Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The Lineker row isn’t about free speech – it’s a moral coup

[Getty]

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.

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