Lineker’s tweets aren’t grounds to cancel him – but they do make the case for scrapping the BBC
EThe pundit’s remarks were crass and stupid, but have nothing to do with how he performs his job. We can’t pick and choose when to defend free speech
The argument for a state broadcaster was already pitifully weak. L’affaire Lineker does not make it any stronger
ither cancel culture is a thing or it isn’t. If it is, and if we object to it, then we have no choice but to rally to Gary Lineker, suspended by the BBC over a series of anti-Tory tweets.
The phrase “cancel culture” is often used too vaguely. It doesn’t mean criticising a public figure for voicing an unfashionable opinion. It doesn’t mean organising a Twitter pile-on. It doesn’t mean unfriending someone on Facebook.
Cancel culture, in its raw form, means trying to get people sacked for voicing views that have nothing to do with their line of work. For example, demanding that a publisher drop an author because of her views on trans rights, or petitioning against an exhibition by an artist – even a long-dead artist – who doesn’t conform to your version of anti-racism.
Cancel culture revives the ancient Greek idea of asebeia – a mockery of the gods so impious that it could not be tolerated even as a private opinion. The essence of a blasphemy code, which is what we are talking about here, is that it renders the sinner impure and thus, by implication, taints anyone who admires him.
We don’t do this in the normal course of life. If we need a plumber, we don’t fret about whether he fiddles his taxes, cheats on his wife or votes Lib Dem. But we do it to artists. To pluck a recent example more or less at random, several of Dr Seuss’s children’s books were withdrawn from print when it was recently found that the author had, among other supposedly atrocious crimes, drawn a cartoon of a Chinese man with braids eating from a bowl with chopsticks.
We consider footballers, at least in this sense, to be artists. Recall how, in 1999, Glenn Hoddle was sacked as England manager for saying that physical disabilities were caused by negative karma. That view is held by many Buddhists and Hindus but, in an early example of cancel culture, Tony Blair decided that it was inexcusable for a white man to voice it.
Lineker, like Hoddle, has been cancelled for expressing an opinion unrelated to his job. If, instead of giving viewers his contenders for Goal of the Season, he had repeatedly gone off on rants about, say, modern monetary theory, that might be a sacking offence. But he didn’t. His performance as a presenter – rather like his performance as a footballer, where he managed more than 300 goals in 600-plus matches without once being cautioned or booked – was close to impeccable.
I can think of only one lapse, when he said of the 2026 World Cup hosts that “obviously, America’s an extraordinarily racist country”. That remark was both insulting and untrue. But, other than that slip, he has proved an able and eloquent commentator.
What he says off-air should be irrelevant. He can be as obnoxious, foolish and self-contradictory as he likes, provided he doesn’t carry it into the studio. Lineker is a football presenter. His fondness for the Channel boat people is as irrelevant as Nick Robinson’s fondness for Manchester United.
For what it’s worth, I consider Lineker’s reaction to tightening the rules on illicit migration to be almost unbelievably crass. Reductio ad hitlerum is always a terrible argument, and rarely more so than when it is deployed against the daughter of immigrant parents, a woman whose children are descended from Holocaust survivors.
Lineker described the approach set out in a short video by Suella Braverman as “an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s”. Hmmm. By way of illustration, let’s compare the Home Secretary’s language with that used by the Nazi dictator.
Here is Adolf Hitler: “If the international Jewish financiers should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”
Here, in the video that so upset Lineker, is Braverman: “We are committed to helping those in need, like the hundreds of thousands of people we have supported from Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong in recent years. But it’s not fair that people who travel through a string of safe countries and then come to the UK illegally can jump the queue.”
I’d say there was a pretty marked difference between the two. But plenty of Twitter users will disagree – an attitude captured in the catchy 2017 song Everyone I Don’t Like is Literally Hitler. Many secondary schools focus disproportionately on the rise of Nazism, and many young people like to catastrophise, seeing any political development they dislike as a mortal danger. The combination of these two tendencies leads to what the commentator Ed West calls political hypochondria – a readiness to see fascism everywhere.
Lineker has reminded us that you don’t have to be young to be juvenile. As the row boiled over, he tweeted: “I have never known such love and support in my life than [sic] I’m getting this morning (England World Cup goals aside, possibly). I want to thank each and every one of you. It means a lot. I’ll continue to try and speak up for those poor souls that have no voice. Cheers all.”
Right, Gary. Just like Nazi Germany, eh? Where, as we all know, opponents of the regime were fêted by fans and mobbed by the media. But, to repeat, Lineker is not paid as an historian or a political commentator. He is paid as a sports presenter.
Ah, say critics, but the BBC is different. It is obliged by its charter to be impartial. What’s more (they go on) Lineker owes his public preeminence largely to his BBC job. It has been nearly 30 years since he last played in a professional game. The reason that he has a continuing national voice, not least on Twitter, is that he is paid by you, the viewer. This (they conclude) gives every licence-fee payer a stake in him, which is why he should stay off contentious subjects.
In truth, though, this isn’t an argument against Lineker. It’s an argument against the licence fee. There is no way that the BBC, or any broadcaster, can be impartial. Even if it somehow cauterised its presenters’ opinion glands in some painful operation, no two viewers would agree on what constituted neutrality. The argument for a state broadcaster was already pitifully weak in an age of Netflix and YouTube. L’affaire Lineker does not make it any stronger.
Two closing thoughts. First, however offended they might be by his Nazi comparisons, the Conservatives won’t be unhappy that Lineker has put its immigration reforms on the front pages. For a policy to be truly popular, voters need to understand that it is being forced through in the face of opposition – an insight often attributed to Bill Clinton’s brilliant strategist, Dick Morris.
The only thing better than having Lineker insult supporters of tighter border control would be for Emma Thompson, Meryl Streep, Daniel Radcliffe and Benjamin Zephaniah to make a video, complete with schmaltzy music, attacking the policy – which, right on cue, they have. No amount of being talked down to by celebs will shift voters from their view that it is fundamentally wrong for young men from safe countries to jump the queue. But the more that policy is attacked, the higher it will rise up the agenda.
Second, Lineker’s descent from goal-scoring hero to irritating luvvie has been played out on, and largely caused by, Twitter. That medium might have been expressly designed to push sensible people into saying silly things. It has a way of degrading and diminishing its users, and has done so in this case.
By all means call Lineker out for his jejune opinions. Feel free to criticise him for his exceptional BBC salary. Do, come to that, campaign for the BBC to be made independent of the state. But to suspend someone because he holds a controversial opinion? To make it a condition of his employment that he should not opine on unrelated matters? Please – let’s hold ourselves to a higher standard. We don’t always have to make everything about everything.