On Gary Lineker and the BBC's credibility

All -- politicians, pundits, BBC management -- need to follow a basic sporting principle: play the ball, not the man

Non-British readers could be forgiven for being puzzled as to why Britain’s political and media world has become consumed by the issue of whether freedom of speech should be allowed to the presenter of a popular soccer TV programme, Match of the Day. Or, looked at from the viewpoint of those who criticise the aforementioned Gary Lineker for speaking out, by the issue of whether the BBC’s rules governing political impartiality should extend to a sports presenter who is a former striker for the England soccer team, is popularly considered to be as morally upright as the Pope (or the Archbishop of Canterbury, if you prefer), and who has 8.8 million followers on Twitter. To most, the answer will be obvious: such a person should be entitled to say what he wants, as long as he does not thereby damage the programme he is paid to present, nor use that programme as a platform for a political campaign. That is what would apply in virtually all democratic countries: Britain is an anomaly. Yet this very British fuss is more important and less simple than it looks, in three ways:

• it highlights a terrible tendency that has taken hold in British political life of seeking to undermine the credentials and right to speak of those whose views you dislike, rather than taking on their arguments;

• it has harmed the credibility of the BBC, as this globally admired public broadcaster has shown that it does not itself understand its own rules and practices on impartiality and is very vulnerable to political pressure;

• it has diverted attention from the real issue, which is the rights and wrongs of Britain’s policy on asylum seekers and refugees, an issue which deserves to be addressed seriously.

For those who looked away from the TV when the news of the Gary Lineker affair came on, his sin was to have criticised, in a tweet, the British government’s new policy on refugees, saying that the language surrounding that policy is reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s. Following a couple of days of outrage in the Daily Mail and from (mainly) right-wing Conservative politicians, the BBC announced it was suspending Lineker as he had supposedly breached their impartiality guidelines. This meant he could not present Match of the Day this past weekend, and all the other commentators reacted by boycotting the show, as did a number of other sports presenters on other programmes. After a weekend dominated by this political story to the exclusion of all others, a settlement of sorts was reached: Lineker will return to present Match of the Day next weekend, without having had to apologise or retract his comments, while the BBC will set up an “independent review” of its social media guidelines for presenters.

This is a sort of victory for free speech. It will now quieten, at least for a while, those media and political voices who had sought to deny Lineker’s right to state his views in public, either because they dismissed him as a mere footballer or because they argued that he shouldn’t be allowed to say what he thinks because he presents non-political programmes on the BBC, is the broadcaster’s highest-paid presenter, and because for such a fat-cat to publicise his views on public policy is thereby an affront to all those who pay the BBC licence fee from which his salary is paid. That playing of the man rather than the ball, as sportspeople say, is surely no way to conduct public debates.

Yet that is, in effect, what BBC management also did, under the very unconvincing leadership of the broadcaster’s Director-General, Tim Davie, who felt under very evident pressure both from noisy right-wing politicians and from the noisy right-wing press. As the Guardian, among others, pointed out, plenty of stars who present non-political programmes on the BBC — quizzes, cookery shows, gardening, sports — have shared their political views with the outside world and not been suspended or reprimanded for doing so. And quite rightly: they are not news journalists or presenters of political programmes. If a celebrity cook such as Prue Leith chooses to advocate Britain’s departure from the European Union, that is her right to do so and her role on a BBC non-political programme has nothing to do with it. That was the BBC’s past practice. So to pick on Gary Lineker was either to single him out because he is a bigger star with more followers than the others, or simply because of the political furore about what he said.

In the past few days, lots of time has been spent scrutinising the BBC’s guidelines on impartiality so as to decide whether or not Lineker can be said to have been in breach of them. Yet the right conclusion from reading such guidelines is that in the end it is not possible to draft clear and strict guidelines for this sort of thing. The guidelines say, in effect, both that a freelance sports presenter is allowed to say what he wants on politics or other non-sports matters, and that he might not be. I remember well from my own case in 2015-16 on the board of Ofcom, Britain’s broadcasting regulator: their code of conduct is drafted so broadly and vaguely as to both permit you to do things and to disallow you from doing the very same things. The use of the word “appropriate” or “perceptions” is the key: Lineker could do what he wanted, as long as he showed “appropriate responsibility”; a director at Ofcom could do what she wanted, as long as it didn’t give rise to “perceptions” of bias. In other words, the BBC’s drafters leave room for management to use their discretion to rule a permitted behaviour as inappropriate, if they feel like it.

The trouble with using such vague guidelines arises when you start to treat them as if they are a legal document, yet do so using discretion rather than any clear, defensible rule. That is what Tim Davie and his management team did: they suspended Lineker for having done something inappropriate, something he had every reason previously to believe was permitted. Under scrutiny, that use of discretion has placed the whole basis of the BBC’s claims to have strong, clear rules on impartiality in doubt. Which is a problem for Davie, since he entered office claiming he would sort out the BBC’s impartiality issues once and for all. Which plainly he hasn’t. Quite unnecessarily, this episode has undermined the genuinely important rules governing the impartiality of news and political reporting.

If I was writing the independent review on social media guidelines, I would simply say this: unless you are a news or political reporter or presenter, you can say what you like as long as it is within the law and does not damage the job you are paid to do at the BBC. The only limit to this is if a non-political presenter chooses to enter politics formally or to lead a sustained campaign on a political issue: in that case, please speak to your line manager to see whether or not your plans are compatible with your broadcasting contract.

Back to the real issue, which this Lineker/BBC affair has distracted attention from. The underlying reality is that the Conservative government has announced a plan to deport all asylum-seekers who arrive in Britain by illegal means such as small boats crossing the English Channel, regardless of the merits of their asylum claim, a plan which the government itself says may be in breach of both domestic and international law. They “believe” it won’t be in breach, but have said upfront that the odds are about 50-50, making this a quite remarkable example of a government presenting a new law to Parliament knowing and saying that it might be illegal. What this shows, however, is that the point of presenting this new law is not really a belief that it will actually make a difference in the short or even medium term to the number of asylum seekers crossing the Channel. The point is that this is purely a political gesture both for the benefit of the right-wing of the Tory party and for those voters, many of them in poorer constituencies, for whom Channel-crossing migrants are an important issue. Hence also the inflammatory language used by the government and its leading supporters about the issue, the language to which Lineker referred in his tweet. This is all about politics, not policy.

For a very good account of this issue and what the Conservative government is really being driven by — or, at least, what sections of the Conservative party are being driven by — read the excellent Substack written earlier this week by my friend Philip Stephens.