The Symptom

Demosthenes has a fine TCW piece on what the Lineker silliness says about the BBC.


Lineker is a symptom, the BBC is the disease

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.


Familiar stuff but worth reading because the BBC mess tells us something important - reform can become impossible.


All talk of reform is absurd; you’d as well try to reform a boa constrictor into adopting a vegan diet. There’s no way to dismantle the extensive Marxist scaffolding that goes to the foundations of the BBC without tearing down the whole rotten edifice.