Lineker dropped from Match of the Day

[JamesWales]

But apparently in today's world you get to become a rule maker by greasing palms for the Tory government and a rule breaker for criticising it.

Yeah, that's not true though is it Cyril.

[Dave Blue]

interesting to see the viewing figures from last nights show

Last nights MOTD was watched by 2.58 million viewers up by 500,000 from last weeks show !

The shows biggest audience since 5'th November 2022 watched by 2.63 million people

thought the show attracted much bigger audiences from those type of figures

I’m pretty sure many ‘non football fans’ watched the show last night out of curiosity. For those with a low attention span or merely because it was just 20, there is maybe a place for a short highlights programme if people don’t want to hear the comments from pundits.

[The Lone Gunman]

Of course, not everyone who works for impartial institutions, be it the BBC, civil service, local authorities, healthcare bodies, police etc are all impartial. Of course they have opinions.

The importance is that they generally leave them at home and do their job with due impartiality.

Quite. Just like Gary Lineker who, to my knowledge, has never criticised the government's policies on refugees while he's been on air presenting football programmes.

[Canton Kev]

Indeed. It's not hard to see why people are miffed about that, just like it's not hard to see why people are miffed about BBC presenters tweeting pretty controversial tweets.

It's a difficult square for the BBC to circle but faith in its impartiality is critical to the BBCs entire model and ethos.

You think the BBC employing ex Tories, Tory members and Tory donors in the highest ranks of the institution is comparable to a freelancer with a BBC contract tweeting something controversial?

[Dorcus]

interesting to see the viewing figures from last nights show

Last nights MOTD was watched by 2.58 million viewers up by 500,000 from last weeks show !

The shows biggest audience since 5'th November 2022 watched by 2.63 million people

thought the show attracted much bigger audiences from those type of figures

Of course, not everyone who works for impartial institutions, be it the BBC, civil service, local authorities, healthcare bodies, police etc are all impartial. Of course they have opinions.

The importance is that they generally leave them at home and do their job with due impartiality.

But of course people from all walks of life all have opinions. Is it right that they are gagged by their employers for freely speaking their minds? Surely, in this modern age of ubiquitous social media all the BBC (or for that matter any employer) had to do was publicly release a statement distancing itself from Lineker's sentiments? We should all be grown ups now.

[lardy]

BREAKING ������

The GB News alternative Match of the Day was better than any parody we could have come up with. pic.twitter.com/t0gOAwwnMd

— Politics For You (@PoliticoForYou) March 12, 2023

[Jordi Culé]

This is my first post on this thread:

"He shouldn't have said it and he shouldn't have been sacked. The BBC is in a difficult position in terms of impartiality I suppose."

I can totally see both sides to it, but painting Lineker as some kind of Saint is not something I agree with and pointing out he is currently under investigation for tax avoidance (and using a bible (guardian) article too!) is not unreasonable or not irrelevant to the debate.

It's a fact he put the BBC in a difficult position and it's a fact there's a tax case ongoing.

What do you want me to do? W**k him off and call him a left-wing hero whilst calling Suella Braverman Himmler or something?

Jim, you suggested St. Gary is using the drama to prove a point.

That was you not me buddy. I just suggested your slightly 'reaching' with that opinion.

If you want to waank Lineker off feel free to do so. Two things ask St. Gary if he consents and break up with Sludge as you've led him on with these sext messages.

[cyril evans awaydays]

Yeah, that's not true though is it Cyril.

It's not true that the current Chairman of the BBC arranged a loan deal for the then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson and pretty soon afterwards he was appointed in a "fair and open" recruitment?

[JamesWales]

Quite. Just like Gary Lineker who, to my knowledge, has never criticised the government's policies on refugees while he's been on air presenting football programmes.

Yes TLG I have sympathy for that point, and a reminder this is what I first said: (I should have said suspended not sacked of course)

"He shouldn't have said it and he shouldn't have been sacked. The BBC is in a difficult position in terms of impartiality I suppose."

It is difficult for the BBC though. I mean, can sn economics correspondent tweet on politics? Can an arts correspondent? Are they not all interconnected? Haven't people long argued (around the BLM knee taking etc) that sport and politics are interchangable? Doesn't that imply there is a crossover?

My issue is more the content of the tweet, I defend his right to say it, but it may well be a breach of BBC standards (Mark Thompson thinks it was) and that's for them to determine. As I say, I think the back story is to do with the ongoing tax investigation

[JamesWales]

It's not true that the current Chairman of the BBC arranged a loan deal for the then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson and pretty soon afterwards he was appointed in a "fair and open" recruitment?

I think he denies it doesn't he? But I haven't defended him at all.

We are talking about Lineker aren't we. What's with the whataboutery?! 😘

[cyril evans awaydays]

I think he denies it doesn't he? But I haven't defended him at all.

We are talking about Lineker aren't we. What's with the whataboutery?! ��

I was replying to your statement that It's not hard to see why people are miffed about that, just like it's not hard to see why people are miffed about BBC presenters tweeting pretty controversial tweets.
so not sure where you get the Whatabouttery.

Perhaps you have become so immersed in your wish for people to stop posting about lovies tweeting that you have forgotten your copious amount of back copy on the subject?

[The Lone Gunman]

Yes TLG I have sympathy for that point, and a reminder this is what I first said: (I should have said suspended not sacked of course): "He shouldn't have said it and he shouldn't have been sacked. The BBC is in a difficult position in terms of impartiality I suppose."

And there, ladies and gentlemen, is the Tory position: a sports presenter shouldn't dare criticise the government on Twitter.

I rather like this piece from Malachy Clerkin in the Irish Times:

"Gary Lineker must sit back and wonder sometimes how it got to this. How did he, the world’s most manifestly vanilla footballer, the apogee of mild-mannered English decorum when he played, how did that guy become a figure of UK-wide national outrage? It’s like hearing Cliff Richard turned out to be a crypto bro or that Su Pollard’s third act was as head of Combat 18. It doesn’t compute.

This is Gary Winston Lineker we’re talking about. Yes, named after Churchill. A sportsman so bland, so studiously inoffensive that he went through his entire career without once getting booked. Who actually began his post-football life as a pundit but was so un-opinionated that the BBC had to find another role for him. Too nice for the Match of the Day couch – has faint praise ever been so damning?

Yet if you cocked an ear to our friends across the water this week, you’d come away convinced that the very fate of modern Britain is predicated on Gary Lineker’s Twitter account. Depending on where you’re standing, Lineker is either a Martin Luther King for the 21st century or a pinko disgrace and a danger to the state. This is quite the turn of events.

His tweets this week comparing the pointedly cruel language of Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman on refugees “to that used in Germany in the 1930s” has plonked him right into the nexus of the culture wars over there. For the foreseeable future – and most likely long after it – he will be a lightning rod for the peculiar brand of conservative English mania that has taken hold of post-Brexit Britain.

It’s wild when you think about it. A man so devoted to the quiet life in his playing days that he preferred snooker to golf as a post-training pastime on the basis that it was less tiring has somehow been reinvented as a scourge of government, a voice for the voiceless, a truth-teller in a world of right-wing spivs and charlatans. All because he uses his platform and his 8.7 million Twitter followers to occasionally talk with humanity and decency about the world around him.

When you step back from it, the most interesting aspect of the week wasn’t that he had a go at a sitting Tory minister. It wasn’t that he compared her words to those of Nazis in the 1930s. And it definitely wasn’t the risible notion that his Twitter account was somehow a threat to the BBC’s sacred impartiality.

No, far more interesting was the fact that it worked. The BBC got spooked and didn’t stand by their man. They tried to browbeat Lineker into an apology and when he refused, they pulled him off air. One of the great institutions of British life ultimately quailed at the feet of the Tory government and the right-wing press. In doing so, they provided a lovely distraction from the troubles of the former and dished up a tasty weekend morsel to feed the beast for the latter.

So much of this stuff is noise, peddled for profit, nakedly disingenuous rabble-rousing. Bad enough that the BBC had already led their two most-watched news bulletins on Wednesday evening with Lineker’s Tweets around Braverman’s refugee policy rather than the refugee policy itself. Imagine the delight in Tory HQ when they saw that. Another day down, another news cycle survived. What’s next off the bullshit conveyor belt?

Well, it turns out nothing is. Roll on a couple more days and by Friday afternoon, the BBC had decided to pull Lineker off-air altogether. Oh, how green must the valley have been in the Home Office when the news came through. Nobody is spending the weekend talking about brown people dying in boats in the English Channel. Everything is centred now on the Twitter account of an English sporting hero. They’ve had a right result here.

The BBC had a busy day, as it happens. Even the sainted David Attenborough fell foul of them. It was reported earlier in the day that the final episode of his upcoming series on wildlife in the British Isles won’t be shown on the mainstream BBC for fear of upsetting right-wing politicians and press. It will instead be held back and only be shown on the iPlayer.

Imagine telling someone in 1990 that the BBC would one day side with government and anti-immigration, anti-environment vested interests over Gary Lineker and David Attenborough? They’d wonder what sort of dark dystopian Britain the future had in store. That’s the power of the people Lineker has annoyed this week.

Here’s the really depressing thing: if Gary Lineker can’t survive a week of the culture wars, who can? Lineker is a genuine sporting giant, one of England’s all-time 24-carat greats. And in his second life, he has been an established feature of the sporting landscape in the UK for over a quarter of a century. Nothing that’s said about him in the Daily Mail or the Telegraph or even on the BBC will change any of that.

Put it this way, by pulling him from Match of the Day, the BBC have probably put him out on the open market. Who loses? Not Lineker. He’ll have no shortage of suitors only delighted to pay him the £1.3m a year he gets from the BBC. And when it comes to his Twitter account, do you imagine the suits in Sky or BT or wherever give a tuppenny damn what he says? Or will they just see the 8.7m followers he brings with him and hope he doesn’t ask for an extra million quid because of them?

Gary Lineker will be fine. But if he can’t stand up against a politician like Braverman, someone who describes seeing a plane leave Heathrow for Rwanda filled with asylum seekers as “my dream, my obsession”, who will?

If the might of the BBC isn’t deployed to support somebody as famous and beloved as Lineker, what are the chances they’ll back a lowly reporter trying to hold the Tories to account? And if someone like Lineker gets chewed up by the culture wars machine, what does that say to the next generation of sportspeople when it comes to standing up for the downtrodden and the vulnerable?
Nothing good, that’s for sure."

[JamesWales]

I was replying to your statement that It's not hard to see why people are miffed about that, just like it's not hard to see why people are miffed about BBC presenters tweeting pretty controversial tweets.
so not sure where you get the Whatabouttery.

Perhaps you have become so immersed in your wish for people to stop posting about lovies tweeting that you have forgotten your copious amount of back copy on the subject?

I was winding you up Cyril. Stop taking everything so seriously.

It's not hard to reply when you seem to plan your day around my posts on CCMB and always respond.

I'm just winding you up, I'm sure you are having a lovely day. I am about to start a roast and then watch the Ireland v Scotland game, so for now I wish you a happy afternoon

[JamesWales]

And there, ladies and gentlemen, is the Tory position: a sports presenter shouldn't dare criticise the government on Twitter.

I rather like this piece from Malachy Clerkin in the Irish Times:

"Gary Lineker must sit back and wonder sometimes how it got to this. How did he, the world’s most manifestly vanilla footballer, the apogee of mild-mannered English decorum when he played, how did that guy become a figure of UK-wide national outrage? It’s like hearing Cliff Richard turned out to be a crypto bro or that Su Pollard’s third act was as head of Combat 18. It doesn’t compute.

This is Gary Winston Lineker we’re talking about. Yes, named after Churchill. A sportsman so bland, so studiously inoffensive that he went through his entire career without once getting booked. Who actually began his post-football life as a pundit but was so un-opinionated that the BBC had to find another role for him. Too nice for the Match of the Day couch – has faint praise ever been so damning?

Yet if you cocked an ear to our friends across the water this week, you’d come away convinced that the very fate of modern Britain is predicated on Gary Lineker’s Twitter account. Depending on where you’re standing, Lineker is either a Martin Luther King for the 21st century or a pinko disgrace and a danger to the state. This is quite the turn of events.

His tweets this week comparing the pointedly cruel language of Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman on refugees “to that used in Germany in the 1930s” has plonked him right into the nexus of the culture wars over there. For the foreseeable future – and most likely long after it – he will be a lightning rod for the peculiar brand of conservative English mania that has taken hold of post-Brexit Britain.

It’s wild when you think about it. A man so devoted to the quiet life in his playing days that he preferred snooker to golf as a post-training pastime on the basis that it was less tiring has somehow been reinvented as a scourge of government, a voice for the voiceless, a truth-teller in a world of right-wing spivs and charlatans. All because he uses his platform and his 8.7 million Twitter followers to occasionally talk with humanity and decency about the world around him.

When you step back from it, the most interesting aspect of the week wasn’t that he had a go at a sitting Tory minister. It wasn’t that he compared her words to those of Nazis in the 1930s. And it definitely wasn’t the risible notion that his Twitter account was somehow a threat to the BBC’s sacred impartiality.

No, far more interesting was the fact that it worked. The BBC got spooked and didn’t stand by their man. They tried to browbeat Lineker into an apology and when he refused, they pulled him off air. One of the great institutions of British life ultimately quailed at the feet of the Tory government and the right-wing press. In doing so, they provided a lovely distraction from the troubles of the former and dished up a tasty weekend morsel to feed the beast for the latter.

So much of this stuff is noise, peddled for profit, nakedly disingenuous rabble-rousing. Bad enough that the BBC had already led their two most-watched news bulletins on Wednesday evening with Lineker’s Tweets around Braverman’s refugee policy rather than the refugee policy itself. Imagine the delight in Tory HQ when they saw that. Another day down, another news cycle survived. What’s next off the bullshit conveyor belt?

Well, it turns out nothing is. Roll on a couple more days and by Friday afternoon, the BBC had decided to pull Lineker off-air altogether. Oh, how green must the valley have been in the Home Office when the news came through. Nobody is spending the weekend talking about brown people dying in boats in the English Channel. Everything is centred now on the Twitter account of an English sporting hero. They’ve had a right result here.

The BBC had a busy day, as it happens. Even the sainted David Attenborough fell foul of them. It was reported earlier in the day that the final episode of his upcoming series on wildlife in the British Isles won’t be shown on the mainstream BBC for fear of upsetting right-wing politicians and press. It will instead be held back and only be shown on the iPlayer.

Imagine telling someone in 1990 that the BBC would one day side with government and anti-immigration, anti-environment vested interests over Gary Lineker and David Attenborough? They’d wonder what sort of dark dystopian Britain the future had in store. That’s the power of the people Lineker has annoyed this week.

Here’s the really depressing thing: if Gary Lineker can’t survive a week of the culture wars, who can? Lineker is a genuine sporting giant, one of England’s all-time 24-carat greats. And in his second life, he has been an established feature of the sporting landscape in the UK for over a quarter of a century. Nothing that’s said about him in the Daily Mail or the Telegraph or even on the BBC will change any of that.

Put it this way, by pulling him from Match of the Day, the BBC have probably put him out on the open market. Who loses? Not Lineker. He’ll have no shortage of suitors only delighted to pay him the £1.3m a year he gets from the BBC. And when it comes to his Twitter account, do you imagine the suits in Sky or BT or wherever give a tuppenny damn what he says? Or will they just see the 8.7m followers he brings with him and hope he doesn’t ask for an extra million quid because of them?

Gary Lineker will be fine. But if he can’t stand up against a politician like Braverman, someone who describes seeing a plane leave Heathrow for Rwanda filled with asylum seekers as “my dream, my obsession”, who will?

If the might of the BBC isn’t deployed to support somebody as famous and beloved as Lineker, what are the chances they’ll back a lowly reporter trying to hold the Tories to account? And if someone like Lineker gets chewed up by the culture wars machine, what does that say to the next generation of sportspeople when it comes to standing up for the downtrodden and the vulnerable?
Nothing good, that’s for sure."

Well, that's a long post. Like LOM's ones.

You misunderstood though. No he shouldn't have said it because in my opinion its historically illiterate garbage that undermines the foundations of the most evil regime in human history. You won't catch me defending many contemporary analogies to the second world war TLG, it's a particular bugbear of mine.

I repeat, I support his right to make the tweet (not withstanding his employers contractual agreements which are beyond both our knowledge)

God knows why you are going on about Tories, but I know it's a hard one for some posters to define everything in these binary terms of Labour / Tory, but I thought we were talking about Lineker and the BBC?

Enjoy the Scotland v Ireland game 👍

[The Lone Gunman]

No he shouldn't have said it because in my opinion its historically illiterate garbage that undermines the foundations of the most evil regime in human history.

Wow.

[pipster]

Looks like Gary will also be fighting against HMRC https://gorillaaccounting.com/blog/t...-gary-lineker/

The biggest IR35 avoidance scheme / fine ever dished out by HMRC against GLM (Gary Lineker Media) - he has been investigated twice now.

This decision when it comes will be interesting - IR35 - if he loses then the implication is for IR35 he was effectively employed by the BBC - and must pay back dated National Insurance contributions - as will the bbc, need to pay employer contributions.

From what I read the case is coming soon if he loses it will be 4.9 million plus costs. The plot thickens

[cyril evans awaydays]

I was winding you up Cyril. Stop taking everything so seriously.

It's not hard to reply when you seem to plan your day around my posts on CCMB and always respond.

I'm just winding you up, I'm sure you are having a lovely day. I am about to start a roast and then watch the Ireland v Scotland game, so for now I wish you a happy afternoon

Just checking, were you winding me up?

[ninian opinian]

And there, ladies and gentlemen, is the Tory position: a sports presenter shouldn't dare criticise the government on Twitter.

I rather like this piece from Malachy Clerkin in the Irish Times:

"Gary Lineker must sit back and wonder sometimes how it got to this. How did he, the world’s most manifestly vanilla footballer, the apogee of mild-mannered English decorum when he played, how did that guy become a figure of UK-wide national outrage? It’s like hearing Cliff Richard turned out to be a crypto bro or that Su Pollard’s third act was as head of Combat 18. It doesn’t compute.

This is Gary Winston Lineker we’re talking about. Yes, named after Churchill. A sportsman so bland, so studiously inoffensive that he went through his entire career without once getting booked. Who actually began his post-football life as a pundit but was so un-opinionated that the BBC had to find another role for him. Too nice for the Match of the Day couch – has faint praise ever been so damning?

Yet if you cocked an ear to our friends across the water this week, you’d come away convinced that the very fate of modern Britain is predicated on Gary Lineker’s Twitter account. Depending on where you’re standing, Lineker is either a Martin Luther King for the 21st century or a pinko disgrace and a danger to the state. This is quite the turn of events.

His tweets this week comparing the pointedly cruel language of Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman on refugees “to that used in Germany in the 1930s” has plonked him right into the nexus of the culture wars over there. For the foreseeable future – and most likely long after it – he will be a lightning rod for the peculiar brand of conservative English mania that has taken hold of post-Brexit Britain.

It’s wild when you think about it. A man so devoted to the quiet life in his playing days that he preferred snooker to golf as a post-training pastime on the basis that it was less tiring has somehow been reinvented as a scourge of government, a voice for the voiceless, a truth-teller in a world of right-wing spivs and charlatans. All because he uses his platform and his 8.7 million Twitter followers to occasionally talk with humanity and decency about the world around him.

When you step back from it, the most interesting aspect of the week wasn’t that he had a go at a sitting Tory minister. It wasn’t that he compared her words to those of Nazis in the 1930s. And it definitely wasn’t the risible notion that his Twitter account was somehow a threat to the BBC’s sacred impartiality.

No, far more interesting was the fact that it worked. The BBC got spooked and didn’t stand by their man. They tried to browbeat Lineker into an apology and when he refused, they pulled him off air. One of the great institutions of British life ultimately quailed at the feet of the Tory government and the right-wing press. In doing so, they provided a lovely distraction from the troubles of the former and dished up a tasty weekend morsel to feed the beast for the latter.

So much of this stuff is noise, peddled for profit, nakedly disingenuous rabble-rousing. Bad enough that the BBC had already led their two most-watched news bulletins on Wednesday evening with Lineker’s Tweets around Braverman’s refugee policy rather than the refugee policy itself. Imagine the delight in Tory HQ when they saw that. Another day down, another news cycle survived. What’s next off the bullshit conveyor belt?

Well, it turns out nothing is. Roll on a couple more days and by Friday afternoon, the BBC had decided to pull Lineker off-air altogether. Oh, how green must the valley have been in the Home Office when the news came through. Nobody is spending the weekend talking about brown people dying in boats in the English Channel. Everything is centred now on the Twitter account of an English sporting hero. They’ve had a right result here.

The BBC had a busy day, as it happens. Even the sainted David Attenborough fell foul of them. It was reported earlier in the day that the final episode of his upcoming series on wildlife in the British Isles won’t be shown on the mainstream BBC for fear of upsetting right-wing politicians and press. It will instead be held back and only be shown on the iPlayer.

Imagine telling someone in 1990 that the BBC would one day side with government and anti-immigration, anti-environment vested interests over Gary Lineker and David Attenborough? They’d wonder what sort of dark dystopian Britain the future had in store. That’s the power of the people Lineker has annoyed this week.

Here’s the really depressing thing: if Gary Lineker can’t survive a week of the culture wars, who can? Lineker is a genuine sporting giant, one of England’s all-time 24-carat greats. And in his second life, he has been an established feature of the sporting landscape in the UK for over a quarter of a century. Nothing that’s said about him in the Daily Mail or the Telegraph or even on the BBC will change any of that.

Put it this way, by pulling him from Match of the Day, the BBC have probably put him out on the open market. Who loses? Not Lineker. He’ll have no shortage of suitors only delighted to pay him the £1.3m a year he gets from the BBC. And when it comes to his Twitter account, do you imagine the suits in Sky or BT or wherever give a tuppenny damn what he says? Or will they just see the 8.7m followers he brings with him and hope he doesn’t ask for an extra million quid because of them?

Gary Lineker will be fine. But if he can’t stand up against a politician like Braverman, someone who describes seeing a plane leave Heathrow for Rwanda filled with asylum seekers as “my dream, my obsession”, who will?

If the might of the BBC isn’t deployed to support somebody as famous and beloved as Lineker, what are the chances they’ll back a lowly reporter trying to hold the Tories to account? And if someone like Lineker gets chewed up by the culture wars machine, what does that say to the next generation of sportspeople when it comes to standing up for the downtrodden and the vulnerable?
Nothing good, that’s for sure."

Excellent article.

[Dorcus]

Excellent article.

Yes I enjoyed that. Highly accurate and articulate 👍

[JamesWales]

Yes I enjoyed that. Highly accurate and articulate 👍

And entirely one sided!

[JamesWales]

Wow.

Whats so surprising? There is a very valid debate that Stalin's regime in the USSR was more evil I suppose, or even that Pol Pots in Cambodia was, but I would give that infamy to the Nazi regime personally.

[jon1959]

Excellent article.

Yes I enjoyed that. Highly accurate and articulate ��

Yes - very good. Thanks TLG for sharing.

Although entirely one sided. The side of astute and perceptive not confused and deflecting.

And incredibly it was all based on what Lineker actually tweeted not inventions of what he tweeted by desperate Tory apologists.

[the other bob wilson]

Bob


On reflection, angry was probably too strong a word to use.

However I do get irritated when assumptions are made about my post which are simply not there,and in this case as I reiterated subsequently I was not making an attempt to justify the overuse of tories purely responding factually to a point made by Eric in another post about BBC political editors being generally tories

The other thing you got wrong is in thinking I was referring to political correspondents. I wasn't, I was referring to political EDITORS, a much smaller field.

There have only been ten of these, the first two Hardiman Smith and David Holmes I know nothing about. For balance my views on those after Simpson Cole and Marr are

Robin Oakley From his background probably Conservative, but not sure

Nick Robinson. A Tory in his student days but not sure about later years. Always seems even handed

Laura Kuensberg. Strongly suspected by some (including yourself)of being story sympathiser. Never been sure myself

Chris Mason. I have no idea of his political views. again always seems even handed.

Anyway enough of this wittering I accept your apology.

Thanks, glad to move on from that.

Having read Oakley’s Wikipedia page, it’s hard to see him as anything else than a Tory, but, like Robinson, he seemed even handed in his approach. I’ve heard Chris Mason called a Tory, but that’s on places that think half of the Labour Party are Conservatives.

[TWGL1]

BBC hypocrisy summed up well here

https://fb.watch/jdKzwFEbG0/

[The Lone Gunman]

Whats so surprising?

The surprising thing is you posted that gibberish believing it made some sort of sense.

So Gary Lineker tweeting about the Tories' refugees policy "undermines the foundations" of the Nazi regime?

Give your head a wobble.