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.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
I know we all like to suspect the vaccines – and I don’t doubt that they are in some way responsible – but I think there may be another cause. I’ve just finished reading Malcolm Kendrick’s book on atherosclerosis, “The Clot Thickens”. One of the key drivers of heart disease is stress, and I think we can all agree the last few years have been somewhat stressful.
The example he gives is after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR, the rate of death from heart disease shot up in middle aged men something like 7-fold in Latvia (unlike in nearby Sweden) as the chaos and collapse of the economy took hold. Then the same effect was seen in Russia in 1991 when they had their subsequent period of chaos, and again in 1998 when the Russian banking crisis happened. I can see that many people who will have seen the collapse of their livelihoods during the pandemic will have been subject to a similar level of stress.
Thanks, lockdown lunatics! Lockdowns truly are the gift that keeps on giving.
Thanks Sophie, it’s an interesting point. I know this is purely anecdotal, but as a formerly fairly healthy 50-something, my metabolic and mental health has been severely stretched to almost breaking point these past 2.5 years.
I’m nothing unusual or special, and my circumstances are “normal”, but if I’m barely holding it together some days, I speculate there are others in slightly less-than-ideal situations that are simply overwhelmed with stress, anxiety and worry … which has causal links to poor physical health.
Sigh.
Can’t wait for September for the madness to be cranked up to 11.
Stress isn’t likely to be a cause of death for healthy cardiovascular systems.
Clotting, heart attacks are caused by physical changes in muscles in blood vessel walls and cardiac muscles, which requires an internal causal agent, and develop over time. Old age bring one cause, for example, as our muscles lose tone.
Stress is somewhat of an abstraction… how is it qualified, how quantified?
For many years stress was blamed for causing gastric ulcers with no clinical evidence just anecdotal evidence, but during the 90s it was demonstrated most gastric ulcers were caused by the Helicobacter pylori bacterium.
That bacterium is easily treated with generic antibiotics – no money in it for Big Pharma. However lots of lovely loot in anti-stress pills and H Blockers to moderate stomach acid production, so Big Pharma and their doctor cronies went to great lengths to discredit H Pylori as the cause of ulcers.
Isolating a single cause from a sea of confounding factors is likely to be misleading. Of course doing precisely that is the foundation of ‘modern’
medicine because it helps sales of drugs aimed at that alleged single cause. And it drives the climate change doom.
The mRNA reagents are shown to cause changes at cellular level, in fact designed to do just that. Specifically they have been shown to cause changes to muscle tissue, neurological tissue, male and female fertility, menstruation.
It doesn’t prove they are causing unexplained deaths, but a proper investigation into a possible link would be a good place to start.
Given Government resistance and complicity of the media in floating lots of alternative explanations… hot weather, climate change, phase of the Moon but definitely not the ‘vaccines’, my money is on the mRNA snake oil being implicated.
All I can do is suggest you read the book. It doesn’t say stress on its own is a reason, but dysregulation of the HPA axis puts the cardiovascular system under additional stress which raises one’s risk level considerably.
This paper covers similar themes (but is less of an easy read):
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/07853890802508934
It’s a very informative book – as are all his books. I’m a fan.
I have a confession to make. I was completely and utterly wrong all this time and it’s time to admit it.
I honestly didn’t think it was possible for the authorities to be less interested in anything than they were about the fate of the children that where abducted, drugged, raped, and exploited by the Pakistani ‘grooming’ gangs, but I will admit that I was wrong.
I cannot see any reason for this lack of interest in a key metric other than the fact that we are dealing with exactly the same type of evil people as those who covered up what happened in Telford, Rochdale, Oldham to protect themselves and their fellow travellers.
It’s better than nothing that McVey is taking an interest but she’s asking the wrong people. It’s her colleague the “Health” minister she needs to be questioning.
Let’s face it, it would be a bit of a pointless exercise anyway. Would you believe anything the Government said about excess deaths?
I know I wouldn’t. That’s what happens when you’re systematically lied to by “experts” and politicians for a prolonged period. You don’t believe a word they say.
Huxley’s rule applies – invert any statement from officialdom to arrive at the truth.
Good articles on here re the agenda…. Depopulation is the goal.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/?d=2022-07-25
“Cancer deaths are, perhaps surprisingly given the withdrawal of healthcare access during the pandemic, broadly at normal levels, suggesting there is something other than lack of access to healthcare going on.”
All cancer sufferers die from their cancer, from metastases if not the primary, just a question of when. Cancer treatment/drugs are declared ‘successful’ if they extends life beyond the expected period of fatality without treatment/drugs.
Therefore since deaths are spread out, the death rate from cancers due to lack of treatment may not vary noticeably, whereas deaths from cardiovascular diseases tend to be more immediate.
However, for cancers, the important effect of withdrawal of medical services will be on early diagnosis. The sooner the diagnosis, usually the smaller/less metastasised the cancer, and the sooner treatment is started the better the prognosis and the longer life will be extended.
Increases in cancer fatalities most likely with appear over the next few years.
I’m quite interested to see age stratified analysis of excess deaths as well as hospitalisation.
My gut tells me the relative increases will be found further down the age brackets. This would validate the insurance industry data reported from the US that have shown massive payouts. Larger payouts occur for younger insurees.
I have reproduced one of the footnotes to the table of deaths registered in the ONS publication referenced in the article:
This breakdown would appear to support your thesis, in that the lowest increase was in care homes (4.1%) c.f. a 25% increase in private homes.
Maybe the jabs deliberately engineered dysregulation of the immune system – which no expert comes even close to understanding – has something to do with it :-
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027869152200206X
According to the paper it’s more the long term effects which are the worry.
Could this be the cause?
Vaccine produces the same spike protein
https://news.sky.com/story/scientists-identify-how-the-coronavirus-spike-protein-causes-heart-damage-12658815?dcmp=snt-sf-twitter