A Newcastle fan banned for gender critical views. How long before ‘HOWAY THE LADS!’ is a hate crime?

WE HAVE become wearily accustomed to professional football’s nauseating and hypocritical embrace of woke causes to disguise its own amorality and venality.

rainbow laces, taking the knee to Black Lives Matter, the ludicrous pretence that the women’s game, however laudable, is somehow the equal of the Premier League.

It would be easy to dismiss this insincere grandstanding as mere window dressing. But the case of Newcastle United fan Linzi Smith has exposed the sinister underbelly of our morally corrupt national game.

You might have thought Ms Smith was the kind of supporter who would be welcomed with open arms, a poster girl for the enlightened face of modern football. She’s an out- and- proud lesbian, who campaigns for gay, bisexual and women’s rights. But in common with other prominent lesbians and feminists she excludes the ‘T’ from the Alphabetti Spaghetti soup of the LGBTQUErTY+ buffet.

Ms Smith doesn’t believe people with penises are women. And she hasn’t been afraid to say so on social media, frequently posting: ‘ Transwomen are men.’ For that, she has been banned from attending Newcastle’s home games for two and a half years for breaching the club’s ‘diversity’ policy.

It would be shocking enough if the story stopped there. But it gets worse. Ms Smith has been subjected to a humiliating and terrifying ordeal at the hands of a secretive ‘ Stasi’ intelligence unit operated by the Premier League. Where do they get the authority to investigate The Lives of others?

The story began when one anonymous individual complained to Newcastle United ( NUFC) about Ms Smith’s ‘transphobic’ Twitter account.

The club immediately suspended her membership and referred the complaint to the police and the Premier League.

As if the old Bill haven’t got anything better to do, officers interviewed her under caution about a possible ‘ hate crime’, before taking just two hours to decide no offence had been committed.

That wasn’t good enough for the Premier League. The case was passed to a unit set up to monitor violent football hooligans hellbent on causing trouble at home and abroad. Investigators spent four months compiling an 11-page ‘Target Profile’ on Ms Smith.

For once, the ‘ Stasi’ analogy is no exaggeration. They didn’ t just trawl through her social media posts. She was followed like a common criminal. Ms Smith has obtained a dossier which shows Google images recording where she lives, where she went and at what time. There are even photos of her walking her dog.

one piece of ‘evidence’ — which would be comical were it not so sinister — notes that she has ‘ties’ to Whitley Bay.

Sounds like something from an episode of ITV’s Vera. ‘What’ve we got, Kenny?’

‘Ties to Whitley Bay, ma’am.’ But this is no laughing matter. While Ms Smith’s social media posts are in the public domain, what gives the Premier League investigators the right to poke around in her private life and record her movements like a terror suspect?

Is this even legal? Surely it amounts to stalking or invasion of privacy, at the very least. The police should be interviewing the Premier League’s Secret Squirrels under caution, not Ms Smith.

Certainly it appears to be a clear breach of data protection law, according to Toby Young of the Free Speech Union, which has done sterling service in bringing this outrageous case to public attention.

I recommend you check out Young’s interview with Ms Smith on the FSU’s website or YouTube. She has been shaken to the core and had her life turned upside down.

She is still frightened to go anywhere near the United ground, even though she lives just ten minutes away, and has stopped drinking in her favourite pub, named after Newcastle hero Alan Shearer, because she can’t be certain who’s watching her or listening to what she says.

Just because you’re paranoid, and all that . . .

Ms Smith still doesn’t know who ‘ reported’ her to NUFC, only that they said they would feel ‘unsafe’ if they had to ‘ share a space’ with her.

This is classic, passive-aggressive snowflake gobbledegook, regularly weaponised these days to silence any view considered ‘threatening’ — especially when it comes to trans rights.

Share a space? Newcastle’s average home attendance is 52,127. There is no suggestion that Ms Smith has ever done anything inside the stadium to ‘ offend’ anyone. In which case, what the hell were the bosses of NUFC thinking? All they will say is her social media tweets contradicted their ‘values’.

Don’t make me laugh. What ‘values’?

Newcastle United is now a majority owned subsidiary of Saudi Arabia, where being gay or trans is a criminal offence, which theoretically carries a death sentence.

So the idea that the club is outraged because a lesbian fan believes that ‘ transwomen are men’ is preposterous, beyond satire. In Saudi, Ms Smith would have been persecuted not for her gender critical beliefs but because she’s a lesbian.

Being banned from the ground would be the least of her worries.

She would be more scared of being strung up from a crane in riyadh’s Chop Chop square after Friday prayers. The Saudis bought Newcastle as part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s cynical ‘sportswashing’ programme — along with LIV golf, etc — to divert attention from his country’s appalling human rights record.

My best guess is that 99 per cent of Geordie supporters ‘ gannin’ alang the Scotswood road to see bin Salman’s aces’ agree with every word of Ms Smith’s views on ‘transwomen’ — even if they’re afraid to say so in public.

How dare NUFC ban Ms Smith for expressing perfectly legal views held not only by the majority of the population but also by their fabulously wealthy owners?

This is just the most scandalous example of football trying to tell supporters what to think.

Not that there’s any consistency. The FA and the Premier League flaunt their woke credentials until they come into conflict with harsh reality and threaten the bottom line. Especially in pursuit of petro-dollars.

The last World Cup was staged in Qatar, which like Saudi — and most other Islamic nations — outlaws homosexuality and persecutes trans people.

To salve their consciences, the FA decreed that England players could wear rainbow armbands to demonstrate their commitment to gay/trans rights.

That was until FIFA, world football’s serially corrupt governing body, decreed that anyone wearing the armband would be booked and then sent off for a second offence.

Who was it who said that a stand on principle is the last stand of an idiot? The FA isn’t daft and wasn’t going to risk getting kicked out of the World Cup for the sake of a piece of virtue-signalling theatre. So the armbands were given the red card.

And despite the FA’ s commitment to gay/trans causes, that hasn’t stopped Newcastle United’s sugar daddy Saudi Arabia being awarded the World Cup in 2034.

YET, back home, the Premier League seems to think it can behave like a sovereign state and set the dogs of war on any supporter suspected of holding the ‘wrong’ views.

It’s bad enough that the police had to be involved, let alone that a body supposed to regulate football can fund a secret ‘Stasi’ unit to spy on innocent supporters.

But it only goes to spotlight the absurd bugger’s muddle modern Britain has got itself into over sexual identity, to the point where free speech — already fragile — is under full frontal assault.

As the case of Ms Smith illustrates, there’s a hierarchy of victimhood, in which ‘ trans’ apparently trumps lesbian. You couldn’t make it up. Whoever thought, even a few short years ago, that someone could get banned from a Premier League ground for saying that a person with a penis is not a woman?

How long before ‘ Howay The Lads!’ is a hate crime?

The club said Ms Smith’s tweets contradicted their ‘values’. Don’t make me laugh. What values?