Last week, my Substack page News From Uncibal got its 500th subscriber. It is therefore fitting that I should return to the subject which got the whole thing started: Gary Lineker, and his semiotic significance. Lineker ought to be an obscure figure. But he is central to the national debate in Britain, and it is important to make clear why, as he symbolises much of what is wrong with the way things are going – not just across British society, but across the Western world.
How does one explain Gary Lineker to a non-British reader? Lineker is a former professional footballer with a natural poacher’s instinct for goals, who won the ‘golden boot’ at the 1986 World Cup finals and was for a time probably English football’s leading light. He was also famously ‘nice’, having never received a yellow card in his entire career, and he gave off a wholesome, schoolboyish vibe, leavened by a slightly impish charm. After his playing career was over he made a living as the face of Walker’s crisps, a snack company, appearing in a long-running series of humorous TV adverts, and he eventually became the presenter of the Grand Dame of BBC sports coverage, Match of the Day (MOTD).
MOTD, like everything on broadcast television, is a shadow of what it once was, but it still has totemic significance in the national psyche, being screened late on a Saturday night and featuring highlights of the day’s football punctuated by chunks of easily digestible ‘punditry’. The person who presents the programme therefore ends up occupying a position a bit like the captain of the English cricket team or a prominent soap star; people feel as though it matters in some profound sense who has the job.
Lineker is by some distance the most highly paid figure who works for the BBC (though he is technically not an employee), earning something like £1.3 million a year – which he gets basically for sitting down once a week to ask easy questions to former footballers with respect to some football matches that happened that day (and also cackling and braying along to Alan Shearer and Micah Richards’s ‘jokes’ – I use the term loosely – on the appalling Match of the Day Top 10). And this is where the trouble, for most people, begins.
I have no problem, for the record, with people earning whatever amount of salary the market considers to be appropriate – I am not the kind of person to get excited by the issue of fat-cattery in the round. But the important thing to understand about Lineker’s salary is that it is not the product of market forces, because the BBC is not subject to those forces (except indirectly in the sense that fewer and fewer people choose to watch BBC TV programmes). Indeed, every single household in the U.K. which owns a colour TV must – at pain of criminal sanction – pay the BBC £159 a year for the privilege if it intends to watch, or record, broadcast transmissions. It is no exaggeration indeed to say that the great majority of the population of the country is forced by the criminal law to pay a portion of Lineker’s salary – something about which they have absolutely no choice (unless they do not wish to have a TV at all), no control over and no recourse to appeal.
As Kundera once put it, sometimes in life it is the most banal observations that shock us the most, and this is one such instance. Unelected bureaucrats at a taxpayer-funded media company have mandated that a former footballer be paid vast sums of money at public expense in order to front a TV programme that individual members of the public may or may not even watch, with each of them being forced to comply on the basis that if they do not, they will have to pay a fine of up to £1,000 (or be imprisoned).
And we have the nerve to call Tajikistan, Myanmar and Eritrea corrupt.
This should of course be scandal enough, although when it comes to the TV licence – as with the NHS – the British population suffers from a strange variation on Stockholm Syndrome, in which great outrages are forgiven and indeed welcomed on the basis that they are ‘our’ great outrages and we all have fluffy and sentimental associations with them. And if Lineker was able to restrain himself to simply reading out football scores and remarking on how good player X, Y or Z is at finding ‘pockets of space’ and how a particular tackle ought to have been a ‘stonewall penalty’, he would fly completely below the radar and could enjoy his sinecure in peace until he shuffled off the mortal coil.
But of course he is on Twitter (or X, if you prefer). And, like anybody who ends up on Twitter, his brain has been well and truly borked. But it has been borked in a certain, illustrative way. And this has allowed him to take on a role as a public figure whose views on The Current Thing are taken to be of great import by significant chunks of the ‘new elite’. This, naturally, draws the ire of people who tend to disagree with his views about The Current Thing. But it also gives us a window onto a particular character type, very common among the media classes, and highly detrimental to sensible public discourse.
Keen readers may choose to take a break for a moment and listen to Gary Lineker’s 1990 appearance on the BBC radio interview programme, Desert Island Discs. For those unfamiliar with the format, Desert Island Discs involves a public figure of some kind being interviewed by a friendly journalist and being asked to choose his or her favourite eight records of all time, and commenting on what they signify. In Gary Lineker’s case, the records in question, instructively, are about the most anodyne that can be imagined (the most outré is Booker T & the MGs’ ‘Soul Limbo’, for heaven’s sake). But the music isn’t very important here. What is important is the interview itself, which reveals very starkly that Lineker is not the kind of person whose views it is important to take seriously about, well, anything other than football. Because, basically, he just isn’t very bright.
But the thing is, he is bright enough. Reading through his timeline on Twitter, one is struck by the same observation, time and again: this is a person who is not really capable of rigorous thought, but is intelligent enough to identify the right thing to say at any given moment in order to appeal maximally to bien pensant Twitterati with regard to the issue of the day. Here he is, for instance, on Nigel Farage, at the time of the Brexit referendum:
And here he is having a go at Boris Johnson after the English national football team made it to the World Cup semi-finals:
Here he is on the removal of the Edward Colston statue during BLM protests in Bristol:
On Covid school closures:
On Donald Trump:
On gun control in the USA:
And finally on Suella Braverman, who spoke recently to condemn mass marches taking place in London in support of Hamas:
Notice how finely tuned are his antennae. How he casts around for exactly the right line to tack with respect to whatever item is on the news agenda, to discern opinion amongst the James O’Briens and Alastair Campbells of the world, and to chime in with an observation accordingly. This is not a man who forms opinions; it is a man who imbibes them from people whom he thinks to be educated and intelligent – the clever people he follows on X – and then simply repackages them as his own. He spouts platitudes, but they are finely distilled platitudes – precisely the right kind of platitudes to garner ‘likes’ and retweets, and generate an ever-growing following. His brain, I repeat, has been borked, and now it functions in an almost purely Girardian way, as a kind of relentless pursuer of mimetic status via social media.
What we have in Lineker then, is a particular spectacle, unique I think to our cultural moment, in which a man who has no discernible applicable talent when it comes to political affairs, and is not really capable of forming independent views, let alone critical analysis, is given a platform by dint of the fact that he has been selected for a role by unappointed bureaucrats, from which the electorate cannot eject him. And he uses this essentially to signal his own adherence to the high-status causes of the day, and thereby cement his own position as a kind of public defender (or launderer) of the views of the higher echelons of society. People like this have presumably always existed, but our age is characterised by their prominence – and indeed their centrality in the public square. And Lineker is in this way highly representative of the Vanity Fair-like tenor of public life in the 2020s, with its apparent lionisation of hypocrisy and superficiality and a concurrent debasement of our public life.
This is in itself obviously to our vast detriment. And this is not even to speak of the demoralising effect it has on a population to go through life having to know what people like Gary Lineker think – to have it printed on the front of newspapers and talked about on the radio and otherwise insinuated into one’s awareness despite the fact that it is inevitably ill-thought through, bland and obvious. That cannot but have negative consequences for our ‘lifeworld’, in the same way that being made to eat nothing but Walker’s crisps every day would eventually have serious consequences for one’s endocrine system.
But the rot goes much deeper than that. Because, of course, the most profound problem concerning the Gary Lineker phenomenon is that he represents, in microcosm, what is going on inside most people’s heads nowadays. Something about the incentive structure of the internet and the innate frailties of the human character combine to turn us all into mini-Gary Linekers much of the time: slovenly dilettantes, knowing very little about very much at all, imbibing our views magpie-like from whatever online loudmouth happens to grab our attention, and convincing ourselves that our opinions are worth airing and taking seriously. The result is a peculiar mixture of breeziness and fanaticism: everybody utterly convinced that they are right and that anybody who disagrees is both wrong and wicked, in inverse proportion to how much they actually know (or really care, deep down inside) about the issues involved.
We are not as bad as Gary Lineker, because we do not behave in the main as if it is holy writ that we should be lavishly funded by a hypothecated tax in order to have a platform to air our oafish views. But we are infected by a repulsive and self-aggrandising Linekerishness all the same. Where we go from here is anyone’s guess. What does Government look like when the population is increasingly comprised of slovenly dilettantes, as I earlier called us, who are incapable of reasoning and know almost nothing about the world but are utterly convinced that they are right about absolutely everything? One thing at least is for sure – we are on our way to finding out.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. He is the author of the News From Uncibal Substack where this article first appeared.
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I would certainly support a great deal more transparency on the sources of funding for many of these groups.
Some of them may very well be funded by Iran: ‘In 2020, the State Department estimated that Iran gave Hezbollah $700 million a year. In the past, Tehran had historically given $100 million annually to Palestinian groups, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
I would also support Lord Frost’s call for marches to be banned on key dates: Remembrance Day in particular.
“I would also support Lord Frost’s call for marches to be banned on key dates”
Could that not be used to prevent an anti-lockdown march if it was held on “Covid Memorial Day”?
That would depend on which dates are defined as ‘key dates’.
In fact it is a ‘National Day of Reflection’ that is mooted.
If an ‘anti lockdown’ march was organised as a march for freedom, to ‘reflect’ on those killed by lockdowns, it is unlikely that it would be deemed provocative.
Marching through London on Remembrance Day shouting “Khayber Khayber ya yaud jadish al Mohammed sauf yaud” through a megaphone is quite clearly provocative, intimidatory; fascist.
You make a good point and I think, on reflection, that I probably agree with you.
Nevertheless, the provocative ‘pro-palestinian’ march at the weekend was very expensive to police so the country at large may very well take a different view….
Thanks for your thoughts.
“it is unlikely that it would be deemed provocative” I thought it was unlikely that a UK government would force people to stay in their homes, stop them seeing their loved ones, suspend normal life for an extended period, and force people into getting an experimental “medical treatment”.
I haven’t really followed the “pro Palestine” marches but my guess is that various strands of opinion were represented, from well-meaning people who genuinely care about stopping suffering, have thought at length about the Israel situation and have considered views on it, right through to the kind of thing you describe. I tend to think that the issue is that it may appear to many that we have in our midst large numbers of people who don’t share our values and we have enough problems of our own without importing a lot more. If the Muslim population of the UK was tiny then I think the whole debate around the protests would be much less heated and less prominent.
If there were large numbers of people wanting to march calling for a humanitarian ceasefire without appearing to support Hamas, calls for jihad or the destruction of Israel they should organise their own march and make it clear that Palestinian flags, pictures of hang gliding terrorists or extremist chants aren’t welcome. If people are happy to march with people calling for jihad or whatever vile things they do then these people are stating they agree with the ethos of the march which was clearly antisemitic and therefore a hate demo.
Well I’ve not seen anything first-hand but would be inclined agree with you if what you say is accurate. I get the impression others here might take issue with what you’ve said.
I’m still wary of using the word “hate” as a criteria for banning something (though I appreciate you are not advocating this).
It isn’t accurate. He’s guessing cos he wasn’t there. MSM picks a few sound bites and fans the flames as they want a race war. They hate all things static – it’s why they thrive on conflict – as Jon Stewart says ‘it’s where careers are made’. Nobody who can actually JOIN THE DOTS gets promoted in the mainstream.
Did you fall for all the propaganda for the past 3 years Matt? No? then why fall for it now? Or do you think that suddenly, overnight, the mainstream media is now telling the truth? There were no calls for the destruction of Israel (jihad means ‘struggle BTW) which would have been awkward being as how there were so many Jewish people on the march. And why aren’t Palestinian flags allowed Matt? Oh, so you don’t recognise a state of Palestine? Maybe you’re the racist.
Nobody chanted that Ian – you weren’t there. So unless you have a recording then it’s just propaganda, along with 40 beheaded babies which CNN has already admitted was garbage. You lot are so gullible.
@sarasidnerCNN
‘I would argue we were mislead. I am going to report on what heads of governments say. That is what new orgs do. It doesn’t mean it’s true but it’s news’.
No love, it’s propaganda.
So much for the Free Speech Union aye Ian? Hypocrites. Maybe change the Daily Sceptic to The Daily. Or just call it Telegraph II and have done with it.
Problem, reaction solution.
Stop falling for this divisive rhetoric.
This issue is being used to ban the right to protest, all protests not just causes one disagrees with!
It’s being used to distract us whilst other aspects of the control grid are being implemented whilst we look away.
We already live in an authoritarian, tyrannical country despite the illusion of democracy. No further tyrannical measures are wanted nor desirable.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/how-the-west-was-lost-part-2/
An excellent second in a series of four from Dr Campbell Campbell-Jack at TCW which highlights the myths of multiculturalism and diversity.
“There is a danger of growing ill will among native Britons at unequal treatment. In 2020 more than 150 people were arrested at an anti-lockdown protest in London; in 2023 protesters called for jihad against Israel and clambered on the Cenotaph waving Palestinian flags, and the police stood by. Christians can be arrested for silently praying in the vicinity of an abortion clinic, yet hundreds of Muslims can kneel and pray at the gates of 10 Downing Street without hindrance. These disparities of treatment can only stoke up already existing community resentment.”
Just so there is no misunderstanding – I am sick to the back teeth of multiculturalism and diversity.
I’m with you on the inconsistencies of policing & the ongoing push to silence the views & culture of indigenous population.
Allowing those valid concerns to be conflated, used & abused by the MSM to further the evil agenda is a different matter.
We need to keep cool heads, be alert to their evil tactics & call out the evil actions.
https://off-guardian.org/2023/11/12/watch-3000-jews-and-muslims-sing-together-just-five-years-ago/
Just found this BB.
I was going to write a post to say exactly this, but you express it perfectly.
We’re being railroaded into a de facto elimination of free speech and the freedom to protest.
Thank you Stewart.
By the Free Speech Union. Couldn’t make it up.
Incitement to hatred and violence.
“Incitement to hatred and violence.” does not exist except when it suits the authorities or special interest groups. People choose their own course of action whether through weakness or a destructive nature.
Yes, indeed. The issue also serves as a honeypot of opportunity to distract attention away from Ukraine proxy war going badly for Uncle Sam and his lackeys, Russia prospering despite sanctions, the ‘safe and effective’ vax narrative being seen as a lie, cross Channel illegal, migration, climate crisis scepticism growing and ULEZ fightback are but a few of the issues the MSM/Government feel uncomfortable with.
The pro-Israel stance of many UK politicians on all sides who have been in a position to influence policy over the years, and also within the legal profession, is without doubt.
It therefore seems fair to question whether, amongst other detrimental policies, the inaction over illegal immigration is the consequence of their relationship with the Israeli regime?
Thanks downvoters, a convincing argument well presented.
Question asked.
Answer: no.
Like the pro Israel stance of Jeremy Corbyn and all those who supported (and still support) him? There’s votes in them there mosques and madressas!
Supprised at downvotes? Promote Sharia Law and see how many you get!
The Jeremy Corbyn smeared out of his leadership for not being pro-Israel. It’s the power of special interest groups that matters.
Daily Sceptic, words fail me!
Are you really suggesting that the Palestinians do not have a valid point of view?
Can you not see where this bigoted stance leads?
Celebration of slaughter and butchery, hatred a valid point of view.
Great point well made by Grant Shapps here ( 2mins );
”Extraordinary moral clarity from the British Defense Secretary here:
“If that terrorist attack a month ago had been on Britain and 1,400 Brits had lost their lives, the idea that we wouldn’t pursue the terrorist organization when we knew where they were and that anyone would tell Britain that we shouldn’t do that, I think would be rather improbable and extraordinary, and therefore Israel do have a right to do that.”
He added “Israel are going out of their way to try and protect civilians [in Gaza].”
https://twitter.com/Ostrov_A/status/1723663396166357287
Actually what I would like to see banned across the board is face coverings in public. Nobody has any valid reason whatsoever to cover their faces, but isn’t it always the crazy nutjob extremists in any type of protest that do this? What are they afraid of? Revealing their identity as a certifiable lunatic?
Nobody should serve anyone in a shop who has their face covered either, for instance. But I feel this is something else which has been almost normalized due to the Plandemonium years. When in 2019 did anyone see people covering their faces outside of a dentist’s or hospital theatre? Now nobody bats an eyelid at a muzzled muppet, and seemingly we can now add the Hamas fanclub, wearing their tea towels across their faces, to the list of loony f*ckwits.
Parliament gifted government agencies the authority to engage in illegal activities when it suits their own ends. When agitators are present whose actions may offer the government an opportunity, the default position should be to assume they may be working directly or unwittingly on behalf of the authorities.
Do you ever listen to the increasingly trashy racist junk you spout?
Its embarrassing.
And yet here you are. Triggered enough to react. Again…🤷♀️🤡
I don’t sweat deranged people.
These comments do seem increasingly extremist. If you had grown-up on the other side of this, do you think you would now be one of the more radical Hamas supporters?
Why would those who have the power to influence these conflicts and have such a disregard for their fellow humans not look to another unworthy group to dispose of once their first objective has been met? Careful what you support.
Define ”extremist”. Funnily enough, call me a weirdo but never in a month of Sundays would I ever support a terrorist organization made up of barbarian, sadistic, death-obsessed Jihadis. Perhaps you need to see a shrink if that’s your bag though.
You do – it’s called Israel.
Seconded.
That’s over a month since the Butchery and Barbarism in Context mob have been promising to flounce off and yet, here they are still paying their subs and treating us to their anti-zionist conspiracy theories.
Let’s hear it for Dresden eh Moggers?
They have previously banned or restricted EDL protests, therefore no new powers are required.
Liberty have a detailed explanation with links to the relevant statutes of the many new powers given the police. See https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/advice_information/pcsc-policing-act-protest-rights/
We may conclude that the hand-wringing pantomime indulged in by Mark Rowley and Sunak ( and indeed as suggested in this article, Walney ) is simply to enable the planned confrontation and intimidation to go ahead
Rowley and Sunak pantomime indeed. There are already more than enough powers on the statute books to have stopped the marches this weekend.
Name them.
They are not protests, they are gleeful celebration of the slaughter and butchery of Jews, and support and encouragement for more.
They incite hatred and violence – those involved them should be deported.
Don’t think the Jewish people on the march saw it that way. But you know better especially as you weren’t even there.
Well I’m fairly pro-Israel in this but I think we should be very careful when calling for “banning” of protests or speech. Who decides, and how? Based on what criteria?
The right to protest in this country is older than the State of Israel. Remove it at your peril.