Aylan Kurdi (Alan Kurdi) & Gary Lineker
Aylan Kurdi (Alan Kurdi) & Gary Lineker
They will not have the luxury of choice that the rich have. This story contains an image of Alan Kurdi dead on the beach. (Bi-lingual)
Amid Holi Festive, and Liverpool lose by relegation-battling 20th Bournemoth, and Lineker’s saga, just reminder for starting this note:
Boris Johnson was born in New York, his paternal great grandfather is Ali Kemal Bey, a Turkish. Rishi Sunak is Hindu - Indian dicent (like Portuguese PM António Luís Santos da Costa and Irish PM Leo Eric Varadkar). Prince Philip was born in Greece. Sulla Braverman's parents were from Mauritius & Kenya, her husband is Jew. Priti Patel's parents came from Uganda. Mother of James Spencer Cleverly from Sierra Leone. Harry Kane's father is from Galway. Sadiq Khan is Muslim - Pakistani, was born in Tooting South London to a working-class Sunni Muslim-Muhajir family, his grandparents migrated from Lucknow in United Provinces, British India to Pakistan following the partition of India in 1947.
Can the same energy being put into defending Gary Lineker be put into defending refugees and migrants? They will need it more and more in the years to come.
If you want to hate anyone, hate the new immigration policy under the Sunak administration, and their disastrous Brexit. No presenter. No pundits. No commentators. And suggestion players/managers may not do interviews. Hard to see how there’s any programme at all.
One in six people living in England and Wales were born outside the UK with ten million non-UK nationals now calling the two countries home, census data has shown.
Figures released on Wednesday by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed a huge 576 per cent surge in people who were born in Romania - up from 80,000 in 2011 to 539,000 in 2021.
The number of usual residents of England and Wales born outside the UK had risen by 2.5million since 2011.
The large increase in the number of those born in Romania followed the lifting of working restrictions across the European Union in 2014.
The Conservative party and its media outriders have overreached themselves in the Lineker affair. The “stop the boats” policy, which flouts democratic, legal and humanitarian standards to reach new heights of cruelty in our proposed treatment of asylum seekers, is not just another political controversy.
It goes to the heart of what kind of country we are and how policy should be conducted in a democracy.
4 months ago, a man motivated by far-right ideology petrol bombed a centre housing refugees in Dover. The very next day, the Home Secretary stood up in Parliament and called refugees invaders. Gary Lineker’s tweets didn’t go far enough. MP was murdered in broad daylight by the far right because she openly supported refugees and this was 7 years ago. The rot is inevitable.
Alan Kurdi (born as Alan Shenu), initially reported as Aylan Kurdi, was a two-year-old Syrian boy (initially reported as having been three years old) of Kurdish ethnic background whose image made global headlines after he drowned on 2 September 2015 in the Mediterranean Sea along with his mother and brother. Alan and his family were Syrian refugees trying to reach Europe from Turkey amid the European refugee crisis. Photographs of his body were taken by Turkish journalist Nilüfer Demir and quickly went viral, prompting international responses.
Gary Lineker just like ordinary people who try to stop, try to never again like Aylan Kurdi / Alan Kurdi. Lineker didn't break the BBC's impartiality guidelines. He made a personal comment on a matter he has been speaking about for at least two years. Can't recall a more successful incident of industrial action at the BBC as the Lineker boycott today. And all inspired by BBC management.
Germany can be exasperating. But the fact that it has twice in a decade (2015/16, 2022/23) taken in over 2 million refugees (1,7 refugees across Middle East and North Africa due expansion of ISIS + Syria crisis; 1,1 million refugees from Ukraine, or STATISTA number is 1,055,323) within a year and integrated them without breaking a sweat compares favourably with a UK currently in utter meltdown over a tiny fraction of that number. Scholz just started / served as the chancellor of Germany since 8 December 2021, and February 24th 2022 already war between Ukraine - Russia.
Authoritarian regimes everywhere progress by breaching one convention as a launchpad for breaching the next until, finally, they land their prize of subordinating human rights to their partisan and untrammelled will. But human rights are indivisible; one breach leaves the rest diminished and weakened.
No less fundamental in a democracy are the rules of engagement in the public square. Debate, however passionate, must respect facts. While our broadcast media are regulated to serve that end, upheld by a system of public service broadcasting of which the BBC is the anchor, our newspapers are not. Newspapers, particularly of the right, have increasingly been edited not as journals but as propagandists of rightwing ideology in which facts are subordinate, serving profoundly political ends. The callous extremes of the “stop the boats” scheme could not have been conceived, nor the extravagant language used to defend it, without the poisonous climate they created. They are necessarily ardent critics of the BBC, even stricken and enfeebled as it is, because it stands in the way of how they want to frame political and cultural argument – part of the march towards the unconstrained exercise of executive privilege, the attacks on human rights and the diminution of our democracy.
The government had readied itself for a fierce reaction to its policy and already had its lines of counter-attack prepared. Protest was only to be expected from a “blob “of “lefty lawyers” in cahoots with the Labour party and a resistant civil service. What it did not expect was a popular sports presenter, Gary Lineker, describing the plan as immeasurably cruel and disproportionate, clumsily saying it had similarities to the language of 1930s Germany. What Lineker was suggesting was that regimes hostile to human rights and democracy proceed in a manner that echoes the language of Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak, a comment much harder to contest because it is true – and which his army of critics made no effort to understand. However, his miscue opened the way to the Mail and Telegraph vindictively denouncing him on their front pages along with condemnation from the home secretary for the analogy with 30s Germany; editorials demanded he be sanctioned for abusing his position, hypocritically urging the BBC, as a great national institution, to defend an impartiality they never observe themselves – a criticism designed not to help the broadcaster but to damn it.
The weight of the coverage was wildly excessive, a tribute to the vulnerability the right itself feels over the small boats policy – how pleasing to have Lineker in their cross hairs rather than arguments over the cruel and illegal treatment of asylum seekers. Notwithstanding the storm, an unrepentant Lineker stood by his comments. On Friday evening, the BBC ran up the white flag and forced him off air, his fellow presenters refusing to present Match of the Day in his absence and commentators declining to report the matches. The blob turns out to be no blob at all – but includes respected sports presenters, provoked into acting not just for their own consciences but for millions who think like them. This is not the political positioning the government intended.
The exposure of the “stop the boats” policy as designed in a hyper-rightwing echo chamber with a narrow base of support could scarcely have been better revealed – nor the parallel effort to weaken the BBC and make it a pliant supporter of the drive not merely to “Torify” Britain, but to redefine who we are as a country. There is no parallel pressure from the rightwing press, its editorialists and the government on the compromised chair of the BBC, Conservative donor Richard Sharp, to “step aside” and resign for not disclosing his role in helping Boris Johnson find an £800,000 loan. His task is to ensure the BBC stays editorially compliant in the run-up to the general election – an essential role in Torification. He is thus relieved from the pressure that forced Lineker off air. Suella Braverman may presenting Match of the Day tomorrow and every week after that, to replace Lineker, Wright, and Shearer.
The arguments over whether Lineker’s contract as a freelance sports commentator allows him to express his views or not are specious. The contract does. Over the years, a string of presenters of varying political colours have been permitted to share their thoughts on social media without sanction, while simultaneously observing impartiality in BBC studios. In a world of social media it’s the only way to operate, otherwise the pool of talent prepared to work for the channel will shrink alarmingly – thus Alan Sugar and Andrew Neil have worked both as BBC presenters and social media partisans, and Lineker was acting within the same framework. But whatever the rules, when policy gets this extreme, menacing who we are and the values we live by, unexpected people stand up to be counted and find ways to make their voice heard. In this case, Lineker was the man. The BBC found itself in a position where it was damned if it acted and damned if it did not. The stronger position would have been to protect itself and thus Lineker; by “sticking to its guns” over impartiality being applied to a presenter who leans left, but not having acted on those who lean right, the charge of double standards has become impossible to rebut. Before our eyes a treasured public institution paid for by all licence fee payers has become a satrapy of the right.
The furore has transformed the terms of the debate. Labour had confined itself to criticising the policy only in terms of its workability. Now it cannot allow only Gary Lineker to speak out about the rotten values that have driven it, as the numbers declaring their support for him grow. This is transmuting into a popular progressive moment as the integrity of public service broadcasting is defended alongside Lineker’s stance on asylum seeking. Britain is not the rightwing country the right imagines. It is a fairer, much more decent place. Congratulations to the Match of the Day presentation team who showed us who we are – the best game any of them have played.
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Wegen des Streits um einen Tweet von Gary Lineker zur britischen Migrationspolitik wird der frühere Nationalspieler vorerst nicht mehr als Fußball-Moderator bei der BBC zu sehen sein. Der 62-Jährige lasse seinen Job ruhen, bis er sich mit dem öffentlich-rechtlichen Sender über seine Nutzung sozialer Medien geeinigt habe, teilte die BBC am Freitag mit.
Linekers jüngste Äußerungen bei Twitter seien „ein Verstoß gegen unsere Richtlinien“. Der Sender forderte, der frühere englische Nationalspieler solle „sich davon fernhalten, in parteipolitischen Fragen oder politischen Kontroversen Partei zu ergreifen“. Co-Moderator Ian Wright, ebenfalls ehemalige Fußballer, kündigte an, aus Solidarität mit Lineker am Wochenende ebenfalls nicht auf dem Bildschirm zu erscheinen.
Lineker, der seit 2009 die BBC-Sendung „Match of the Day“ präsentiert, hatte getwittert, die Sprache, mit der die konservative Regierung für ihre umstrittene Asylgesetzgebung werbe, sei „Deutschland in den 1930er Jahren nicht unähnlich“. Premierminister Rishi Sunak und Innenministerin Suella Braverman reagierten empört. Mehrere Abgeordnete der Konservativen Partei forderten die BBC auf, sich von Lineker zu trennen.
Die britische Regierung will Migranten, die ohne offizielle Erlaubnis einreisen, zunächst in Unterkünften festhalten und dann nach Ruanda oder in andere Staaten ausweisen. Das Recht, Asyl zu beantragen, soll ihnen entzogen werden. Die Pläne könnten gegen die Europäische Menschenrechtskonvention verstoßen.
Innenministerin Braverman hatte mit Blick auf die steigende Zahl von Menschen, die unerwünscht über den Ärmelkanal ins Land kommen, unter anderem von einer „Invasion“ gesprochen. Kritiker werfen ihr und anderen Regierungsmitgliedern vor, mit ihrer Ausdrucksweise Hass gegen Ausländer zu schüren. Die BBC hat sich einer strikten Neutralität verschrieben. Lineker, der bei Twitter etwa 8,6 Millionen Follower hat, hat die konservative Regierung wiederholt kritisiert. Der frühere Stürmer gilt mit einem Grundgehalt von 1,35 Millionen Pfund (1,51 Millionen Euro) als bestbezahlter BBC-Moderator.