What was it exactly that footballer Gary Lineker tweeted, leading the BBC to suspend him from ‘Match of the Day’? – Here it is:

‘This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the ’30s.’

He was referring, of course, to Suella Braverman’s new law directed against refugees crossing the English Channel without permission in small (and very sinkable) boats.

Quite apart from the question of whether the BBC should be able to censor remarks made by a freelance broadcaster, not on one of the BBC’s programmes, but on a personal Twitter account – there is the question of whether the statement itself is fair and reasonable. Lineker’s critics claim it isn’t, because it seems to be comparing the present British government to the Nazis. I think most of us historians would agree that this would be going too far.

But it’s not strictly what he wrote. What he did say, it seems to me, is far more defensible. ‘Immeasurably cruel’ is a matter of opinion, but of reasonable opinion, surely. ‘Most vulnerable people’ (referring to the refugees) must be a matter of fact. But it’s the reference to ‘Germany in the ‘30s’ which has triggered all those Right-wing alarms, and perhaps understandably. No-one wants to be associated with the Nazis, who were after all Britain’s main enemy in World War II; even the formerly supportive Daily Mail rather went off them after that. Comparisons with Hitler, and with the deepest atrocities of his regime, are clearly beyond the pale.

But a comparison with the period that gave birth to Nazism certainly isn’t.  It’s a parallel that has been drawn by a number of historians, in Britain and the USA, over the last few months and years, who have offered it as a warning to the present generation of what might develop out of current trends. Lineker’s specific reference to present-day Right-wing language is bang-on here. Expressions like ‘invasion’, ‘enemies of the people’, ‘swamping’, ‘traitors’ and ‘lefty lawyers’ certainly are reminiscent of the kind of language which preceded and fed into German Fascism in the 1930s. Which is not to say that Suella Braverman is the sort of Führerin who wants to gas the Jews, or lefty lawyers, or any other ‘wokeists’ at the present day; but only that language of the kind she uses could have repercussions of this kind.

Together with the extraordinary way in which the new Director-General of the BBC was appointed – the job given to a Tory party donor who had facilitated an £800,000 personal loan to the Prime Minister shortly before Boris appointed him to the job – and we have to wonder at the BBC’s ‘neutrality’; Lineker’s lack of which was one of the BBC’s excuses for taking ‘MOTD’ away from him.

(And is it true that the final episode of the saintly David Attenborough’s new TV series about nature and its destruction is being pulled in the face of  hostility from the climate science-denying Right? – https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/mar/10/david-attenborough-bbc-wild-isles-episode-rightwing-backlash-fears.)