Gary Lineker today refused to apologise and used his reinstatement by the BBC to hammer home his views on migrants, saying those crossing the channel were fleeing persecution – even though they are coming from France. The Mail has the story.
The footballer turned broadcaster, 62, was taken off air for a tweet comparing the language used to launch a new Government asylum seeker policy with 1930s Germany.
But after he was begged to return, his first assignment back on the BBC will be to present live coverage of the FA Cup quarter-final between Manchester City and Burnley on Saturday.
Mr. Lineker said today: “However difficult the last few days have been, it simply doesn’t compare to having to flee your home from persecution or war to seek refuge in a land far away. It’s heartwarming to have seen the empathy towards their plight from so many of you. We remain a country of predominantly tolerant, welcoming and generous people. Thank you.”
BBC Director-General Tim Davie said in a statement the corporation would now commission an independent review of its social media guidelines, particularly for freelancers. …
In a follow-up tweet, Gary Lineker said he wanted “to thank Tim Davie for his understanding during this difficult period”.
He added: “He has an almost impossible job keeping everybody happy, particularly in the area of impartiality. I am delighted that we’ll continue to fight the good fight, together.”
Confirming Lineker would return to Match of the Day on Saturday, Mr. Davie said the presenter “will abide by the editorial guidelines” until a review of the BBC’s social media policy is complete.
In his statement issued on Monday, the Director-General said: “Everyone recognises this has been a difficult period for staff, contributors, presenters and, most importantly, our audiences. I apologise for this.
“The potential confusion caused by the grey areas of the BBC’s social media guidance that was introduced in 2020 is recognised. I want to get matters resolved and our sport content back on air.”
Mr. Davie told the BBC he did “the right thing” in asking Lineker to step back from presenting duties, but said he “respects the views” of the presenters and pundits who walked out in solidarity with the former England striker.
The BBC Board said it welcomed the agreement between Lineker and the broadcaster, saying it was “the right time” to review its social media guidelines.
It’s a humiliating climbdown for Davie, who has had to commit to revising the guidelines again – having last changed them only in 2020 – instead of enforce them. Why he begged Lineker to return when Match of the Day viewing figures soared by half a million on Saturday – it was shorter and had no presenters – is unclear. Could be onto something there.
Tory MPs are apoplectic about the BBC’s “pathetic capitulation” to Lineker, with Philip Davies calling it a “watershed moment” that will hasten the “end of the road” for the £159-a-year licence fee owing to it causing catastrophic damage to the corporation’s claims of impartiality.
“The BBC can no longer credibly claim that it believes in political impartiality and – more importantly – it has proved that it doesn’t have the stomach to enforce it. It is now a free for all at the BBC,” he added.
There’s no doubt that BBC stars and pundits overwhelmingly spout Left-wing talking points and clichés (in public at least) and that allowing them an online free for all will not do the corporation’s fragile veneer of impartiality any favours. When there’s the ever-present threat of an unhappy Tory Government reforming the anachronistic funding model this is also a major risk to the bottom line.
Nevertheless, the Free Speech Union, in line with its principled opposition to employers placing excessive limits on their employees’ speech outside of work, has said that “if Gary Lineker is punished for ‘bringing the BBC into disrepute’, without the ‘tangible harm’ test being met, we will offer him every assistance. A good outcome will be if the BBC decides to extend more latitude to all its employees when it comes to speech outside the workplace.”
That would certainly seem the principled free speech position, even if it grates to apply it to the wokerati who you know would cancel a heretic in a flash if they thought it would allow them to signal their virtue for a passing moment. Whether such a free-speech policy is consistent with the BBC’s special commitment, as the licence-fee funded national broadcaster, to be (and appear to be) impartial is another matter.
In any case though, Lineker’s smug victory statement was a classic of the virtue-signalling genre in failing to recognise or engage with the issues that most concern people. Saying the last few days don’t compare with “having to flee your home from persecution or war to seek refuge in a land far away” is just bizarre because it makes precisely the strange comparison that it claims can’t be made and so sounds ridiculous. Of course, a millionaire getting in trouble with his employer for partisan tweeting he’s been warned about numerous times before doesn’t compare with being persecuted and a refugee. Why even bring it up?
As for fleeing persecution and war, Lineker seems once again to be ignoring the fact that the boats are all coming from France. Last time I checked, France was not persecuting anybody or at war. Everyone has sympathy with families fleeing conflict zones of course, and the U.K. is rightly generous towards them. But from May to September of last year, 42% of the people illegally crossing the Channel on small boats were Albanians and Albania is a democracy that hasn’t been at war since 1997. Stopping the boats is about ending human trafficking, preventing unnecessary loss of life and securing the borders. But this has been explained so many times, you can be sure Lineker and friends know it very well, they just don’t care.
Lineker adds: “It’s heartwarming to have seen the empathy towards their plight from so many of you. We remain a country of predominantly tolerant, welcoming and generous people.” But polls consistently show a majority of the U.K. population are concerned about illegal immigration and support measures to stop it. Lineker and his Twitter followers are a vocal but small minority who seem not to care about securing borders, closing high-risk routes and stopping human trafficking. We do indeed “remain a country of predominantly tolerant, welcoming and generous people” – but one that also, rightly, wants to close the illegal and dangerous channel-crossing entry route. Lineker falsely equates support for illegal channel crossings with being “tolerant, welcoming and generous” and wrongly assumes people who support that weird view are in the majority.
Unfortunately, with the BBC now set to revise its guidelines, this means we can look forward to even more insufferable woke grandstanding from Lineker and his fellow luvvies. Free speech it may be; pleasant it ain’t.
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#13 Team James or Team Tobes?
Are these problems all caused by a concatenation of poor decisions made by overpromoted and easily led oafs or is it a long planned project to ultimately enslave and destroy humanity by a shadowy Luciferian predator class?
Obviously not a conspiracy theory. The first statement is ridiculously true, but they don’t see how stupid they look! Talk about Kings new clothes…
Very well said! Great stuff! Thank you.
The response to covid, across large swathes of the world, has a name:
Socialist Fascism
‘And what of the English Bentham who considered that all industry asked of government was to be left alone, and of the German Humbolt who expressed the opinion that the best government was a lazy one?’
I stand with Bentham and Humbolt
‘The Fascist State organizes the nation, but it leaves the individual adequate elbow room. It has curtailed useless or harmful liberties while preserving those which are essential. In such matters the individual cannot be the judge, but the State only.’
https://sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/2B-HUM/Readings/The-Doctrine-of-Fascism.pdf
Our government, governments, and their minions stand with Mussolini
‘“Those people nowadays who say they would have stood up against the Nazis – I believe they are sincere in meaning that, but believe me, most of them wouldn’t have.”
“the whole country was as if under a kind of a spell,”
Brunhilde Pomsel
Where do the great British public stand?
Fascism wants man to be active and to engage in action with all his energies; it wants him to be manfully aware of the difficulties besetting him and ready to face them. It conceives of life as a struggle in which it behooves a man to win for himself a really worthy place, first of all by fitting himself (physically, morally, intellectually) to become the implement required for winning it. As for the individual, so for the nation, and so for mankind. Hence the high value of culture in all its forms (artistic, religious, scientific) and the outstanding importance of education.
If that was one of the core values of the mad pandemistas, I must somehow have completely misunderstood it. It seemed more as if they didn’t value education at all, considered art and religion expendable (and very much expendable) luxuries in face of The Existential Global Danger Of Respiratory Infections and wanted man to be passive, docile and accepting of whatever fate international public health authorities threw at him.
There is a difference between high minded, insincere, platitudes and reality.
‘Mussolini’s ideological penetration of education was especially visible in primary schools. There, politically reliable instructors were ensuring that children were raised in fascist values. This included teaching the spirit of sacrifice and heroism, strict obedience to authority as well as the protection of the Italian nation.
In Fascist Italy, organizations assisted this process of ideological instruction also at university. Here youth had to participate in activities focused on pre-military training for boys and different forms of civic service for girls.’
‘The Blackshirts favored way to make people obey was to tie someone to a tree, force 1-2 pints of castor oil down his throat, and then force him to eat a live frog/toad. Usually, this punishment was enough to ensure that people kept their thoughts to themselves…..The motto of the Blackshirts was “Me ne frego” (‘I don’t give a flying fuck’)
Life in Italy under the dictatorship
‘The last thing any Education Secretary wants to do is announce that schools will close and this is not a decision that the government ever wanted to take.
I would like to reassure everyone that our schools have not suddenly become unsafe, but limiting the number of people who attend them is essential when the COVID rates are climbing as they are now.
We must curb the escalating cases of COVID throughout the country and prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed.
That is why today I am setting out the contingency plans I had prepared but had hoped to never have to implement.
I would like to thank all our teachers, all our education staff and social workers for all they have been doing to keep children and young people safe and learning.’
Gavin Williamson
‘You hear them shouting “Heil, Spode!” and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: “Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?”
Bertie Wooster
There is a difference between high minded, insincere, platitudes and reality.
There’s a much more important difference between I consider this opinion really deplorable! and It’s fascism!, no matter how convenient one believes this toughtersatz-label to be. That’s particularly true for pandemic policies which were all essentially based on the notion that people are cattle whose individual properties don’t matter and who have to be herded by their expert minders in the proper way to maximize their useful output and minimise the harm they accidentally do to themselves.
Another aspect would be that fascism is ultimatively military, ie, geared towards war and based on the presumption that the highest purpose people can serve is that of a soldier. In contrast to this, Corona-ism was/ is built and an almost pathological fear of people coming together for any reason and is thus inherently pacifist. It’s not possible to field an army without strangers coming together and living under very much improvised circumstance for prologned periods of time and there’s no way to erect hand sanitizer stations on all entries to a battlefield and make people use them every time before and after they touched something somebody else also touched.
Lastly, saucy eyewitness (always) stories people put into place after handing half of Europe over to a murderous communist dictator who killed people by the million but of whose feats we never really hear anything aren’t terribly credible. Especially not, if they obviously mirror American interrogation practices of not that long ago, cf Trump’s Torture works statement. The fascists also claimed they were the good guys and that whomever they were targetting was handled in the most appropriate way to achieve a generally desirable outcome.
The reality is that ‘The Doctrine of Fascism’ written by Mussolini was implemented violently.
‘The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative. Individuals and groups are admissible in so far as they come within the State.’
‘We will fight both technical and spiritual rear-guardism…’
The Doctrine of Fascism – Benito Mussolini
‘During the Fascist takeover, many Italians lived in a state of terror. Black-shirted squadrists beat, shot, ritually humiliated, and destroyed the property of peasants, workers, politicians, journalists, and labor organizers. Although Socialists and the working classes were the primary victims, the Fascists also targeted Catholics, liberals, Masons, state authorities, and even dissident Fascists. This unprecedented campaign of political violence, most intense during the years between 1920 and 1922, culminated with the March on Rome and the appointment of Benito Mussolini as prime minister.’
Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy, Michael R. Ebner
‘….Italian atrocities committed in their Balkan and colonial territories, the more than fifty concentration camps throughout Italy that held Jews and foreigners during World War Two, the forced labor of Italian Jews in the cities and countryside…’
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, A Lesser Evil? Italian Fascism in/and the Totalitarian Equation
‘If we delve further back, the roll call gets longer: the living and recently deceased Italian soldiers under Mussolini whose atrocities against Greeks, Serbs, Ethiopians and Jews have been, with U.S. approval, largely ignored for more than 60 years. One of the most notorious, Giovanni Ravalli, died only in 1998, fully exposed but completely unpunished for crimes ranging from having a Greek policeman’s teeth pulled out with pliers to ordering boiling oil poured over 70 other prisoners.’
John MacArthur, Sorry About That War Crime,
A report of the NDH (Croatia) Consulate in Rijeka sent to the NDH’s Foreign Affairs Ministry on 20 December 1941 wrote that 800 people, including 60 women and 40 children, passed through Rijeka from Dalmatia in chains in four transports from 15 November to 20 November 1941.
‘“It is distressing to see our people with folded, cuffed hands, tied together with chains, going into the unknown, labouring while carrying their luggage, their faces distorted with pain caused by their shackles.”
British Police did not put people in chains, it is true, but measures implemented by the British government in response to a common cold coronavirus violated the human rights of millions and killed tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands before their time.
‘Between 2 March and 12 June 2020, 18,562 residents of care homes in England died with COVID-19, including 18,168 people aged 65 and over, representing almost 40% of all deaths involving COVID-19 in England during this period’
‘The UK government, national agencies, and local-level bodies have taken decisions and adopted policies during the COVID-19 pandemic that have directly violated the human rights of older residents of care homes in England—notably their right to life, their right to health, and their right to non-discrimination…….
Via its Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), the government in mid-March adopted a policy, executed by NHS England and NHS Improvement, that led to 25,000 patients, including those infected or possibly infected with COVID-19 who had not been tested, being discharged from hospital into care homes between 17 March and 15 April—exponentially increasing the risk of transmission to the very population most at risk of severe illness and death from the disease……..
Although care home deaths were not even being counted in daily official figures of COVID-19 deaths until 29 April, some 4,300 care home deaths were reported in a single fortnight during this period.’
As If Expendable 04 Oct 20
There is no mention of the environment. It is a life threatening situation and unless we can control the green zealots our lives will be destroyed.
Mr Tucker – that is an amazingly thoughtful and insightful piece – thank you.
I’m not sure it is an omission as such, but you don’t mention the role of the mainstream legacy media in enabling the disaster of the last three years, or the need for a proper fourth estate media, acting on behalf of the People in exposing the truth and holding power to account.
If the MSM continue to suppress the truth and propagandise and thus enable the implementation of policies that are against the interests of the People, we are doomed.
It’s a dilemma, should we fight the globalists with our own globalist organisation? National level opposition such as the Dutch farmers & the Canadian Truckers achieved some cut-through but is it inevitable that opposition to globalism has to be, well, globalist?
Global, ideally yes, but not globalist. Namely, a global opposition (in the sense that it’s everwhere) to the notion that the world needs global decisionmaking to avoid catastrophe.
The current system has absolutely nothing in common with what Mussolini referred to as corporatism because he wasn’t thinking about multinational enterprises encorporated according to the laws of the state of Delarware. What this world urgently needs is either less clueless Americans talking ouf of their asses or less Americans in general, especially for the next so-called pandemic. Let germ hysteriacs and civil service would-be dictators create chaos, death and mayhem there, as they already managed in 1918 – 1920, while the rest of the world happily ignores them.
Where is the UK version of Jeffrey Tucker?
History will prove that Covid-19 was a flu varient (proven by the instant disappearance of seasonal flu) and the greatest ever hoax perpetrated on humanity. Governments and Health institutions will NEVER be trusted ever again.
While an elite class can steal money from the population at will – through inflation – there is no chance of reforming this system. As is usually the case, money is the key.
One of the best articles I’ve read about this whole shite show. I just love Jeffery A Tucker trouble is aren’t more like him. The British press have been abysmal as have the church, the police, the courts, doctors, the list goes on and on.
The problem missed here is the WHO which is trying to force the world to follow its health diktats and countries are lining up to agree to subverting their sovereignty to this body controlled by China and any billionaire who is mad for power (eg Bill Gates). There is no universal vote for this, but many countries are nodding this through, hoping we won’t notice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFLPWWCAHfQ
Just watch some of this, it is long. But this EU sponsored conference, with MEPs present discloses it all. You will soon get the idea…
We have told God to butt out, and, as it has been said, He is gentlemanly enough to do so. But He has a competitor who is no gentleman.