Impartiality? Sure. As long as you’re impartial for us

It’s with some delight that I see Gary Lineker, ex-leading England footballer, returning to the BBC’s Match of the Day programme, on which he was an outstanding presenter and commentator.

Well, I say outstanding. To be honest, it’s been decades since I’ve watched Match of the Day. But people who know about these things tell me he really is outstanding.

Small-boat immigrants in the Channel

He was suspended because he put some tweets up about the UK government’s plans to stop illegal immigrants travelling across the English Channel in small boats. Those plans involve keeping them in centres that have yet to be built before deporting them back to the countries they came from, or to a range of third countries, that have yet to say they’ll take any. Except for Rwanda. It’s prepared to take 200.

For the record, more than 40,000 such immigrants arrived in Britain last year. If I've got the arithmetic right, Rwanda’s generosity represents around 0.5% of the total.

Gary Lineker

Lineker’s tweets compared the government’s language over its proposals to that of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Well, perhaps that wasn’t entirely wise. There’s a good principle, known as Godwin’s law, that says that the longer an online debate goes on, the closer it gets to a comparison with the Nazis or Adolf Hitler. An often-quoted spin-off rule is that such a comparison should end the debate, and the person who has made it has lost the argument.

Still, the principle behind Lineker’s comment seems entirely justified. Perhaps rather than compare the government’s thinking to Hitler’s, we could compare it to that of other less controversial, more contemporary but still weird figures. Take Matteo Salvini, for instance, who as Interior Minister in Italy, closed the country’s ports to vessels that had rescued immigrants who’d been left drowning in the Mediterranean when the boats carrying them sank.

Presumably he felt that it was better to let people drown than to let them in. 

He also once said that what Italy needed was “a mass cleansing, street by street, piazza by piazza, neighbourhood by neighbourhood”.

It’s hard not to think that he sees certain people as pretty much sub-human. Which is, I think we can agree, more than a little ugly. Without even having to break Godwin’s Law. 

Incidentally, Matteo Salvini has congratulated the British government on its stance on illegal immigration to the country. Which probably tells you as much as you need to know about the policy.

Salvini: indifferent to the suffering of immigrants
and a great fan of the British government approach

In any case, the motivation given by the BBC for Lineker’s suspension, was that it needs to maintain its strict impartiality. Now, I think that’s an important principle. Perhaps, though, the BBC ought to start by setting its own house in order. Its Chairman, Richard Sharp, is a long-time donor to the Conservative Party. He’s also under investigation for having organised a loan for the then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, at just the time when he was being considered for appointment to the chairmanship. That’s a decision over which the Prime Minister has serious influence.

I don’t know. It may just be me. But that history suggests to me that there’s a much bigger problem of impartiality at the BBC than Lineker. I can’t help feeling that impartiality matters more at the top of the organisation than at the level of a sports presenter.

It’s hard not to feel that there are people out there who think that impartiality is good, but only as long as it’s impartiality for them. Rather like Donald Trump, who’s keen on free speech, as long as it’s freely adoring of him.

In any case, impartiality is most important when it comes to news and current affairs. Football commentating? I’m not sure it matters that much. Besides, Lineker didn’t make his comments on air in his capacity as a BBC presenter, he made them on his private Twitter account. And he isn’t even a BBC employee, but a freelancer.

All this made it heart-warming to see how many of his fellow commentators and presenters on sports programmes supported him by refusing to do their broadcasts. That left the BBC’s sports coverage in tatters over the weekend. Which, no doubt, explains the end of the suspension.

A delight, as I say. Though perhaps more of a relief. At least, for as long as this setback to the Salvini trend in British politics endures.