If anyone ever demonstrated the essential vacuity of loudmouth celebrities and the wisdom of staying in your lane, it’s Peter Garrett. Garrett made a career out of shouting fashionable political slogans. Then he made the mistake of getting parachuted into a safe Labor seat and having to put his millions where his colossal gob was.
It was an hilariously embarrassing failure. Handed his pet portfolio of Environment on a silver platter, Garrett stuffed it up in truly spectacular fashion. Even worse, the champion of the common man oversaw a dodgy home insulation scheme that claimed the lives of three apprentices. (In most recent news, Mr “Give It Back” has conspicuously not done so, instead buying up a swanky swathe of “stolen land” in the country.)
But if you thought that would be a cautionary tale for loudmouth celebrities, you’ve obviously not reckoned with what dim bulbs most of them really are. Especially sports people. Instead of learning to shut their damn yaps and take their millions, they’ve only honked and hooted their idiotic “opinions” even louder.
Cue, Gary Lineker.
When “taking the knee” became as briefly fashionable in sport as doing coke and bashing their partners, multisquillionaire Lineker was clearly desperate to get a toehold on the Victim Totem Pole. So, this whitebread ethnic Englishman tried, ludicrously, to claim that he’d been the victim of racism from the other Brit kids, as a boy. Is it cos he woz black?
He trivialised the very real evil of racism a while back when, in an interview with Jake Humphrey, he pretty much claimed to be non-white, saying that as a youngster he had endured ‘pretty much racist abuse… without being good at sport, life would have been very different for me… I think I would have been bullied at school, I was kind of marginally that way anyway because I was this tiny geeky kid, with darkish skin and I had pretty much racist abuse although I’m not, I’m as English as they come.’
Of course, if a man can be a woman at will, then Gary can certainly be black but with this statement – so hideously insulting to actual victims of racism – his preposterousness was established once and for all.
How could he possibly top that?
Now he’s said something equally offensive, claiming that the language used about stopping economic migration to this country is in some way equivalent to ‘Germany in the 30s’. Yes, it’s our old friend ‘Everyone I don’t like is literally Hitler’, last used this offensively when India Knight wrote of being born in Brussels in a post-Brexit Britain ‘I now have a letter from the Home Office that I carry about on my phone, in case I need to show it to someone, like a Jew in late 1930s Berlin.’
For all his “literally Hitler” witterings, Lineker has quite the form when it comes to the modern-day eructation of fashionable anti-Semitism.
Lineker is a long-time Israel-basher – he has tweeted about arrests in the West Bank and lamented the killing of a Palestinian man who was later revealed to be a member of Hamas – which makes these comparisons even more revolting than they otherwise might be.
But Lineker is not only blind to his own fashionable bigotry, he’s box-of-rocks ignorant about the actual history he’s dim-wittedly trying to appropriate.
The Jews so viciously persecuted in 1930s Germany were citizens of that country – not migrants without documentation coming from a safe country. When you bring up Nazism in a discussion about immigration, you are – even unwittingly – continuing to spread the lie that the Jews of Europe had no right to be there. And not only is saying ‘They’re just like the Nazis’ about anyone who isn’t literally committing genocide a vile affront to everyone who suffered or died at the hands of the actual Nazis, as a rhetorical flourish it carries about as much weight as ‘I know you are but what am I?’
When you bring up Nazism in a discussion about immigration, you are – even unwittingly – continuing to spread the lie that the Jews of Europe had no right to be there.
Then there is the basic and outrageously offensive stupidity of arguing that the most basic role of a nation-state — to secure its own borders — is akin to the systematic genocide of millions.
Are we really acting like stormtroopers if we enquire if it’s absolutely necessary for Albanians to relocate to Surrey? At one point last year, four out of ten illegal immigrants rocking up on the beaches of Kent were from a democracy where there has not been a war in 25 years. Are we really behaving like the Waffen SS if we ask when thousands of young men from the Middle East – many raised in cultures where un-shrouded women are regarded as scum – arrive in British cities, what their attitudes to women are? Even disregarding the effects mass immigration has on a host community, what about the harm to the migrants themselves? The English Channel is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world; dissuading small boats from crossing it is a moral obligation.
For all his public preening and posturing, though, Lineker is notably reluctant to put the tens of millions he’s trousered hawking junk food where his colossal gob is.
But telling the proles to play nicely and share the state’s ever-dwindling resources from your cushy billet at the BBC (on a salary of £1.35 million, Lineker is the corporation’s highest-paid employee) was never going to be a good look and now Saint Gaz has been sent for an early bath by his BBC paymasters: ‘The BBC has decided that he will step back from presenting Match of the Day until we’ve got an agreed and clear position on his use of social media’ […]
Never mind – maybe the BBC could draft in some actual football fans, people who understand that it doesn’t make one a fascist to believe that endless immigration can sometimes be bad for Britons who don’t live in gated communities, don’t have extensive private health cover and whose kiddies don’t attend private schools.
The Spectator
As if. The left-elite will give up their taxpayer-funded bully pulpit shortly after they welcome the immigrants they champion into their gated communities.