There is a bit of a kerfuffle here in England. National hero, sports presenter and self-appointed moral authority Gary Lineker reacted to government plans to reduce illegal immigration by posting a tweet which could be construed to suggest that he thought they – that’s the government not the illegal immigrants – were a bunch of Nazis. His employers – the sinister British Broadcasting Corporation – have suspended him. His colleagues have walked out in solidarity which means that today’s edition of Match of the Day – a football highlights show which Lineker presents – will be very odd indeed.
Some thoughts:
- As libertarians we believe in freedom of speech. As libertarians we also believe in the enforcibility of contracts. But what if those two principles are in conflict? I don’t think any company or organisation can be entirely indifferent if their employees or associates make controversial remarks in public.
- The BBC is funded by money extorted from people who own televisions. As such it should not exist. If it must exist then it ought to be impartial. Except that there is no such thing as impartiality. Even if there was would it last? The late Brian Micklethwait was of the opinion that bias in media organisations was inevitable. If so the BBC have embraced the idea with gusto. For the most part its output is little more than communist propaganda interspersed with cookery shows. BBC sports coverage itself is a cesspit of virtue signalling and wokery. Except, of course, when it comes to covering a major international tournament in a blood-soaked petro-tyranny.
- It is interesting that his co-presenters have rushed to his side. Why? Maybe they believe this stuff.
- I don’t think this – should it end in his sacking – counts as cancel culture. But I am not quite sure. Cancellation seems to me to involve ending a person’s career something that has happened to any number of academics, doctors and YouTubers. Certainly, it isn’t – at least, it shouldn’t be – disastrous for Lineker.
- I haven’t noticed anyone rushing to defend his actual words. If an historical analogy is appropriate then it would be the US from the 1920s not Germany from the 1930s.
- Matt Le Tissier was an ex-footballer and was also a pundit. He also made controversial remarks. He got fired. No one rushed to support him. But he wasn’t expressing Establishment opinions so that’s OK.
- Maybe Lineker should post anonymously. Problem solved. Except no one would listen to him then. Problem doubly solved. This, of course, is an approach taken by a number of my fellow Samizdata writers. Oh you thought Perry de Havilland was his real name? Ha!
- I have this awful feeling that if you truly wish to exercise your right to free speech you have to be independently wealthy.
- Lineker is a great presenter.
Perry de Havilland is not his real name?!?
:-O
Gutted
I agree with all of this, so thank you for articulating it so well.
I must say this is quite a revelation to me! All these years and I thought…
Actually, I am one of the minority of Samizdatistas that actually does use my real name 😀
Indeed, which is what makes sites like Samizdata hard to cancel. But it is also the reason most of our contributors do not use their real names. I can used my actual name because I can’t be fired given I’m an independently wealthy chap who works for himself.
I think that the fact that Lineker is a total intergalactic cunt has some bearing on public perceptions, whatever the pertinence of the moral or contractual positions may be to arguments either way.
If you have enough money, you can certainly freely express your opinions, and you can express everybody else’s as well.
He’s certainly entitled to his opinions, and as far as I’m concerned, so long as he isn’t expressing them at work it shouldn’t matter. But it is nice to see their side of the aisle getting hit with the policies they so regularly use against the right for once. I would like to think he and other like him would see the monster they’ve created and get the point and demand it be torn down for everyone’s free speech, but that would mean an end to their hypocrisy and we all know that’s not going to happen.
Now, as to all his colleagues that are refusing to go on air over this ( https://www.bbc.com/news/live/entertainment-arts-64895316 ) BBC should fire each and every last one of them and call it a day. I’m sure they can make brand new shows with brand new hosts by this time next week and life will go on just splendidly for soccer fans and I’m sure there are any number of capable presenters who will take the jobs. Let the moral indignation crowd figure out where their next paycheck is going to come from for once.
What none of them, not the BBC, not the presenters, not the team owners, not the players, seem to get is they are just entertainers and normal people tune in for a few hours a week to get away from life’s troubles by taking their minds off of politics and bills and the family and whatever else by watching a game or a movie or a show. When their grandstanding means real life is bleeding into those few hours of escape from life, then that particular form of entertainment can be thrown to the trash. It happened here in the US when people tuned out of NASCAR and NFL and tv and movies when everything became about taking a knee for race and how Bush and Trump are literal Nazis and so one. People tune out instead of being beaten over the head with ideologies and politics.
Quite why a football pundit should be Al-Beeb’s highest paid “star” is beyond me. Presumably this is part of his HMRC defence showing that he’s not some mere employee.
Quite frankly, I hope he gets fired and then HMRC taxes, penalties and interest grind him into bankruptcy.
Serve the bugger right.
At 1st sight one might agree, but there is a problem with the term “bias”: it suggests that there is a continuum between 2 extreme positions, and that there is no other position outside this continuum, so that the “bias” can be removed by turning a knob, as it were.
I find it more useful to think about preconceptions rather than bias. Preconceptions are inevitable, but one should be aware of them, and willing to revise them when necessary.
I wouldn’t have given Lineker the satisfaction of being allowed to claim martyrdom. What would be more appropriate is that every tweet or other public pronouncement he makes going forward, no matter how anodyne, should be met with barrages of inflammatory and historically illiterate analogies and accusations against himself.
Perry, I only believe you because you used a double actually as authentication 🙂
Lineker is a great presenter.
Citation needed.
You could reasonably argue that ‘moral indignation’ – of the correct sort – was a necessary qualification for working at the pro-Establishment BBC.
Now that the lunacies of ‘exaggerated’ moral indignation are starting to be laid bare, some sports commentators (and their mates) have been caught on the hop.
Oh dear, how sad, never mind.
Perhaps Gary Lineker could be replaced by a chat bot?
This is not a free speech issue. Mr. Lineker is free to air his views. It relates to his contract and to the national status of the BBC.
The BBC has to be impartial. Mr. Lineker has chosen to ignore that requirement in his tweet, and if his contract requires him to be impartial then he is in clear breach of it.
He tweeted on a controversial issue; a lot of people agree with him, a lot of people disagree. He has implied that those who disagree with him, who support the government with regard to the small boats, are somewhat similar to Nazis. That is a vile insult. A commenter over on Guido Fawkes made the point that an employee who insults a large number of his company’s customers can expect to be sacked immediately.
It’s more important for the BBC because the BBC customers can’t take their business elsewhere if they still want to watch live TV.
A final point: Mr. Lineker has the right to express his opinion, and noboidy is trying or trhreatening to take away that right. But he has no entitlement to a job at the BBC.
I also use my real name – I do not know why Central Office has not had me executed, as a reactionary-running-dog, yet. Perhaps what I type makes their heads spin so much they do not know how to respond, oh well I can wait a bit longer for my inevitable doom (it will not be long).
As for Mr Lineker and co.
I could not care less what this idiot, or the presenters “in solidarity” with him, say – as long as the BBC Tax (“License Fee”) is abolished, and so is the, utterly despicable, “Ofcom” – so that people such as Mr Mark Steyn can also say what they like.
There should be many television stations – with many different points of view. No pretence of being “unbiased” – which is impossible anyway.
Lineker is a prick away from the football pitch, so I’m told. I never really took to him. The smug demeanour, or something.
An excellent overview from Patrick.
It is not possible for an individual to be impartial, but it is possible for them to *try* to present as much of the information available with as little bias as possible.
It is very difficult for an organization to be unbiased in EVERYTHING, but it is possible for intellectually honest people to recognize they have their biases, and to find other people with countervailing biases.
This has been known forever, and like a lot of other hard-won understanding is being discarded. So we’ll fight the same fights over again.
Y’all pay dearly and in a compelled fashion for a broadcast company that routinely leans well left, which means it usually just denies a platform to people like us, and this episode – a leftie speaking intemperate leftism being suppressed – is anything other than funny?
No matter what you think of Lineker, and my opinion is unprintable, you are either committed to free speech or you aren’t. There is no “I believe in free speech, but ….”
I’m bemused by the fact that suddenly the BBC has to be seen to be unbiased. They seem to have abandoned all pretence of being unbiased years ago. Now they are trying to claim that it’s really important?
Not an argument I’d accept from someone using spray paint to express their views on my wall, or a wall I am forced to pay for. That particular ‘but…” really does change the discussion.
What would be more appropriate is that every tweet or other public pronouncement he makes going forward, no matter how anodyne, should be met with barrages of inflammatory and historically illiterate analogies and accusations against himself.
He’s the epitome of what Hannah Arendt had in mind when she wrote about the banality of evil.
Mr De Havilland, my point was that free speech means we find out what people think, and Lineker in particular. He is clearly uninformed and uneducated. There is no parallel between the actions of this conservative government and Germany after 1933. Quite rightly Lineker has been condemned by all and sundry. His days at the BBC are surely numbered and rightly so.
The other side of the argument would seem to be that the left restricts the free speech of the right through cancellation. However, that should not be a reason to restrict free speech in my view.
Personally, I don’t care what people think of my conservative and libertarian views. I’m very ancient and wealthy enough.
Cheers Chris Oakham
[…] Thoughts on the Lineker Affair […]
First they came for the guy who trained his girlfriend’s pug to do Hitler salutes…
Then they came for the guy who burned a cardboard box with crudely drawn sketches to resemble a tower block…
Then they came for actor Laurence Fox, bestselling ‘Harry Potter’ author J K Rowling, ‘Father Ted’ scriptwriter Graham Linehan, the creator of the peerless ‘Dilbert’ cartoon strip Scott Adams, professional controversialist Jeremy Clarkson, and others too numerous to mention.
Then someone dared to push back against BBC virtue-signaller-in-chief Gary Lineker, and everyone who had either remained silent or actively celebrated all the other cancellations suddenly went absolutely apeshit. Go figure.
Oh I very much agree! I have often used that same argument in favour of the very vilest speech myself.
It is just I also see this as an argument about the problem with people saying vile things (indeed saying anything) on my unwillingly paid shilling (theoretically at least, I haven’t paid the BBC “licence fee” for a long time).
There should be many television stations with many points of view – no pretence of being unbiased.
But there must be no BBC Tax “license fee”, and their must be no “Ofcom” censoring television stations.
The contract takes precedence because it was freely entered into. If we want to argue that the contract is unduly restrictive, that’s another conversation.
The issue here, AIUI, is that The BBC contracts with a limited company that has the ability to deliver the services of a presenter (who therefore is not a party to the contract), and the presenter has made public comments that are politically contentious and directed at the governing party in the UK. From there, again AIUI, the BBC takes the view that the comments of the presenter amount to conduct that puts its contract with the company into doubt, presumably as the limited company has guaranteed that it has some ‘control’ over the presenter and vouches that he will not act in a manner incompatible with the purported values of the BBC. I am guessing this as I haven’t seen any contracts or anything other than comment about these matters. Whether or not the limited company is a legal fiction and/or tax-efficient mechanism (think IR35 and service companies) and the reality is that the BBC ’employs’ the presenter is another question. Since The BBC should not have any money to enter into contracts, all such contracts should be declared void and any previous proceedings recovered from the end recipients by ‘tracing’ and used to compensate those harassed, fined or jailed over the non-payment of the licence fee, so it hardly seems to matter if a crisps pusher is or is not on TV on a Saturday evening/Sunday morning.
However, what this might do is teach the more sensible BBC managers a lesson. You cannot afford to be hostage to your ‘talent’ (these highly-paid presenters) and you could simply run much cheaper bargain-basement highlights programmes without a team of commentators or pundits to waffle about what we can see with our own eyes (if we watch the BBC, I don’t watch TV at all), and let them cry to their agents that they have lost lucrative contracts.
The BBC could revive the Potter’s Wheel in the space where the waffle used to be.
And this pm, the Daily Mail reports that the programme sans presenters got c. 500,000 more viewers. Curiosity no doubt played a part, but it’s a start.
Yes Mr Ed. If people love Association Football, as they say they do, they would want to concentrate on watching the match – not have endless distractions from “presenters” who may indeed have been good sportsmen in their day, but now just prattle on.
But again, I do not care what Mr Lineker and his Comrades want to say – as long the BBC Tax (“license fee”) is abolished, and “Ofcom” is also abolished – thus freeing television and radio.
In the least surprising news of the century the bbc are, depending on which unreliable news source you choose, either about to or have already backed down.
Lineker and his acolytes will all be back next weekend and, at worst, he will be required to make an insincere apology following which he will tweet away safe in the knowledge that he is truly untouchable.
Good news. The great thing about having freedom of speech is, now you know who supported his comments and thus who you ought to take off of your Christmas card list. Explicit idiocy is always better than hidden idiocy. I want my neighbor to wear his “ban all guns” tee-shirt and his ACLU cap.
Not even an insincere apology then :-
“however difficult the last few days had been it simply doesn’t compare to having to flee your home from persecution or war to seek refuge in a land far away”.