Patrick O’Flynn has an interesting take on the ongoing Lineker saga in the Spectator, suggesting it could accelerate the demise of the BBC. Here’s an excerpt:
I never expected staff at an entire department of the BBC to put their shoulders to the wheel of the campaign to bring about an early demise for the television licence fee. Yet that is what those working for BBC Sport have done with their rock-solid sympathy strike on behalf of Gary Lineker.
Of course, most of them probably don’t realise what they are doing. With many of the big names of BBC Sport being former professional footballers themselves, one should not expect a particularly exalted level of intellectual reasoning.
But if they help Lineker win the right to continue engaging in hyperbolic left-wing tweeting while being the BBC figure paid most loot by TV licence fee-payers, they will surely hasten the end of the compulsory fee.
BBC director general Tim Davie – effectively its editor-in-chief – has previously reminded Lineker about his responsibility not to compromise the corporation’s impartiality via his social media utterances. Lineker, by contrast, has expressed zero remorse for his latest infraction and has even pledged to carry on in the same vein. So it looks like a fight to the finish.
Let’s be clear: in his outburst over the Government’s Illegal Migration Bill, the Match of the Day presenter did not merely say he was against the legislation and thought we should do better by new arrivals in the country.
He invoked bad faith and extremism on the part of those advancing or supporting the measures, branding them “beyond awful” and “immeasurably cruel” before even getting on to his ludicrous comparisons with 1930s Germany. This is, to use a footballing analogy (the only one this article will contain, I promise) tantamount to going in on an opponent two-footed and with studs showing.
Early polling from YouGov on Friday found that half of people support the core policy in the Bill – that anyone arriving illegally should be removed from the U.K. and not allowed to return, compared to 36% opposing it and 14% expressing no opinion.
So Lineker has branded at least half of those who fund his BBC wages via the licence fee as morally bankrupt and akin to Germans who went along with Hitler’s persecution of minorities.
There is no way that a compulsory universal licence fee can support that level of factionalism among its prime beneficiaries.
O’Flynn goes on to argue that a universal broadcaster is an obsolete notion in an era of such radical division.
We live in an increasingly polarised era when it comes to politics. Ideas that once commanded near-universal support, such as heightened compatriot obligation being the very basis of a nation state, are now actively and fiercely contested. In the case of the new legislation, that ferocity is even directed against the principle of it being reasonable for a nation to fend off illegal breaches of its borders.
We also have intensifying geographic and demographic-based concentrations of opinion on either side of this basic values divide. Anyone who had the pleasure of wandering round various London TV studios on June 24th, 2016 (the day after the EU referendum result) as I did, would have been in no doubt about the overwhelming preponderance of distraught Remain voters to be found within the broadcast media in general.
So the defenders of Lineker’s right to be politically partial, hyperbolic and abusive are in effect arguing for those of a conservative mindset to be forced to pay the wages of someone who insults them. If Lineker gets to win his face-off with Davie then by extension this will apply to many other left-leaning BBC household names too.
Can they not see that this simply isn’t a credible way forward for a broadcaster that is supposed, in the words of its recent promo, to belong to “all of us”?
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Saturday’s Match of the Day sans Gary Lineker saw its audience increase 23.4% compared to last week. Guido Fawkes has more:
Match of the Day was watched by 2.58 million TV viewers on BBC One. Up nearly half a million on last Saturday’s figure of 2.09 million according to the BARB overnights. This was the show’s biggest audience this year.
Worth reading in ful.
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As ever with a Mr Tucker article, far too many words. He probably didn’t have enough time to write a concise piece so produced this instead.
You should stick to reading posts on Twitter/X. Have you ever read a book?
Thanks for your advice. I have read a book. To be fair, not recently though.
You said the article has “far too many words”. Not a little too many words but FAR too many words. How many words do you think the article should have? Half as many? Or fewer than that?
As opposed to some of the others, I thought this one was really ok.
Almost wish I had read it now. I get a few paragraphs in and there is no purpose and then I read on and it’s more periphery stuff and I scroll up to see author and when I see Tucker (and to be fair a couple of others in recent times) and just scroll down to next article. That’s the problem when the editors don’t edit….
Dystopian and why the Police need a thorough cleansing, as do our ‘laws’.
Pets and minorities can now be offended by something and register a crime against you.
As the author asks – is hating the non-crime of a hate-crime, itself a thought or hate crime?
Massive government and state power. And we are to worship the police as ‘heroes’. They are no such thing, too many of them are useless and most of them are part of the problem.
Indeed the process is in itself the punishment; doing it to a high-profile journalist ensures that the message will get publicity. The message being “keep quiet or the police will turn up on your doorstep”.
The police visiting you is in itself a punishment. You are only human: you will feel stressed out, intimidated and humiliated just by them knocking on your door. That’s the aim here. That will teach you a lesson. Next time you’ll keep quiet.
The fact that “hate crime incident” is such a vaguely defined term is deliberate too. Its aim is to include anything that the government doesn’t want you to do.
The whole thing is not even particularly original: it is a copy of the 1927 Stalinist “Counter-revolutionary activity” law that allowed people to be sentenced to 10 years in the Gulag for making a joke.
Not for me it won’t.
I’ll follow my own conscience, post what I want when I want, say what I want to say.
Always have, always will.
There’s more of us than them and they’re terrified of us.
The point remains, however, why British police officers would cherrfully stand to be photograohed next to a flag which represents any nation other than ours which I doubt they understood. The article says it was a flag for a Pakistan political party which British police and other officials have no business being associated with.
I have no idea of the policies or charavter of that party but it does not matter.
It is also important to recall just how the police and UK public authorities generally have stood by Hamas and Palestinian demonstrations. At the wholly peaceful protest by naturally peacable farmers the Met rolled out 20 vans of police. When anyone protests for Israel or Jews they better beware. The contrast is binary.
Sam Melia is to be released from prison but the punishment continues;
”UPDATE: Sam Melia will be released before Christmas. However, they’re not allowing him to spend Christmas at home with his family. The state ensured he missed the birth of his baby girl and now they’re denying him her first Christmas. Sam will be placed in accommodation and monitored for 6 months because they claim his stickering makes him high risk of “serious harm”
https://x.com/MrNChance/status/1861905073904980376
An update from his partner, Laura Towler, here. It all sounds completely over the top and disproportionate when you consider who they’ve let out early and who gets suspended sentences;
https://x.com/MrNChance/status/1862038872621760746/photo/1
Thanks for these.
That we have an anti-white government and an anti-white Establishment is becoming clearer and clearer to more and more people.
In this context “high risk of serious harm” means “He could still have some stickers left and put them somewhere!” That’s the actual issue here: The notion that speech can be harmful in itself, ie, that people may be harmed by being exposed to opinions they really don’t like (or rather, the government really doesn’t like).
The evil bastards.
Fascinating this morning to see on GBNews, the corbynista criticising the police for arresting protesters trying to stop the detention of suspected PKK members because they had the cheek to search the community centre and ask the people living in the same house as the suspects to vacate, so the properties could be searched. In his view, these people of faith were all innocent and should not face jail time for the protest because it’s the police who were heavy handed, but he still said that waving the St George cross should be an imprisonable offence when done near a mosque!!!
All social control is predicated on fear.
No system of authority has enough resources to keep a population under control by sheer force.
Brainwashing helps, but the further from reality the brainwashing is, the more reliant on the threat of force authority becomes.
The problem the UK and most western nations have is the ideology of established power has been diverging from reality for sometime and the population isn’t having it.
No, it’s achieved NOTHING. Roll on the 20th January 2025, when sanity will be returned to the world.
The purpose of NCHIs seems to be to discredit the legal system which is based upon one law for everyone. This is individual law