The boot’s on the other foot now... just ask Gary Lineker
Since the EU referendum on June 23, this country has been turned on its head. The latest proof comes from an unlikely – and indeed unwitting – source: the former England football captain, Gary Lineker. A few days ago on Twitter, Lineker expressed his disappointment at the lack of sympathy some people in Britain were showing to refugees. In some cases, he believed, their attitude was not only heartless but racist.
In return, he received cascades of indignant abuse. A Ukip MEP, Patrick O’Flynn, suggested he should lose his job as presenter of the BBC’s Match of the Day. Then the Sun joined in, by claiming on its front page that “the BBC was under pressure to fire Gary Lineker”. Apparently, some people were so offended by Lineker’s comments that they proposed a boycott of the brand of crisps he advertises. (Walker’s, if you want to join in. Or, indeed, if you want to buy some extra, out of solidarity.)
There, in microcosm, you see how debate has changed in this country. Everyone’s switched sides. Because, until quite recently, it was the socially conservative who complained that “you can’t say anything nowadays” without causing outrage among the socially liberal. Now, it’s the socially liberal who complain that “you can’t say anything nowadays” without causing outrage among the socially conservative.
It’s fascinating: a complete role reversal. What are the people calling for Lineker to lose his job, after all, if not hyper-sensitive “special snowflakes” who are trying to “noplatform” someone, merely because he expressed an opinion they didn’t like? Can’t he even mention immigration without people jumping down his throat? Aren’t they just shutting down debate about his legitimate concerns, by taking offence and playing the victim card? Whatever happened to freedom of speech?
Honestly. It’s political incorrectness gone mad. Personally, I’m all for freedom of speech. At least, I think I am. But then I watch Question Time on BBC One, and I’m not so sure.
Is there a more dispiriting programme on TV right now? These days it just feels like the middle-class equivalent of The Jeremy Kyle Show: an exercise in winding up the studio audience until it’s in a tizzy of judgmental ire. Actually, maybe I’m being unfair to the producers. Maybe they don’t wind up their audiences. Maybe their audiences are just unpleasant of their own accord. On this week’s edition, recorded in Hartlepool, a Polish woman said that since the vote to leave the EU she no longer felt “wanted” in Britain. As if to prove her point, others in the audience jeered and booed her. At times like that, I begin to think that the only way I can retain my belief in freedom of speech is to avoid hearing people exercise it. On Thursday David Cameron was replaced as Tory MP for Witney by Robert Courts. Bizarre, in a way, to think Mr Cameron was prime minister just a little over three months ago. It seems like another age. I barely think about him now. Still, that’s politics for you: one minute you’re the most important person in the country, the next everyone’s forgotten who you are.
As it happens, while I was reading yesterday’s newspaper, my son looked over my shoulder and pointed eagerly at a photo of Mr Cameron. “Look!” he said. “It’s Mr Tumble!” Like most small children, my son is a big fan of Mr Tumble, so I’d take it as a compliment. I love looking at old newspapers. Decades-old, I mean. I’m not interested so much in how they reported the major stories of the age. It’s more the insight they give into the attitudes of the time. The way people thought – or at least, the way newspapers thought people thought.
Recently I was visiting a secondhand bookshop in Rochester, when my eye was caught by a familiar sight: the logo of The Daily Telegraph. It was on the front of a battered-looking book titled The Thirties: A Chronicle of the Decade. I looked inside. It was a compendium of contemporary front pages, news reports, obituaries and editorials. I bought it straight away, and was instantly engrossed.
A headline from 1932, for example, proclaimed a remarkable innovation: “Radio Sets Designed for Women.”
The reporter had spoken to an official from the Radio Exhibition at Olympia in London. “Women are not technically minded,” the official explained. Therefore, “to cater for women”, manufacturers had decided to “reduce the operation of a radio set to the utmost simplicity”.
The idea, wrote the reporter, “is that when the husband leaves home in the morning for work he can set the buttons to plot out a day’s listening for his wife”. Much appreciated, I’m sure. Then, “as each hour comes round, she has only to press the appropriate button in order to be tuned straight into the station”.
The headline of an opinion column from 1935, meanwhile, asked: “Does a University Help a Girl?” It concluded that it did. “To send a daughter to the university” would “make her life more interesting and satisfying both as single woman and as wife and mother”.
On to the sports pages, where, in 1936, a columnist discussed whether black athletes had an unfair advantage over whites. While he commended the former for their “charming human attributes of keenness and sportsmanship”, he noted the theory that “the black has an elongated heel which gives him greater power of springing”.
From 1935, incidentally, came a report revealing that the BBC had banned its broadcasters from passing comment on certain controversial subjects. Among them were “religion – including spiritualism”, “marital infidelity”, “immorality of any kind”, and “effeminacy in men”.
No mention of tweeting about refugees.