As Gordon Brown took a swing at the Royal & Ancient Golf Club for its old-fashioned and offensive policy of all-male membership it was like watching a wrecking ball smash into a tower block without making a dent.
Since Mr Brown's speech at the Festival of Politics, in which he urged the R&A to let women join, not even a hairline crack has appeared on the monolith that is arguably St Andrews's most famous institution. This, despite the fact that Augusta, previously a bastion of golfing conservatism and prejudice, had relented and allowed women loose on its greens. As Mr Brown said, if South Carolina can change, then so can Scotland. In response, the R&A stated simply that its rules specified male membership and it was for its members to determine whether or not that would change.
It's like asking alcoholics to decide safe drink-driving levels, or grouse to consider extending the open season. The kind of men who like all-male company may be sufficiently in touch with their feminine side to don pastel jerseys and tasselled shoes, but they certainly won't be urging their chums to allow the opposite sex anywhere near their precious links and hallowed club house.
Meanwhile Muirfield in East Lothian, another men-only ghetto, has also come under the eye of equality campaigners who hope that before next year, when it hosts the Open, it will have embraced womankind. In anticipation of that historic day, they are likely to step up their protests and appeal to the club's sense of fair play in these enlightened times.
I wish them luck. Yet it seems to me that they, like Gordon Brown and the legion of others who have tried to shame these dinosaur institutions into changing their ways, are wasting their breath. A large part of these clubs' appeal is the escape they offer from the politically-correct demands of modern life. The more they are criticised, the more they can enjoy feeling persecuted and wronged. For the kind of men who want only the company of men, any attempt to make them alter their ways is an affront to their values, and their natural rights. There's even a certain glamour in being dodos, the last of a kind. The R&A's and Muirfield's denizens are like those die-hard outlaws in westerns who creep around the hills and hide in caves, watching for the sheriff's posse. They exist in the sure knowledge that one day they will die, but they intend to go down in a blaze of gunfire and glory.
Obviously there's nothing violent or illegal about the golfing fraternity, but their exclusive, excluding clubs are a last redoubt, a haven in a stormy sea of equal rights, a sanctuary against the unwelcome fact that women are now their peers in almost every other realm.
So, if one wants them to update their policies, there's no point in appealing to common sense or reason. The more people try to embarrass them into changing their ways, the more they will cling to their olde-worlde pleasures and prejudices. In that sense, the R&A and Muirfield are the adult equivalent of a gang hut, with private rules and dress codes, secret signals and passwords which may seem ludicrous to outsiders, but carry a strange, almost superstitious allure for members.
The only proper way to treat these clubs is with pity. After all, what crippling levels of anxiety they must feel if the very idea of women golfers encroaching on their territory makes them retreat behind barred doors. These poor souls are not bully-boys or bigots, but bags of nerves, their narrow-mindedness not a symptom of intolerance, but of fear. They need help, not condemnation. We should write them letters of comfort, not of complaint.
If all petitioning to allow women to join ceased, if all clamour to be included died out, maybe they would eventually realise that the rest of the world sees nothing enviable in their codes and rules but finds them risible, and even a little sad. I speak as a non-golfer, but it seems to me that for once the grass is greener on this side of the fence. If I owned a set of clubs, that's certainly where I'd stay, whatever the rules.
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