GARY LINEKER and the question HOW MANY IMMIGRANTS AND REFUGEES SHOULD WE RECEIVE?
If a woman flees persecution in Afghanistan of Iran, is she an “illegal emigrant”? I think not. She is seeking safety as a “legal refugee” and therefore if she arrives in a foreign country (like Britain or America), she deserves to be given refuge. It is absurd and cruel and immoral to call her an “illegal immigrant.”
The famous and popular British football commentator Gary Lineker (top scorer for England, Tottenham and Leicester) objected to the British Home Secretary’s language about “illegal immigrants” as similar to the language used by the German government in the 1930s. This was calculated to get attention! The Tory party attacked not only Lineker, but also they attacked the BBC.
Gary Lineker, English football commentator and hero 2023
The Prime Minister has made the ridiculous comment that it is “a matter for the BBC” … after his staff and party put pressure on the BBC to sanction Lineker. I am happy to report that the whole of the BBC sport staff have supported Gary Lineker: colleagues standing with their colleague, supporting Free Speech.
The BBC ‘s Director General Tim Davie has made a terrible decision, and put his corporation in the wrong, by suspending Lineker = giving in to Tory Party pressureand showing that politicians dominate the supposedly independent BBC. The BBC news service is supposed to be “objective” …. but why should the BBC muzzle the political opinions of a football commentator?
Lineker is certainly entitled to his opinions about Human Rights, as well as to his opinions about football. When Gary Lineker criticized the human rights record of Qatar during the World Cup, neither the BBC not Tory Party Hacks objected.
HERE IS THE TEXT OF MY LETTER TO THE GUARDIAN newspaper:
11 March 2023 (see the original texts below)
guardian.letters@theguardian.com
I support the well-written article of Mr Jonathan Freedland, and well-tweeted Mr Gary Lineker. The biggest scandal is the fact that BBC Chairman Richard Sharp is sacrificing Lineker on the altar of Tory complaints about Lineker’s private opinions on immigration, in order to save his own job following embarrassing accusations of financial malfeasance and his links to Boris Johnson.
Lineker should stay, and Sharp should go.
Not only does Britain not take a “fair share” of the immigration wave, but neither Freedland nor Lineker mentioned that the United Kingdom is actually responsible for much of the refugee crisis: Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians and Libyans are all fleeing wars in which the UK marched in lock-step with disastrous American and NATO war policies.
And why do many Africans and Asians choose Britain for their exile? Because of the amazing cultural success and commercial dominance of our British Empire. We became wealthy from our exploitation of Africa and Asia …... and thanks to international trade and financial movements, we still continue to do so. We still need these immigrants to fill the 1.2 million British jobs we are unable to fill. An honest government would say exactly that, denounce racism and proudly offer asylum to the that need refuge.
Why do the descendants of recent immigrants – people who include like these Tory ministers Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman, James Cleverly - not stand up and speak this truth? …. and many others are in the same position, including even ancestors of Boris Johnson ….I am ashamed of Great Britain when its leaders behave in this hypocritical manner.
Robin-Edward Poulton PhD
(I am not ashamed to be descended from senior members of the British army and Imperial administration in India and elsewhere …. but perfectly willing to accept the consequences)
Many of the migrants in these boats crossing the English Channel, are people fleeing war or persecution in Africa, just like the Asian fathers of Britain’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who fled East Africa to find refuge in Britain.
THE JONATHAN FREEDLAND ARTICLE:
Gary Lineker spoke his mind. Now we should too: fate could have put any one of us in those migrant boats
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/10/gary-lineker-cruel-tory-policy-boats-migrants
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.
So Lineker erred by making the one comparison that makes this government look less bad than the alternative. In the process, he allowed the culture war machine to crank itself up to full heat, thereby diverting attention from what actually matters. Because every minute we are talking about Lineker is a minute looking away from the actual villain: this cruel and useless government and its reprehensible plan to mistreat refugees.
It’s wrong on every level, except perhaps party politically – with Tory strategists detecting an advantage to be had in “red wall” seats by talking tough on migration. But practically, legally and morally, it is a disgrace.
The proposed new legislation would, in the words of the UN High Commissioner on Refugees, “amount to an asylum ban – extinguishing the right to seek refugee protection in the United Kingdom for those who arrive irregularly, no matter how genuine and compelling their claim may be”. Some might read that sentence and think the obvious solution is for genuine refugees to arrive “regularly”. The trouble is, for most people seeking asylum in the UK no such route exists.
There are schemes for those from Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong. But for a person fleeing from somewhere else, there is no office they can walk into, no form they can fill in. A small boat, or the back of a lorry, might be their only way to safety. Yet the government wants automatically to deny such people the right even to apply for asylum: instead, they will be detained and then deported within 28 days. Where would they be held? Where would they be moved? The government has no answers.
As the UNHCR notes, that’s a “clear breach of the refugee convention”. Written on the face of the bill is Braverman’s admission that the new law may be incompatible with the European convention on human rights. Rather appropriately, it’s called the illegal migration bill: it’s almost certainly illegal. It’s also the second time this government has asked the Commons to pass legislation that it admits is at odds with international law.
The Conservatives’ justification is that the UK faces that supposed “invasion” of would-be migrants and refugees. But besides being grotesque and inhuman language – a dog-whistle that’s been heard by the far right, turning out in force outside places where new arrivals are housed – it’s also wholly false. Numbers from the Migration Observatory show that the UK is, in fact, a laggard when it comes to taking in those in need.
The UK granted asylum to 13,000 people in 2021, a fraction of the 60,000 taken in by Germany and much less than half of those admitted by France. Spain, Italy and Greece all took in more than we did. In other words, this is not some unique challenge faced by Britain. Far from it. Asylum claims went up across the entire EU last year, and globally we are scarcely doing the bare minimum. The biggest refugee populations are in Turkey and Colombia; Germany is home to 2.2 million refugees. In Britain, there are 232,000.
At this point, ministers and their allies insist they’re not trying to keep out genuine refugees, but economic migrants – people who are not fleeing from peril, but rather seeking a better life. Put aside that the new approach will treat both categories of people the same: if you arrive here irregularly, you’ll be shut out of the asylum system, no matter what hell you’ve fled from. Put aside, too, the Refugee Council’s figures showing that two-thirds of those crossing the Channel qualify as refugees – and the fact that plenty of long-established Britons, some of them in the cabinet, are the descendants of people who were economic migrants. Focus instead on those who are described that way now.
Chief among them are Albanians, who have become a ready target for the anti-migrant crowd. They’re easily cast as abusers of British generosity: from somewhere officially deemed a “safe country”, what right do they have to come here? Except more than half of the asylum claims lodged by Albanians are upheld: it turns out they are refugees after all. Most of those are women and children, often the victims of trafficking and exploitation. But young Albanian men, those most easily demonised, are often victims too, whether fleeing violence and blood feuds back home or abducted into a modern form of slavery once here. Consider the case of the trafficked 16-year-old boy who was locked into a cannabis farm in Leeds for three months, before he was freed in a police raid.
Of course, some of those coming here will be acting on the eternal and universal human impulse to move in search of a brighter future. We could follow Braverman’s dream to put them on a plane to Rwanda – or we might note that, at the very moment the government launches this rancid bill, it is “quietly” seeking to bring in more overseas workers to plug a chronic shortage in the labour market, “starting with looser rules for the construction sector,” according to the FT. It can’t be beyond the wit of even this government to see the connection – and come up with a scheme that would open up a regular route for people who could help fill some of the 1.2m UK jobs that remain stubbornly vacant.
We need to see this whole question differently. To realise that migration is a global challenge, like the climate crisis, that will require nations to work together, forging arrangements such as those agreed on Friday by Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron, and each country to do its bit: there’s no escaping it, Britain will have to take in its share of people. To see that those people can be like every cohort of refugees and migrants that has come before it: a huge asset for a country in need of extra hands now, and down the generations. And to remember what exactly it is that these people are fleeing – whether from Iran, where schoolgirls have been targeted by a wave of poisonings credibly suspected to be the work of those in power, from Eritrea, where torture and executions have become routine, or Afghanistan, where the Taliban are once again barring women from the fundamentals of a human life. Above all, to reflect that, but for the lottery of fate, it would not be them on those boats – it would be us.
• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak meets French President Emmanuel Macron and finance minister Bruno Le Maire to discuss improving franco-british relations post-Brexit and collaboration on managing cross-Channel migration. Plenty of French people wonder why France doesn’t simply help migrants to reach the UK if that is where they want to go. France has plenty of immigrants from former French colonies; why should the French have to deal with migrants from former British colonies?
THE BACKSTORY
Gary Lineker has said he will stand his ground after a day of attacks from ministers over tweets he posted earlier this week criticising the government’s asylum policy, and dismissed suggestions he could face suspension from his £1.35m-a-year job at the BBC.
The row began when the former England footballer responded to a video message by the home secretary, Suella Braverman, about stopping people crossing the Channel in small boats. He wrote: “Good heavens, this is beyond awful.”
When challenged by someone on Twitter, he defended his comments, saying: “There is no huge influx. We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. 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, and I’m out of order?”
The prime minister’s press secretary told reporters the remark was “not acceptable”, echoing the views of a number of Conservative MPs.
Following comments he made comparing Home Office immigration policy to Nazi Germany, Lineker tweeted on Wednesday: “Great to see the freedom of speech champions out in force this morning demanding silence from those with whom they disagree.”
He said he had “never known such love and support in my life than I’m getting this morning (England World Cup goals aside, possibly)”, adding: “I want to thank each and every one of you. It means a lot. I’ll continue to try and speak up for those poor souls that have no voice. Cheers all.”
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Suella Braverman is a lawyer whose Indian parents came to UK as economic refugees from Mauritius (her mother) and Kenya (her father. Née Fernandes, she married Rael Braverman who is Jewish.
An ‘invasion’? Suella Braverman, this refugee crisis is of the government’s own making
Enver Solomon
Madeleine Sumption, the director of the Oxford Migration Observatory, said: “This is not an invasion – it’s not an army. But if instead she is referring to the number of people coming, we can compare the figures to other countries and see that the numbers coming in to the UK are relatively manageable.”
Seventeen EU countries received larger numbers of asylum applications per capita last year, according to an analysis of official figures by the OMO. The UK received eight asylum applicants for every 10,000 people across the country in 2020/21, the figures show. This compared with just under 23 for Germany and just under 18 in France. Cyprus received 153 applicants for every 10,000 people in the country, the highest among 32 European countries.