10 March 2023 , 14:09
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I wish Gary Lineker would get the hang of this Twitter lark.
If he decides he wants to carry on presenting Match of the Day after stepping back from it, then he needs to realise it’s not the subjects he tweets about that matter, it’s the way that he tweets them.
This week, instead of calling Suella Braverman’s attempt to criminalise asylum seekers an “immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people, in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s,” Lineker should have called it “a brilliant policy aimed at delivering The Final Solution to subhuman vermin who come here to steal all of our wealth”.
Then, instead of right-wing pundits spewing their bile at him, and newspapers like the Daily Mail splashing for three days on the need for the BBC to sack him, he would have been hailed a national hero who speaks for the silent majority by telling it as it is.
Because the Mail, after all, actually supported the party that ran Germany back in the 1930s.
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But no, Lineker has to go and stick up for desperate people he believes deserve a better life. What a complete b*****d. You think he would have learned from 2016 when, after tweeting “the treatment by some towards young refugees is hideously racist and utterly heartless”, there were calls not just for the BBC to sack him from Match of the Day but, and this was proposed by the leader of UKIP, to boycott Walkers Crisps which Lineker helped promote. Especially the curry-flavoured ones, no doubt.
This is the crucial point about a man who has actually taken two refugees into his own home. Not whether a BBC freelancer in the sports department should be allowed to criticise the Government, but that Lineker has been criticising them on this issue for at least seven years.
And despite this latest attempt to chuck red meat at Tory voters in the cynical hope that it will stop them being wiped out at the next election, they haven’t had a clue how to sort it out. Braverman and Sunak know this policy won’t fly but it’s a stellar distraction from the fact that the Tories have failed so lamentably on the asylum issue we now have a backlog of 150,000 claims.
Stop The Boats is just another three- word slogan like Get Brexit Done (how did that one pan out?) that they hope will make them look tough on immigration in constituencies that voted Leave.
Braverman’s dog-whistle claim that there are 100 million refugees on their way is even more dangerous than Nigel Farage’s “Breaking Point” lie about 75 million Turks heading here, in the same week Jo Cox was murdered by a man shouting “Britain First”.
The irony is that virtually all of Lineker’s critics believe that it’s fine for the BBC chairman to donate £400,000 to the Tories but not a sports freelancer to criticise their policies.
These are also the same people who spend their lives banging on about how woke lefties are trying to cancel people saying what they believe.
Yet when Lineker says what he passionately believes they demand he be cancelled. Meanwhile, Britons can’t buy a tomato or call an ambulance.
But don’t blame the Tories for that, blame Gary Lineker. Off with his jug-eared head.