So the cancel-culture set believes in free speech now? What a turnaround. People who have spent the past decade turning a blind eye to the unpersoning of gender-critical feminists by the tyrants of Big Tech and the persecution of every poor soul who makes the mistake of holding up a picture of Muhammad have suddenly decided that they like liberty after all. En masse, with noisy tweets and Braveheart-style yelps about the right to dissent, they’ve converted to the cause of freedom of speech. Well, Gary Lineker’s freedom of speech, anyway.
The shamelessness of the British chattering classes never ceases to amaze me. In the past couple of hours, the kind of people who stared at their feet as JK Rowling was threatened with rape and death for saying ‘men aren’t women’ are running around like modern-day Miltons, shouting ‘Free Gary!’ on a loop. Folk who say ‘Well, free speech has consequences’ in a cavalier way whenever an ex-Muslim is blacklisted for ‘Islamophobia’ or a TERF is cancelled for ‘transphobia’ now decree that free speech should not have consequences. Well, Gary Lineker’s free speech should not have consequences. Of any variety. Ever.
This is the news that Lineker is ‘stepping back’ from presenting Match of the Day until he and his BBC bosses reach an agreement over his use of social media. It follows his Twitter outburst against the government’s measures to tackle illegal immigration. He compared the language used by certain ministers to ‘Germany in the 30s’. To some of us, this was a grotesque instance of historical relativism, of unwittingly minimising the uniquely barbaric crimes of the Nazi regime by comparing them to a pretty normal immigration-control bill proposed by a democratic nation in 2023. But to Very Online Tory-loathers, the time-rich middle classes who love nothing more than screaming ‘FASCIST’ at right-wingers and their own parents probably, it was a divine revelation. They’re fuming that St Gaz is now being martyred for his fearless truth-telling.
This isn’t a fight for free speech – it’s a moral coup by noisy political influencers determined to turn everything, even the public broadcaster, into a platform for political preening.
The gushing over Gary has been one of the most embarrassing online phenomena of recent times. And that’s saying something. A cartoonist called Cold War Steve compared Lineker to the man who refused to salute in that famous 1936 photo from Nazi Germany. Yes, being briefly suspended from your cushy, multimillion-pound job as a footie presenter is just like the fate that awaited brave Germans who took a stand against actual Nazism. Across social media there’s been a secular beatification of Gary, the transformation of him into the pope of the pained liberal elites who’s valiantly sticking it to the fascist Tory government. Is anyone else a tad uncomfortable with the sight of mostly white virtue-signallers damning as fascistic a government and a Home Office overseen by people of Asian heritage? Just me?
Now these people are slamming the BBC for its unforgivable ‘cancellation’ of Mr Lineker. We need some perspective here. What has happened to Lineker is not cancel culture. The BBC is the public broadcaster. It has rules on impartiality. It is committed to being politically neutral – a task it often fails at, of course. Everyone who works for the BBC knows this. They know that, given their wages are funded by us, and given they work for a broadcaster that is meant to represent us, the people, in all our political and moral diversity, they can’t just go around saying ‘I hate the Tories’ and ‘Brexit is evil’. We know most of them think this, but we expect them not to say it. We know that while the Beeb is obsessed with gender and ethnic diversity it is terrible at political diversity and that you cannot swing a cat in one of its studios without hitting someone who went on one of those crazy Remainer marches in 2016. But we expect it to aspire, at least, to genuine public representation.
And when one of its presenters, especially a starry one, brazenly grates against the institution of impartiality, the BBC has a right to act, no? My view is that the likes of Lineker and Emily Maitlis, formerly of Newsnight, have forced the Beeb’s hand. These people pushed their luck, and they know it. From the staggering arrogance of Maitlis’s use of the privileged platform of Newsnight to spout her (entirely predictable) Guardianista views, to Lineker’s use of his BBC-burnished platforms to make pretty shocking political statements – such as likening the language used by an Asian-heritage female politician to the language used by violently racist Nazis – these two and others pushed too far. The BBC had no choice but to act. It knows that if it allows big names to wax lyrical on politics, in defiance of the rules, then it would have no way of stopping other Beeb people from using this licence payer-funded entity as a personal soapbox. It would lose control.
What’s really going on in the online Lineker love-in is not a fight for free speech, but a fight by the correct-thinking liberal elites to further turn the BBC into their political plaything, to complete its transformation into an outlet for their beliefs and their beliefs only. Their cringe-inducing cheerleading for Lineker, and for Maitlis before him, has nothing to do with the great old cause of defending the liberty to utter, and everything to do with colonising the Beeb so that it becomes little more than a mouthpiece of the right-on middle classes. This isn’t a fight for free speech – it’s a moral coup by noisy political influencers determined to turn everything, even the public broadcaster, into a platform for political preening.
Freedom of speech means defending the right of every citizen to hold and to express whatever views they like. To that end, I would defend to the death the right of Gary Lineker to give voice to his sixth-former-style inanities about the Tories and the Nazis and blah blah blah, even as I recognise that his current employer might want to say to him, ‘Chill, Gary’. Lineker’s online defenders, in contrast – those Johnny Come Latelys to liberty – will mount no such defence of the right of every man and woman to think, say, write and believe whatever they want. Their impulse is not to liberate thought and speech, but to occupy the BBC. The pro-Lineker crusade is an ironically authoritarian one.
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