The BBC presenter’s sidelining will delight ministers eager for a distraction. The last thing they want is for us to see refugees as real people
Even to talk about it is a distraction, but let’s be clear: Gary Lineker is not the villain here. On the contrary, he deserves admiration for speaking out against a naked injustice, for taking a stance that has now required him to “step back” from presenting Match of the Day while he and the BBC work out what he is, and is not, allowed to say on social media.
True, he deployed the wrong analogy: the Conservative government’s policy and language on refugees are foul, but they are not a match for either the policy or language of “Germany in the 30s”, as he tweeted. When the home secretary, Suella Braverman, speaks of desperate people as an “invasion” she dehumanises them, and that is appalling enough – but even in the earliest stages of the Nazi dehumanisation of the Jews, both the words and the deeds were worse.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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