BBC in a shambles as the Lineker affair rumbles on…
JVL Introduction
Support for Gary Lineker continues to grow as the BBC digs an ever-deeper hole for itself.
We follow on from David Rosenberg’s earlier pointed analysis of the Lineker affair, Free speech, humanitarianism or authoritarianism, with some Guardian/Observer comments.
Barney Roney says that what we have here is “de facto state censorship”; Archie Bland hopes that Keir Starmer learns something and concludes that “sincerity and clarity will put him on safer ground than the endless pursuit of diluted border conservatism”, while James Tapper in the Observer presents a list eminent TV presenters who have written about politics without any repercussions…
Why there are no winners after the BBC’s two-footed tackle on Gary Lineker
We all lose when the state, no matter how third-hand or arm’s-length, is able to engineer the silence of public figures
Barney Ronay, sports correspondent, the Guardian, Fri 10 Mar 2023
Keep politics out of sport. Ha, yeah. Good luck with that. Meanwhile, in what we must, if only out of a sense of convention, call the Real World, we have this: the strange and sinister developments of Friday evening in what will now come to be known as the Lineker affair.
The suspension of Gary Lineker from BBC presenting duties – not Newsnight or Question Time, but the bloodless warm bath of Match of the Day – over a tweet sent on Wednesday afternoon criticising government policy on migrants is, frankly, a jaw-dropping act of political intervention.
Of course both the BBC and the government will deny that this is an act of direct intervention. The only real response to that is: do you believe them?
And let us be clear: it really doesn’t matter what Lineker has been banging on about on his Twitter feed. It doesn’t matter if you like him, or agree with him, or feel annoyed by him. Perhaps you just want to watch the football. Perhaps you actively dislike and fear migrants. Perhaps this is in part because the government and friendly media keep stating (incorrectly) that the UK is being disproportionately assailed or invaded or colonised by them.
The fact is everybody loses, everything is diminished, when it is in the gift of the government of the day to decide who gets to say what on issues of basic human kindness. What we have here is the de facto state censorship of a man who says things like “and now to Goodison” in between footage of people playing football, for the crime of having freelance opinions on social media.
The title of stupidest, nastiest national discourse is, of course, a hotly contested global title. What makes the actions of the BBC in suspending Lineker over his personal tweets that bit worse is that with the other hand it will preach to others about press freedom and editorial integrity. Meanwhile it will also cave, without resistance, will be bullied and lectured on probity by the cheapest of political classes, by a home secretary who resigned over a breach of the ministerial code just six months ago.
So Lineker, who makes dad jokes and talks about Leicester, will now be absent from our screens over the contents of his original tweet, in which he compared the language used by the Home Office in framing its policy on migrants to that of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
And you do have to admire the unstinting effort that has gone into constructing out of such thin material not just a white noise of distraction; but weaponising Lineker’s own words against him.
It should be no surprise. If Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages have taught us anything, beyond the fact Matt Hancock is a kind of rancid human margarine poured into a shiny blue suit, it is that the current political class is obsessed with managing the message.
Lineker’s key mistake was to throw Nazi Germany in there. However fine and nuanced his understanding of the semiotics of National Socialist messaging in the years 1930-1940, it would be good generally if people could stop using Nazi Germany as a kind of bad things emoji. Better to explain and use detail. Save Nazi Germany. Keep it in your back pocket for those occasions when only Nazi Germany will do. In doing so he offered up an opportunity. And an opportunist will never miss one of those.
And so Lineker’s comments were gleefully gobbled up, gloatingly amplified, used as a dead cat with which to beat him around the head. At the end of which the only real certainty is that Lineker has been played like a piano, thrashed like a human piñata by a government which already has quite the record when it comes to sport and cheap public relations.
His suspension will, of course, be linked explicitly to the fact BBC presenters are supposed to avoid political statements. But the use of this power here feels arbitrary. Lineker is a freelance football pundit with a private Twitter account. He doesn’t do politics for the BBC. It is bizarre to suggest there is some public good issue, some threat to independence, that justifies threatening him into silence on his personal social media.
It’s not that everyone agrees with Gary Lineker, it’s that he offers a moral clarity missing everywhere else
As the BBC crisis snowballs, it is obvious that director general Tim Davie and those who pushed him into error misread the public mood
Archie Bland, the Guardian 11 Mar 2023
Impartiality is a knotty old concept, and one of the trickiest things about it is that it relies on the idea that you can safely find the middle ground. Witness the agonised attempts by the BBC and the Labour party to land on that sweet spot of unimpeachable banality after radical centrist firebrand Gary Lineker’s tweets became a rightwing media obsession this week. Instead of establishing themselves as the trusted representatives of the median voter or viewer, they have ceded moral authority to a man who spent last Sunday commentating on Nottingham Forest v Everton.
That’s Steve Wilson, one of the Match of the Day commentators who on Friday announced that they would be stepping back from their duties this weekend in solidarity with Lineker. Post-match analysis and player interviews will also be missing. The version of the BBC’s football highlights show that will be on air as a result – and the enforced dropping of Saturday’s Football Focus after its presenter Alex Scott, pulled out – is the natural endpoint of the position that the corporation has so painfully staked out for itself: a (political!) football fizzing about without much sense of why, or what the stakes are. Give up on meaningful analysis in pursuit of neutrality and the result is a version of events which is uncontroversial, certainly, but also difficult to understand.
One common theme of the response to Lineker’s intervention and its aftermath is to bemoan the fact that the media story is drawing so much more attention than the specifics of the government’s small boats policy itself. This is certainly true, as far as it goes, but what it misses is this: the Linekerology is only prominent because, even if you think his comparison of Suella Braverman’s rhetoric to that emanating from Germany in the 1930s is excessive, it is obviously the product of a moral clarity that has eluded the actual opposition.
Most people are now clearer on where a television presenter stands on the small boats crisis than where the Labour party, which has largely confined its critique to a managerialist argument about Home Office asylum application backlogs, does. If you’d rather people didn’t view every story through the prism of celebrity, you have to offer them a more compelling alternative.
The BBC director general and former Conservative council candidate Tim Davie, meanwhile, has acquiesced to a vision of the corporation’s responsibilities that is wholly the creation of those who would rather it did not exist. The BBC’s guidelines say that high-profile individuals should “avoid taking sides on party political issues or political controversies and to take care when addressing public policy matters”. It is not obvious why this should mean Lineker is off air, but Alan Sugar can praise Boris Johnson and excoriate Mick Lynch without any threat to the Apprentice and its stories of gormless business influencers hawking corporate hospitality packages in Dubai. The only conceivable distinction is that the government and its supporters across much of the media are angry about one, and couldn’t care less about the other.
To state the obvious: you shouldn’t trust a definition of impartiality created by actors with an obviously uneven way of applying it. Nor should you trust a vision for a public body set out by people who would like it to be privatised. Even so, the BBC appears resigned to meekly chasing after the football that the Daily Mail dangles in front of it. You will recall that when Charlie Brown did this with Lucy, he repeatedly wound up on his backside in the dirt. The headlines in the Conservative-supporting media this morning were not about the restoration of order at the corporation, but enthusiastic descriptions of “revolt” and “mutiny”.
If the right remains unappeased, the sheer giddiness of the broad left, which is now so elastic that it incorporates Jeremy Clarkson nodding approvingly at Ian Wright’s catalysing decision to withdraw from Match of the Day tonight, was a cheerful and unexpected addition to life’s rich tapestry on Friday afternoon. By happy coincidence, Wright’s tweet landed around the time that Labour recognised which way the wind was blowing, and dared to be carried by it so far as to issue an anonymous source quote saying something concrete about the Lineker business, if not the actual small boats crisis.
However Lineker’s employment status is resolved, we might hope that more significant consequences arise from all this. Keir Starmer should consult the anonymous source of that quote about what could be gained from a more nuanced understanding of what voters want than can be found in a PowerPoint presentation of the latest issue polling. Perhaps, he may conclude, sincerity and clarity will put him on safer ground than the endless pursuit of diluted border conservatism.
The BBC should figure out a standard for its non-news talent that makes more sense than muddy assertions on Friday that it had “never said that Gary should be an opinion-free zone”, recognise that nobody seriously thinks he is picking the Today programme’s running order, and apply whatever set of rules it arrives at with the same alacrity to its conservative stars as it does its liberal ones.
The rest of us, meanwhile, might wonder if the very idea of the political centre is bogus, and conclude that, instead, there are many political centres, calibrated not by who Rishi Sunak thinks he needs to keep onside in swing seats to defend his majority, or who is likely to pay for the Daily Mail, but by complicated and sometimes contradictory impulses around fairness, honesty, and who is deserving of the public’s trust. It’s pretty ridiculous that it takes a row over a football presenter’s tweets to give these ideas some traction. Now that it’s here, we shouldn’t waste it.
Archie Bland is the editor of the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter
Gary Lineker was singled out from a long list of BBC stars who express political views
From Alan Sugar and Karren Brady to Richard Osman and Nadiya Hussain, there is nothing new about TV presenters writing about politics
James Tapper, the Observer, 11/12 Mar 2o23
Gary Lineker’s suspension for expressing political views set off an avalanche of comparisons with other BBC stars who have not been similarly sanctioned for lacking impartiality.
Some were obvious: Lord Sugar of The Apprentice, whose 18 years of firing people have been punctuated by political outbursts, from newspaper interviews calling on people to vote Conservative to tweeting a mocked-up image of Jeremy Corbyn sitting next to Adolf Hitler.
Others were more obscure: Dame Mary Berry, the doyenne of TV cookery shows, has expressed scepticism about the government’s sugar tax in interviews and called for changes to the national curriculum to include cooking skills. They, like Lineker, were not journalists so shouldn’t be expected to adopt monastic levels of impartiality away from their jobs, political commentators argued.
Armando Iannucci, creator of the satirical series The Thick Of It, told the Observer that Tim Davie, the BBC director general, should reset the clock: “If I was Tim Davie, I’d come out of Broadcasting House and say, ‘Everything I’ve done in the last four days – forget it. I was under pressure. Pretend it didn’t happen. I’m going to have a bath for the rest of the weekend’.”
He raised the example of Michael Portillo, the former Conservative cabinet minister who has spent many of the past 14 years making shows such as Great Continental Railway Journeys, while also talking politics in newspaper columns.
“If Michael Portillo did his train programme and it was all very lovely down the Amalfi coast and he said ‘the great beauty of this train service is that it’s privatised, once again showing that it’s the free market that delivers the best sort of service to the customer’, then you think ‘he’s crossing the line here’,” Iannucci said.
Other stars who have expressed views include Nadiya Hussain, who won The Great British Bake Off when Berry was a judge, and became a popular TV chef hosting shows including Nadiya’s Family Favourites. In 2018, she posted a tweet calling Theresa May “a monster” for ordering an airstrike in Syria. She quickly deleted it and the BBC brushed off the matter saying she was “not a BBC staff member and her personal social media accounts are not connected to her work as a BBC presenter”.
Richard Osman, creator of Pointless and presenter of House of Games, said in 2019 that he believed the Tories wanted to sell off the NHS bit by bit.
Baroness Brady, an adviser on The Apprentice, is a Conservative peer and has a column in the Sun, last week writing to support the equalities minister Kemi Badenoch’s decision not to make the menopause a protected characteristic. Claude Littner, another Sugar associate, lambasted a Twitter user in 2019 as “an ignoramus! Under Labour, the money will run out”.
Other presenters, like Lineker, have attacked government policy. Martin Lewis, who has a weekly show on BBC Radio 5 Live, campaigns to change government policies, including most recently warning of an “act of national mental health harm” if energy bills were allowed to rise.
Rob Rinder, the TV judge, is co-presenting a new documentary airing soon on BBC Two called The Holy Land And Us, about families with Jewish and Palestinian heritage. He campaigns on homelessness for Shelter and last year criticised the government for its slow response to the Ukrainian refugee crisis.
Gabby Logan, the sports presenter, asked why the government wasn’t tackling racism in a Twitter exchange with then-junior minister Natalie Elphicke in 2021. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is a Green party campaigner, but Hugh’s Wild West continues to run. Vanessa Feltz had a Radio 2 show and also criticised Boris Johnson for failing to ban conversion therapy while prime minister in 2021.
Comedians often express opinions – even Michael McIntyre, whose Saturday night shows are reliably politics-free, lampooned Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak and Chris Pincher at a performance in 2022.
Iannucci said even journalists could express opinions without undermining their impartiality.
“Andrew Neil is one of the best interviewers on television, even though I know what his opinions are,” he said. “He’s still professional enough to not in the slightest let that get in the way of how he’s going to interview a politician. Lineker isn’t presenting a political programme, he’s a football presenter. There’s no way that people take Gary Lineker’s views to be representative of the BBC.”
The BBC’s approach means that even when stars take on obviously political projects there is little room for them to back up their findings with an opinion. Paul Whitehouse, the comedian, has won plaudits for his BBC Two documentary series Our Troubled Rivers, detailing the scale of sewage discharges and other pollution, but in interviews has been unable to suggest which politicians might be responsible.
It was still not enough satisfy the government, with officials at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs despatched to publish a point-by-point rebuttal.
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This article was amended on 12 March 2023. An earlier version said that Vanessa Feltz “has a Radio 2 show”; she left the show in 2022. This has been clarified.
ABSURDLY
The audience
Are pointing out the double standards
Alan Sugar. His post of Jeremy Corbyn
As a Nazi. His support for Boris
Johnson. His call to Vote Conservative
But there’s a difference
Conservative is better, less contentious
All the newspapers are Conservative
The higher-ups and editors
Managers and owners. People
Who matter. Refugees are foreign
Coming here in dinghies. Not yachts
And private aeroplanes
People on the left tend to regard public ownership as a panacea. The state of the BBC and our universities should cause them to think again. Public ownership only makes sense if the publicly owned entity is accountable to the public. Given the amount of money we give the BBC it would be surprising if it didn’t make some good programmes. The truth is that we on the left have been rather lazy. We have tended to assume that because the BBC is publicly owned that is a good thing in itself. We praise the jewels but ignore the mountains of dross. The BBC has never been completely impartial. It doesn’t even pretend to be impartial in its reporting of the Royal family. But now we have strident extreme right wing voices in Parliament we can see very clearly the defects that were always there in the governance of the BBC. We cannot rely on good will from the “great on the good” because we live in an age when top bosses award themselves 33 percent pay rises while expecting ordinary workers to take pay cuts. That’s the moral climate we inhabit and so we can no longer trust the BBC to do the right thing. We need a transparent appointment system for senior staff and proper accountability. Perhaps the “shareholders” of the BBC should be a Select Committee ?
RE: “Lineker’s key mistake was to throw Nazi Germany in there …”, I profoundly disagree with the comment (and the rest of the paragraph). Lineker is giving a warning – and warnings are only useful when they’re understood by their “audience”.
Enough people know about what happened in Germany during the1930s – the step by step collapse of its democracy and the nation’s moral sense under increasing Fascist pressure and eventual control – to correctly apply Lineker’s warning to what’s happening in the UK today.
The Fascists’ language and propaganda in the 1930s “othered” the mentally and physically disabled to the extent that eventually nuns and nurses supported the murder of those defenceless ones in their care.
The UK state is “othering” refugees in a similar fashion. While refugees probably never need fear being deliberately murdered by the UK state, its “othering” of them means recent governments can treat them appallingly with much less fear of the public backlash it deserves.
I’ve just finished listening to a recording of the File on 4 R4 program on “Missing Migrant Children”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001jslt
The UK State may not deliberately murder refugees –
but they treating some young asylum seekers in a manner
which is criminally irresponsible.
I agree with Linda. We should compare more not less with Nazi Germany. Why? Because the Nazis didn’t come out of a vacuum. The eugenicist measures that Hitler introduced were not innovative but owed their inspiration to similar policies in the United States and elsewhere.
And these same eugenicist policies which began with the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases led to the euthanasia T4 programme. T4 led directly, as Henry Friedlander outlined in the Politics of Genocide, to the Holocaust. Both the same personnel, Christian Wirth and Franz Stangl and even the same gas trucks used in T4 were used to initiate the first extermination camp at Chelmno.
How is the policy of Susella Braverman, to return refugees to France any different from the decision of Nazi Germany to exclude Polish Jewish refugees in 1938? It was this decision that led to the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, the pretext for Kristallnacht. No comparison?
And we could also compare the opposition today of the Daily Mail and Express to Jewish refugees coming to this country with their hostility to the ‘small boats’ refugees.
Of course the Tories and their Labour echo chambers, Yvette Cooper and Emily Thornberry, hate comparisons between their policies and the Nazis. That is all the more reason to keep using them!
Of course this is all politically motivated. That’s clear from one aspect of this I have not seen mentioned anywhere, although I might have missed it. The footballing world, including Gary Lineker and all his fellow-presenters, have given their whole-hearted, sincere, and unstinting support to two huge political campaigns lately. One, the general stand against racism which is affirmed every time a team takes the knee and the commentators explain exactly why; and two, the specific campaign, encouraged by the government, to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia, which has been referred to with great frequency especially when Ukrainian players feature in games. Yet no-one, not the BBC, not the government, not the press, has seen fit to censure Lineker et al for any of this; and why? Because all of this is in line with government policy. So the argument about impartiality is clearly a nonsense, since the side of it which is trying to impose an idea of impartiality (which actually has no connection with real life, Lineker’s or anybody’s) is itself proven to be utterly incapable of it.
you believe Lineker and chums are in any way politically ‘of the left’? i suppose it must be true when ‘the wolf in sheep’s clothing’ aka the Guardian says it is, but Lineker and chums (inc. Guadian) remain silent on the continued genocide in Palestine. what an opportunity for BBC to save hundreds of thousands of pounds paid in stratospheric wages to a crisp salesman who can afford to pay the wages of Alastair Campbell.
I agree entirely with Linda’s analysis of why Gary Lineker’s reference to the Nazis was correct. Note the constant reference to poor people who claim benefits as ‘spongers’, another labelling to denigrate human beings, most of whom have little choice than to be claiming.
I note too, the madness of people slogging at work all week to pay huge nursery fees, leaving them with a pittance of what they have earned to live on – a ludicrous situation engineered by the Government. If they stopped work and claimed they would become ‘spongers’.
The best thing that has come out of Lineker’s Tweets so far, is that the Public are shocked and angry at the attack by the BBC (Government) on him, and the BBC is going to have to do some hard work to win back public trust.
It is absolutely incredible to think that the government has faced more opposition from Gary Lineker than it ever has from Keir Starmer who is actually paid to do it!
Don’t be a Bystander. That is what I took from this. That phrase came from and was emphasised time and again by Alastair Campbell, who did an excellent defence of Lineker to allcomers on TV on Friday. Just remember how Campbell was treated by Seamus Milne et al in the rather pisspoor press operation around Corbyn (who I supported on policies). Stupid move that was. Anyway, of course, Lineker did not use the word Nazi. The language used in 30s Germany against Jews was a precursor and that is what warnings are for -to point out similarities. Gary Lineker is involved with Refugees at Home. He is well informed. People who opposed Lineker are ill informed and hold the views that feed their xenophobia; views built on hatred that were held by the German political establishment in the 30s: that Germany had been ‘invaded’ and ‘swarms’ of Jews were to blame for everything bad that had ever happened. In the end that led to the greatest evil ever perpetrated by humans upon other humans in the 20th century -the ‘Final Solution’. Lineker gave a warning from history and was heard. Then Davie silenced him, with the backing of Sharp and Gibb, in a culture at the BBC that ditches Emily Maitlis yet gives free reign to Kuennsberg, Alan Sugar, Fiona Bruce, Andrew Neil and Jeremy Clarkson (although chastened himself, Clarkson backed Gary in this).
The BBC breaks its ’Impartiality’ Rule every day, Israel, Ukraine, The US and UK Governments, the NHS and more. Let’s remind ourselves of the part it played to stop a Corbyn led Government, which included the Panorama Programme “Is the Labour Party anti Semitic”.
I agree with Lineker entirely on what he said but would love to question him about his comment “Bin Corbyn’ which by the way, it apparently didn’t break the Impartiality rule, I wonder why!!
https://twitter.com/garylineker/status/854673387565834243?s=61&t=B_w5huIzHHinRDbtiiW29w
Prof Tanja Bueltmann, a German historian of migration and diaspora based in Scotland comments “when politicians speak in a language not dissimilar to that used in 1930s Germany, I recognise it. Why? Because I have been taught about it all my life—and that it needs to be called out and rejected. It’s a duty to do so, in fact.” She has written a thread on the subject here:-
https://twitter.com/TanjaBueltmann/status/1633445311103262721?s=20
Naziism was almost certainly uniquely evil but what can also be rather shocking is that is seems to have grown out of a well integrated and tolerant society not so very different from our own. As I grew up in the UK I was surrounded by people tut tutting about the German mentality, as if we were congenitally incapable of going down to their level. Such ironic bigotry.
We may fail to nip it in the bud if we are too self satified to accept such buds may exist in our more civilised garden.