The BBC’s decision to take Gary Lineker off the air is the sort of self-harming stupidity at which the Corporation excels. The Match of the Day presenter tweeted that the Illegal Migration Bill was ‘an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people’ and done ‘in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s’. As his social media activity makes clear, Lineker’s views are checklist progressive: anti-Tory, pro-Palestinian, anti-Brexit, pro-taking-the-knee. The BBC has previously censured him for a tweet it found to breach social media guidance and editorial standards of impartiality.
Rather than cave to one mob or another, it would profit the Corporation to stand firm in all cases
Like other BBC staff or contractors, there are rules which Lineker must follow. I would dispute these rules being applied to social media, as opposed to how Lineker conducts himself on-air, but I’m probably in the minority. If his contract specifies that he must refrain from certain public activities, the BBC is entitled to enforce that contract. Even so, the decision to suspend him from presenting duties is a mistake.
For one, he is not a BBC News presenter, where standards around impartiality are more exacting. His work for the BBC does not touch on news or current affairs and he has no way of influencing editorial output. Nor is a reasonable-minded viewer likely to construe his social media activity to represent an official BBC view on the government’s immigration policies. The Corporation is at risk of setting a precedent it cannot possibly sustain. If outlandish political statements render Lineker unfit to host a sports programme, they must do the same for actors in EastEnders, DJs on BBC 6 Music, and hosts of light entertainment shows.
For another, there is no good outcome for the Beeb. In taking Lineker off the air, it has confirmed the suspicions of every progressive that the Corporation is easily cowed by the right-wing press or keen to suck up to the Tories. If it relents and puts him back on-air, the BBC will reinforce the fears of every conservative who regards it as a bastion of left-liberalism. Rather than cave to one mob or another, it would profit the Corporation to stand firm in all cases, whether the pitchforks are hoisted from the left or the right. Sure, there are some instances where this would not be possible or desirable, but these should be restricted to the most extreme views, such as espousing genocide, political violence or the overthrow of electoral democracy.
Of course, this brouhaha is bound up in so much hypocrisy and tribalism. If Lineker had a history of right-wing pronouncements and had invoked 1930s Germany in criticising the government’s lockdown policies, those currently attacking him would be defending his right to free speech and those supporting him starting petitions to get the gammon sacked. Such is the way of it when your only political principle is: it’s okay when we do it.
As such, Lineker’s right-wing critics might say that getting him taken off the air is one in the eye for cancel culture. Let’s see how progressives like it when one of their own gets the kind of treatment to which they routinely subject conservatives. I understand the sentiment but you can’t defeat cancel culture by buying into its logic, no matter how tempting it might be in the moment. You either value freedom of speech or you don’t and getting one loudmouth lefty shut up isn’t going to make progressives any less censorious towards conservative speech. You defeat speech authoritarianism by making an honest and consistent case against it, not by indulging in it yourself.
Right-wingers might also object that they are compelled by law to pay for Lineker through the licence fee. They couldn’t care less what political views he expresses but if they are forced to line his pockets, the least they can expect is that he not compare their views to Nazism. This too is understandable, but it is an argument against the licence fee, not a justification for the action the BBC has taken against Lineker. The man himself does not decide the BBC’s funding model. Indeed, it is the government that keeps the licence fee in place. The same government that once pledged to decriminalise non-payment then broke its promise and upheld the status quo instead. If you object to having to pay Gary Lineker, take it up with the Tories.
This is not ‘In defence of Gary Lineker’. His comparison of the government’s rhetoric to ‘Germany in the 30s’ is as obnoxious as it is midwit. You can be sure of that because everyone on Twitter agrees with him. To suggest that Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman’s Illegal Migration Bill, dubious and questionably drafted as it is, exists in the same moral universe as the policies of pre-war Germany is to identify yourself as a historical illiterate. The implicit logic when you draw this parallel is that the UK is on a similar path to that taken by Germany 90 years ago. Indeed, it has become dangerously mainstream to contend that Britain is going or has already gone fascist. All of a sudden, the slippery slope is no longer a logical fallacy.
No one versed in the literature on fascism or modern German history could honestly defend the analogy. It diminishes the enormity of Nazism, reducing an ideology of Aryan supremacy and racial extermination to the kind of run-of-the-mill immigration anxieties and hostilities seen across Europe today. Only a cynic, a liar or a simpleton would sincerely draw parallels between a moderate Tory government — which, however much its Very Online critics might howl, is what this government is — and the Third Reich.
That Gary Lineker is a simpleton is unfortunate, but it shouldn’t disqualify him from presenting a BBC sports programme.
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