonder if that’s part of the reason they start to decline, their innate conservatism and aversion to risk means the institution can’t change fast enough? (I suspect a significant number of men fit in to that category as well)

  10. “her grandmother’s experience of escaping from the Holocaust”

    I don’t know her grandma’s story but I was struck recently to read about an American from a family who “escaped the holocaust”. It turned out that the family had left Germany in 1933. So they didn’t escape the holocaust, they simply exercised caution.

  11. Dearieme – “I’m Jewish, and that’s why you’re not allowed to have your own country anymore” was never the most convincing of arguments, tbf.

    Especially since it’s used to Mau Mau the descendants of people who sacrificed a lot to fight the fucking Nazis.

  12. BiND,

    I think so. And as women start to take over, it gets worse. Because you get more policing. And engineers who have bad manners but can get stuff done get into trouble, so quit, which further strengthens the conservative culture.

    I think that perhaps one reason I like working in manufacturing is that factories are like kryptonite to middle class women. You get some women, but they’re the fun, JFDI types that are part of the solution. Like the HR department is more doing all the necessary paperwork rather than deploying whatever fashionable nonsense they think up.

  13. If Campbell, O’Brien and Stewart can be disposed of on gender diversity grounds then sign me up to battle the patriarchy!

  14. Andrew Bailey, the governor

    I think o’Brien is a hard centrist who believes in such centrist ideas as nationalisation, open borders, censorship, state control of economies, MMT, high taxation, high benefits. The only thing more centrist than that is communism but that’s an extreme centrist position.

    I just created money and missed ballooning inflation as I overestimated my own credibility. That’s radical centrist isn’t it?

  15. I think that perhaps one reason I like working in manufacturing is that factories are like kryptonite to middle class women.

    Factories are like kryptonite to women in general.
    You see the odd one, maybe a few times but then they disappear. I’ve only seen one or two that lasted more than a year on the shop floor.
    Strangely,those that work in the offices hang around for a lot longer.
    Its a mystery why they don’t like working in dark, dirty, cold/hot, noisy environments. I thought they were all supposed to be as excited about working in such places as us men. Equality and all that…
    I can go for weeks without speaking to a woman who isn’t my wife.

  16. FFS Tim, it’s bonkers to describe a man who was recently a Conservative minister as being to the left of most of the population. Most of the electorate votes for parties to the left of the Tories.

  17. In my opinion Hadley Freeman does not live in her own bubble… that implies a certain lightness of being. She writes for the Grauniad so I propose that she lives in a journalistic sump.

  18. Err, no. Hadley loudly left The G over (I think, trans, but loudly at least) an issue and is now at S Times.

  19. A lot of women did work on dark, dirty factory floors during the War. And a number continued afterwards, as Mr Attlee grimly persisted with a war economy. My own mother got sent to work in the machine shop of an aircraft components factory on Slough Trading Estate in 1941, and didn’t leave until 1960, when my father used to set her drill for her, and their love blossomed. She was born in 1921, so she spent the best years of her life on a factory floor.

    I don’t want to argue with the basic points about female work preferences. But I think it’s worth pointing out the wartime exception, because it just makes women’s efforts at that time more noteworthy.

  20. Yes, and women worked en masse in farming too.
    Probably what helped usher in feminism in the first instance.
    Women thinking that they can do anything the men can do too, and for the same wage.
    Naturally, after the war economy ended, they gravitated towards the easier, less physically demanding jobs.
    The jobs with more flexibility, fewer hours and better conditions.
    All the while telling the men who had continued doing the shittier, dirtier jobs, how hard they had it and how under paid they were.

  21. A very good point, Paul from S. But the only feminists that generation produced were university educated & if they worked, did something clean & safe in an office. I know what my grandmother would have done with feminists. And it would have involved carbolic soap & a flannel.

  22. “Why aren’t there any women podcasting about politics?”

    Candice Owens (1.85m subscribers) and Amala Ekpunobi (1.37M subscribers) do podcasts about politics (and neither are fat munters, which is a different theory I have).

    Oh, sorry, you meant women who agree with you.

  23. Chernyy,

    “Factories are like kryptonite to women in general.
    You see the odd one, maybe a few times but then they disappear. I’ve only seen one or two that lasted more than a year on the shop floor.
    Strangely,those that work in the offices hang around for a lot longer.”

    My observation is that there aren’t that many in the admin bits, either. There’s some but less people doing accounts, training than service companies.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *