IT must be nice enjoying all the benefits that come with striking liberal attitudes without suffering any of the negative consequences. Gary Lineker will never sit for 12 hours in A&E waiting to see a doctor, he’ll never have to compete with hundreds of parents to get his kids into the only semi-decent local comp. Nor will he wait years on the council register as people who’ve just arrived in the country, legally or otherwise, are fast-tracked into social housing.
On the contrary, he can hold his head high when attending those fancy dinner parties in his London bubble, basking in the warm glow of self-righteousness, especially since yesterday’s announcement that he was getting the yellow card from Match of the Day.
Suella Braverman said the Nazi comparison used by Lineker was ‘lazy and unhelpful’, but that the decision whether to punish him rests with the BBC. My word, such powerful rhetoric doubtless has the overpaid crisp salesman quaking in his boots.
But this problem looms much larger than Lineker alone; he is a symptom rather than the disease itself. The underlying pathology is the BBC as an institution.
Everything that needs to be said about the wretched, toxic, cancerous corporation has already been said. Suffice it to say they stopped even pretending to be impartial a very long time ago.
The BBC are obsessed with all kinds of diversity except the only one that matters: diversity of opinion. That’s why Director General Tim Davie is incapable of talking about the real problem at hand, for to admit that is to admit there is a legitimate counter-argument which should be presented, rather than simply the woke opinion on one side, and the racist, sexist, bigoted, intolerant opinion on the other.
The BBC genuinely cannot see their own bias, as fish can’t see water: it’s what surrounds them 24 hours a day. If the only people you ever talk to at work or in your private life share the same left-wing, politically-correct attitudes, you stop thinking of them as ‘politically-correct’ attitudes and start to think of them as the ‘correct’ attitudes.
The social diversity commitments are a red herring. I’ve met working-class northerners employed there who pride themselves on being ‘salt of the earth’ and in touch with the working man who were as horrified by the Brexit result or Trump’s election as 99.99 per cent of their BBC colleagues. This is because, regardless of your convictions going into it, once you’ve been marinated in that woke, globalist soup for long enough, everyone ends up thinking the same way.
Take the Channel migrant crisis. For the BBC, the only debate is whether to send ships directly to France and ferry them across, or simply take in and permanently house and clothe whoever makes it here. That is how they present the decision to ministers during interviews. The idea of sending these chancers back immediately or processing them offshore doesn’t cross their minds, yet that is what the majority of the population undoubtedly desire. In other words, the debate is always framed between the left and the far-left, and that is political diversity in their eyes.