Lineker and the BBC: everyone kind of sucks here

Politically motivated cancellation vs. dumbass Nazi analogies. Choose your fighter.

The latest cancel-culture/free-speech controversy in Britain involves an outspoken soc- sorry, football commentator suspended by the BBC for his controversial tweets, and I think I'm just one "blimey" away from writing the most British sentence ever.

As we've been reporting, Gary Lineker was asked to step back from presenting the BBC's Match of the Day on Saturday after becoming embroiled in a row over impartiality.

In a statement on Friday, the BBC said it considered Lineker's use of social media to be "a breach of our guidelines".

A spokesperson added: "The BBC has decided that he will step back from presenting Match Of The Day until we've got an agreed and clear position on his use of social media."

But what was the tweet that led to his removal?

Lineker became embroiled in the impartiality row after comparing language used to launch a new government asylum policy to 1930s Germany.

He was criticising the Illegal Migration Bill, which would make it unlawful for migrants who arrive in the UK on small boats to settle in the country.

Lineker said: "This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the '30s, and I'm out of order?"

He had previously replied to a video of Home Secretary Suella Braverman explaining the bill, saying: "Good heavens, this is beyond awful."

On one hand, I am no fan of employers punishing people for expressing their opinions when it is clear they are doing so in their capacity as private citizens. I cannot say it’s never appropriate (had Lineker gone the route of another former football player and commentator, David Icke, a termination might well be justified) but his tweets don’t come anywhere close to the line I would draw.

On the other hand, the BBC has strict impartiality rules for its employees, by which Lineker agreed to abide when he took the job, which makes this kind of like someone who accepts an athletic scholarship to Liberty University and then complains that they won’t let him organize a drag queen story hour.

On the other other hand, it is unclear whether Lineker's tweets actually ran afoul of these rules, and whether the Beeb has been consistent in enforcing them:

The BBC guidelines acknowledge that social media is "now a part of everyday life".

Staff are allowed to "engage in social media activities if they wish".

But there must be a "clear distinction" between BBC accounts run by the BBC for BBC purposes and personal accounts run by employees for personal purposes, the guidelines say.

Where does that leave Lineker?

Lineker is a freelance broadcaster at the BBC - not a permanent member of staff.

He does not present news or political content.

He tweeted to the 8.7 million followers of his personal account, which does not include any link to the BBC or Match of the Day in his bio.

But BBC guidelines state: "There are also others who are not journalists or involved in factual programming who nevertheless have an additional responsibility to the BBC because of their profile on the BBC. We expect these individuals to avoid taking sides on party political issues or political controversies and to take care when addressing public policy matters."

And that people who are "clearly identified with the BBC" should behave "in ways that are consistent with the BBC's editorial values and policies".

Richard Sambrook, former director of news at the BBC and director of BBC Global News and the BBC World Service, told the PA news agency: "For a sports presenter in their personal life to express views that aren't impartial, is not as serious as if it was a news journalist."

I didn’t have an issue with cancelling Donald Trump’s social media accounts per se, so much as I questioned whether Twitter and Facebook were being consistent in enforcing their rules. That’s what Lineker’s case ultimately comes down to: is he being singled out, or is he being treated as any other BBC presenter would?

For what it’s worth, I don’t remember the outspoken Jeremy Clarkson’s job hosting Top Gear being in jeopardy until he punched a guy.

OTOOOH:

As usual, when something which is not within a hundred miles of what Hitler did is nevertheless compared to Hitler, I find myself wondering what I would do if I were living in Germany in the thirties.

And my answer is not, "instead of taking up arms or fleeing the country, demanding I be allowed to keep my job with the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft." If Lineker feels Rishi Sunak’s government is in any way comparable to the Nazis, his accepting a salary from its broadcasting company makes him a collaborator, no?

Samuel Rubinstein, in UnHerd, accuses Lineker of cynically using the spectre of the Holocaust to score partisan political points:

It is Match of the Day host Gary Lineker’s belief that the Home Secretary’s language, when setting out her plans for the Government’s asylum policy, was ‘not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s’. Those who make such claims ought to be mocked, aside from anything else, for the apparent shallowness of their arsenal of cultural references.

But why are critics of the government so quick to reach for the rise of Nazism? Such analogies tend to be rooted in what could be described as ‘Holocaust-as-civics-lesson’, as distinct from ‘Holocaust-as-history’. The latter seeks to understand the catastrophes of the twentieth century in their own terms, as complex and contingent historical events, whose underlying causes were specific to their time. ‘Holocaust-as-civics-lesson’, however, reduces the entire point of learning about the Holocaust to ‘Never again’.

According to that view, the story of Hitler is a kind of cautionary tale: one learns about it simply so that one can ‘recognise’ the hallmarks of fascism in one’s everyday life and ‘call them out’. This explains not only why people like Lineker make the analogies they do, but also why they feel so self-satisfied as they do it. In short, there can be no surprise that people use the Holocaust as a blunt rhetorical tool, because they believe that the purpose of learning about the Holocaust is to use it as a blunt rhetorical tool.

To contort the history of 1930s Germany into an analogy for 2020s Britain, one has to do and say some very strange things. It is untrue, for example, that Nazi rhetoric was ‘insidious’ or ‘subtle’, as though they ever bothered to hide their violent hatred of Jews. Likewise, the British press is in no way reminiscent ­— no matter what Alastair Campbell tells you — of the Nazi press: turn to any page of Der Stürmer and you would have found things much nastier than you’ll ever get in the Daily Mail.

(Side note: there are people in Britain whose rhetoric actually does resemble what the Nazis said about Jews, but the same people backing Lineker insist they’re just expressing their opposition to Israeli policies.)

The problem with ‘Holocaust-as-civics-lesson’, like the problem of treating the collapse of Weimar Germany as a parable, is that it means that the Holocaust has to be ‘updated’ to reflect present political concerns.

We see the same thing in America, where some blue-checks are already declaring Ron DeSantis worse than Hitler. Didn’t they get the memo? The Nazi comparisons aren’t supposed to come out until he’s secured the Republican nomination.

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My final verdict? Lineker’s comments are cheap and unfair, but I don’t think they justify him being suspended. If everyone who said something stupid about a highly charged political issue lost their jobs for it, the unemployment rate would be 97%.

Also, if he’d tweeted something in support of the Conservative government and was suspended for it, literally everyone would be on the opposite side of this debate. For most people, the only principle is working the refs and supporting the team.