What the Lineker Moment Means
What the Lineker Moment Means
A liberal left that has been cowed for far too long found its voice. That will have long term implications for more than just the BBC.
Sorry the newsletter is a little late this week. I wanted to reflect on the Lineker situation and was waiting until there was some sort of resolution to do so. The next paid edition will be out on Sunday as usual!
It was always going to be sport. It usually is. So many times where we see social change happen it becomes exemplified in sport. This is why so many liberals still wax nostalgic about the 2012 olympics - despite these being held in a country just seeing the start of a decade of crippling austerity.
Sport is ultimately about fair competition. I’m not a big watcher of sport but I get the emotions it drives. When I do tune in I too feel that sense of emotion and the joy of watching two relatively even competitors battle it out. Without thinking about it in any way, we go into watching sport thinking about it in a framework of fairness as well as one of competition.
This isn’t to say there aren’t plenty of illiberal or right wing sports personalities - nor that there shouldn’t be. Their political views have nothing to do with their talent in their arena.
When it comes to impartiality, we really don’t actually ever ask this of sports presenters or athletes.
I mean…
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As mentioned, I rarely watch sport. But I know that Gary Lineker support Leicester City. I’ve never for a second thought that his being completely open about that preference was a problem in his being able to talk about *actual football* and I don’t think a single viewer of Match of the Day thinks so either.
We don’t need to agree with our football presenters any more than we need to agree with the person we buy our milk off. We are asking them to provide us a specific service and beyond that live their lives however they want to.
That, it seems to me, is why so many Britons thought the BBC were in the wrong in suspending Linekar.
Yes, there’s clearly a political bias in those numbers. But 36% of Tory voters is really not an insignificant number, given that Small Boats is one of the Tory government’s flagship policies.
Sadly, what this doesn’t mean is that the country doesn’t back the horrible policy overall. Polling here shows that 50% of the public do.
So I am not in any way claiming that what has happened this weekend has changed public perceptions on migrants and refugees policy.
What I do think has happened is that there is a newly refreshed sense among much of the public that it’s OK for people to disagree on issues like this. The Boris and Brexit years - when it was portrayed by an unscupulous few as unpatriotic to oppose the government in any way are receeding.
I don’t think this means that Brexit is going to be reopened as a topic. Labour show no appetite for this and while regret is increasing it is not doing so in a truly saliant way. Making Brexit work - as Labour are promising to do - may feel like a betrayal by the FBPE crowd, but it is also the reality of the political world Labour are going to inherit. Brexit has happened. Were the UK to even being to wish to rejoin the EU there would be an extraordinary long period of negotiation needed to make that happen and it wouldn’t come with anything like the terms we had when we left.
Rishi Sunak - for his multiple flaws - is not Boris Johnson. He’s not running a government in the populist style, even if he is introducing populist (and unworkable so) policies. He doesn’t have the bombast of Boris and as such has deliberately not taken a side on the BBC row (though several of his really, really awful backbenchers have - step forward Jonathan Gullis).
So Brexit is largely off the boil as a dividing line and Boris on the backfoot
Also, the Tories are 20 points behind in the polls. The public don’t pay much attention, but they do know the Tories are currently losing voters. It strikes me that this too comes into their sense of fair play. Whether or not they agree with the liberal left on a policy by policy basis, knowing that they may well be in power soon and that there are significant numbers of people who do agree with them means they understand they have a right to a hearing - even if they don’t agree.
For a long time, anyone espousing liberal or left wing views were not simply argued with by the right wing, they were told that in expressing such views alone they were disrespecting the public and the democratic process. Organisations like the BBC got themselves into a dreadful muddle as a result. Any view seen to be liberal was considered out of touch rather than taken as an important part of an ongoing conversation. And as such not only were commentators who might offer such views booked less, but they were always framed as out of touch rather than this being a fair fight.
Let’s not make any mistakes about where we are. The Tory Party is still in a deeply populist moment. It is only led by Sunak because this was forced on an unwilling membership after the atomic failure of Liz Truss. Their instinct are still far more with the Boris Johnsons and Jonathan Gullis’s of the world. Their election campaign will strike the same note. Out of habit and desperation if nothing else.
But we do have a moment of opportunity to speak with more confidence in a world that is - ever so slightly - more open to giving us a hearing. And a media that might be finally willing to understand that they too have a duty to that hearing in the name of the impartiality that they claim to uphold.
The BBC is one organisation. But it finally facing a crisis caused entiely by it’s rightward and populist cringe reflex (the ‘Please don’t hurt us Daily Mail’ instinct that has been institutionalised by Tim Davie). That enough of us - led by Lineker and his brave colleagues who stood by him - were finally able not only to say that we do not accept this framing but to get a hearing in doing so is a very encouraging moment.
It’s not the end. It’s a long way from the end. The hideous legislation passed its first reading. It will receive very little Parliamentary scrutiny. It will pass. All this matters more that the right of free speech of one sports broadcaster.
But if we are going to continue to fight this populist wave, we first need to get a hearing and be confident enough to take it. That is why I think this moment matters.
What I’ve been up to
We have recorded two editions of the House of Comments one on the proposed appointment of Sue Gray and another on the Small Boats legislation.
I also saw a really lovely play at Upstairs at the Gatehouse called Jumping the Shark - all about writing Sit Coms.