Brown urges 'unjust' R&A to end its bar on women golfers

Chief Scottish Political Correspondent

Saturday 25 August 2012

GORDON Brown last night condemned the home of golf at St Andrews for refusing to admit women golfers.

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ROBBIE DINWOODIE CHIEF SCOTTISH POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT

The former prime minister attacked the Royal and Ancient Golf Club for failing to embrace sexual equality as he gave the Campbell Christie Lecture to the Festival of Politics at the Scottish Parliament.

He said the Fife club should learn from Augusta, home of the US Masters, which ended a 80-year bar on women members this week by admitting former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice as well as a prominent businesswoman.

Speaking in the main Holyrood debating chamber, Mr Brown said: "If the golf club in Augusta can start to admit women, shouldn't St Andrews? "Shouldn't the Royal and Ancient Golf Club admit women to their membership? If they can do it in a southern state, can we not do it in Scotland?"I think we've got to think hard and long about issues of discrimination in our own country where we've got to tackle inequality and tackle that injustice."But he also had an apparent dig at American politicians who have been critical of Britain's National Health Service, saying of the principles of fairness: "If countries do not apply this, they do so at their peril."Mr Brown expanded on the themes of his Edinburgh Book Festival speech last week about the way Britain had achieved fairness through the "pooling and sharing" of resources.He used this platform to intervene in the current debate over the different charging regimes for university tuition fees between Scotland and the rest of the UK. Mr Brown, who was making the speech on social justice named after the former STUC leader, said: "I don't think it is right, personally, that you have a situation where we believe that the principles of social justice applied fairly to everyone, and you have tuition fees free in Scotland to Scottish students, free to anybody from the rest of the European Union, but we charge someone that comes from England."He warned that the issue could "increasingly be a difficulty as tuition fees in England go up".The SNP said that unlike First Minister Alex Salmond, this was the first time Mr Brown had criticised the Royal and Ancient's stance on equality, and called his tuition fees comments "simply bizarre".Kirkcaldy MSP David Torrance said: "The SNP have delivered a policy based on ability to learn, not ability to pay – and our student numbers are going up in Scotland, while they are plunging in England due to Tory cuts. "Yet it sounds as though Mr Brown wants our universities to be controlled by Westminster, instead of being a Holyrood responsibility. "In his lecture, Gordon Brown failed to explain why he prefers Tory rule from Westminster, rather than home rule with independence."

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Brown urges 'unjust' R&A to end its bar on women golfers

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