Shooting from the hip
Gary Lineker's Nazi analogy was crass and foolish, but it didn't merit a suspension
My last post on the topic of cancel culture was, in the main, warmly received, so thank you all for that.
I didn’t intend to come back to the subject so soon, but then The Discourse has been taken over by Gary Lineker’s suspension from Match of the Day, which gives me an opportunity to make some supplementary points.
One Twitter user got very cross with my cancel culture piece and argued with me about it. The nub of the complaint was that there must be situations where I believe someone being fired is justified, what if a school teacher was promoting Andrew Tate to his students, what did I think about Scott Adams, etc etc.
This is so typical of conversations around the area of free speech it’s probably worth addressing clearly: at no point have I ever argued that nobody should ever be sacked for anything ever. We’re all capable of imagining scenarios where we believe that termination of a contract would be the most appropriate resolution.
But this is used as a rhetorical trick by people like my Twitter interlocutor. Ah ha, they think, I have established a beachhead here. You do accept the principle that sacking people is ok sometimes, therefore you can’t oppose cancel culture, this is all just a matter of degrees, you lose.
To take this line is to profoundly misunderstand those who support free speech and oppose cancel culture; it is not a matter of degrees but disposition.
It may be better to think of us as free speech maximalists. Almost nobody believes in entirely unfettered speech in all circumstances, but the bias should always be in favour of freedom and against introducing new restrictions. If you want to restrict my speech, you’d better have a damn good reason.
This stands in stark contrast to the internet activism approach of wanting to shut people up by any means possible; activists have found that the risk of losing your job is a decent deterrent for speaking up about things and a decent punishment for those who step out of line. When I talk about cancel culture, I’m talking about ordinary people being fired unjustly to placate some transitory online mob.
This maximalist approach is also why it is not incompatible to believe in both free speech and libel law; the only people who think this is some sort of gotcha are those who haven’t thought about the issue or just don’t understand their opponent’s position. In essence: the bar on restricting speech should be set as high as possible, and we should only consider lowering it for the most extreme cases.
Which brings us to Gary Lineker.
Lineker, host of the BBC’s flagship football highlights show Match of the Day, recently tweeted his opposition to the government’s migration bill, and was suspended after refusing to apologise or delete the tweets; this led to many other BBC presenters and pundits declining to appear in solidarity. The suspension has now been lifted, with the BBC Director General apologising.
The issue has been discussed to death this week and I don’t think it’s necessary for me to rake over the same points, but I’ve found The Discourse a bit disappointing in general and there are a few things I wanted to note.
A lot of people have made much of Lineker’s moral hypocrisy: he didn’t boycott the Qatar World Cup despite their hideous human rights record! HMRC are pursuing him for £5m of taxes (which he is contesting)! I mean, well done, you’ve shown that Gary Lineker is morally compromised, as are those who walked out in his support this week but happily commentated from Doha. Fine.
But where exactly does that get us, here? I’m not clear that him reporting on the World Cup has much bearing on whether or not his recent tweets on government policy are good or bad. So he’s a hypocrite… now what? If we only showed solidarity and support to people who are morally unimpeachable, there wouldn’t be much solidarity to go around.
A much better criticism of Lineker is around his use of Nazi Germany as a reference point. Specifically, his tweet described the Migration Bill as an
“immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s”
In those early, giddy days of the internet, I’m sure it used to be the case that comparing something to Hitler would automatically lose you the argument. Now, it’s almost become the default; a rhetorical trump card, the sign of someone pushing back from the keyboard and folding their arms in perceived triumph - I said they were like Hitler, I win.
I wonder if we’re in danger of forgetting that the Holocaust was a real event that actually happened to real people. Considering how commonly references are made, how readily they are dropped into social media discussions, there seems to be such a lack of understanding of the Nazis and the history of European antisemitism. Half of Twitter has convinced itself that “fascism arrives as your friend”, a line from a Michael Rosen poem which perfectly encapsulates the gap between what Samuel Rubenstein calls “Holocaust-as-Civics lesson” and “Holocaust-as-history”.
Karen Pollack, the Chief Executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, condemned the comparison between the government’s bill and 1930s Germany, and it would be a good idea for Lineker to take the time to understand why such analogies are inaccurate and offensive.
As an aside, we could probably do without Lucy Powell stupidly likening the situation to Putin’s Russia as well.
Thirdly, it’s been rather dispiriting seeing people I’d previously admired for their opposition to cancel culture suddenly start equivocating over Lineker. “I don’t understand why he won’t just delete his tweets”, wondered one. This comes back to my point earlier about being maximalists; the question is not why won’t he delete his tweets, but why should he?
We should not want to normalise the idea of employers being able to tell employees what to tweet. That bar should be set very, very high, and there is no reason why anyone presenting football highlights should be required to display political impartiality in their private lives.
So, then, why would we accept the suggestion that someone working in an entirely non-party-political role ought to be blocked from tweeting about political issues in their free time? Lineker might be powerful enough to face his employer down, but why would we want to establish this as a principle?
I’ve seen it asserted that he should suck it up because he’s paid handsomely (so what?) or that he’s a face of the BBC, whatever that means, but all of this is so much chaff thrown up because for once, a victim of cancel culture is being attacked from right rather than left; a switcheroo which has shown up rather a lot of inconsistency right across the political spectrum.
And if cancel culture is when a motivated but unrepresentative mob pressure an employer to sack an employee for expressing political opinions they disagree with, then yes, this is about cancel culture and yes, this is about free speech. It might feel a bit different when it comes from the right; less from anonymous internet accounts, more from parliamentarians and journalists, but the basic mechanism functions the same way. Clearly there are at least thirty-six Conservative parliamentarians who don’t mind a bit of cancel culture, provided it’s happening to someone they dislike.
The reality is that we have a Conservative government in its death throes, leaning into right-wing populism and anti-asylum seeker sentiment as a final roll of the dice, and that is worth opposing on its own terms. The migration bill is a horrible piece of legislation; Gary Lineker shouldn’t have likened it to Nazi Germany; he shouldn’t have been suspended for doing so. It is depressing that any of this is even contentious.
I just think it's dumb that British politics ground to a halt for a week to discuss a tweet.