16.03.2023
Victory for pundits’ union
The BBC’s brief ‘free speech’ war with Gary Lineker shows up its own institutional weakness - and the strange moral situation of football itself - argues Paul Demarty
From one angle, last weekend was a very ordinary one for the Premier League. Three of the top four sides won their matches. Even the ‘surprise’ results were not that surprising (Liverpool capitulating to rock-bottom Bournemouth is, alas for this unashamedly biased writer, all too typical of the season so far).
Business as usual then, but for one minor thing - those who tuned into Match of the Day, the BBC’s venerable Saturday evening highlights package, will have seen a very odd broadcast indeed - no studio banter, no commentary - just edited highlights, presented as is, and lasting just 20 minutes. What a strange, ghostly experience it was - almost reminiscent of those mid-pandemic match days, where the stands were empty, albeit with supporters replaced sometimes with laughably malfunctioning fake crowd noise.
There was no virus to blame for this situation, of course. Most readers will no doubt be familiar with the story in outline, given the total domination of the front pages by this scandal over the last few days. But let us recap: on March 7, Gary Lineker - ex-footballer of some renown, and long-time MoTD host - called the government’s ‘stop the boats’ policy “beyond awful” in a tweet, and later defended himself from Tory repliers by making the point in rather stronger terms: “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?”1
Bias
That was certainly the opinion of various government ministers, who insisted the comparison was way over the top and grossly offensive. They also questioned whether this was a violation of the BBC’s ‘impartiality rules’. By March 10, the problem seemed to have been resolved: BBC Sport had dealt with it internally, and presumably Lineker got a slap on the wrist and was told to get on with his job. That was not good enough, however, for unknown senior executives, and the message came back: Lineker was to be suspended from presenting duties immediately.
This caused complete chaos. His most frequent co-presenters, fellow ex-strikers Ian Wright and Alan Shearer, immediately announced that they would not be available for Saturday’s broadcast; then most of the rest of the MoTD pundit rotation; then the presenters of various other BBC sports TV and radio programming; and the commentators; and so it went on. There is the old cliché about the ‘goalkeeper’s union’, where goalies and ex-goalies tend to defend each other against accusations that the keeper is at fault for conceding some goal. Well, it seems there is a pundit’s union, and its all-out wildcat strike rapidly brought the BBC executives to the negotiating table. Lineker was back in post early on March 13.
This raises questions most directly about the BBC, and the true character of its relationship to the government. No reader of this paper can be so naive as to believe the Beeb to be truly impartial, of course; but ‘impartiality’ is nonetheless an important ideological component of the BBC’s raison d’être. When BBC apologists and spokespeople refer piously to the corporation’s ‘impartiality’, they dishonestly describe the corporation’s biases; when politicians invoke it in their complaints, as Suella Braverman and her colleagues did relentlessly last week, they seek to shift, rather than eradicate, those biases.
We have argued before that the BBC is, in fact, biased towards the party of the state.2 Tendentially Tory, but not exclusively so, this ‘party’ is informally composed of mandarins, diplomats, spooks, officers and others in public life whose job resolves to that of Sir Humphrey - to prevent the government of the day from doing too much damage. When that government gets too high on its own supply, and launches some sort of war against sections of the administrative state - as clearly happened, for a period, in the Boris Johnson administration - friction with the BBC can result. (Arguably the last major crisis of government-Beeb relations was over the death of David Kelly, the ‘dodgy dossier’, and so on; and so it is worth noting that the Iraq war was a matter of contention within the state apparatus.)
There is an important additional matter which has tended to breed Beeb-bashing among Tories specifically, which is the Tories’ dependence for legitimacy on the yellow press. If you are editor of the Daily Mail or The Sun, the BBC is not only a hotbed of ‘liberal woke madness’ or whatever: it is a competitor. That is certainly the historic attitude of Rupert Murdoch and his minions, and we may assume the Harmsworths are on the same page. The successive adoption by different sectors of the ‘party of the state’ of bureaucratic, ‘official’ anti-racism, anti-sexism and so on gives the rightwing media a wedge to use against the BBC, which inevitably reflects this change.
Here lies one explanation for the ‘Garygate’ fiasco. The scandal has drawn attention to the historic Tory activism of director-general Tim Davie, who even stood as a council candidate in the 1990s. Chairman Richard Sharp has had his own scandals dragged back into the spotlight: not only did Sharp, Rishi Sunak’s old boss at Goldman Sachs, donate £400,000 to the Tories: he introduced Boris Johnson to someone who could arrange him an £800,000 loan, and just three weeks later was appointed chair of the BBC. It all looks a little cosy. Both promised to address the problem of ‘impartiality’ - in effect, to bend the stick of bias towards the Tories.
In order to do so, they advanced a new version of the BBC’s guidelines on the issue. These had always encoded a bright line between people fronting the corporation’s news coverage from those involved in sport, entertainment and so on. But now there was an additional clause enjoining extra scrutiny on “others who are not journalists or involved in factual programming, who nevertheless have an additional responsibility to the BBC because of their profile on the BBC”. Staffers nicknamed this “the Lineker clause”, since Lineker had repeatedly butted heads with the government over Brexit. (As a run-of-the-mill liberal, he had also inveighed against Jeremy Corbyn.) We do not yet know who from ‘upstairs’ overruled the decision of the BBC’s sport department to let Lineker off, or what pressure they were under from whom, but it is easy to imagine back channels through Sharp and Davie carrying the instruction that this was quite enough.
On this view, the government succeeded in suborning the BBC hierarchy. It seems eminently plausible, yet it highlights deeper issues. If it has now been suborned, it must have always - in principle - been subornable. Fear of a confrontation with government must always have factored into senior decision-making at the Beeb, especially after the Blair government inflicted such punishment after the David Kelly affair. Its ever increasing timidity must be placed in this context.
The BBC’s defeat by its own pundits this week tends to suggest that they are in an impossible bind, regardless of the particular political opinions of the top people at any time. Had they let Lineker off in the first place, they would never have heard the end of it from the rightwing press, which merely wants it reduced to an empty shell of its old self. They took the other option, and suddenly the jewel in the crown of their sports coverage ceased to exist. What is a director-general - even one who is not flagrantly an agent of the Conservative Party - to do?
It is not clear, as I write, whether Sharp and Davie will survive; but, if they do not, the government will replace Sharp, and Sharp’s replacement will replace Davie. We will be back to square one, especially if the government plays against type and produces a more plausibly ‘neutral’ candidate, who will inevitably find themselves in a similar bind in due course.
Strip-mined
Slowly, the corporation is being strip-mined. Its local journalists are on strike this week over extensive cuts to output in the regions. The high-minded Reithian displays are also under the axe, with the planned shuttering of the BBC Singers choir and a 20% pay cut for its orchestral performers. MoTD survives to fight another day - but, of course, its long-term future is dependent on the perceived interests of the Premier League itself, which sells off the rights periodically.
The pathetic ease with which the pundits’ union saw off the hierarchy reflects the symbolic importance of the show, which is almost the last remaining vestige of the BBC’s once considerable sport coverage, besides ‘listed’ events like the World Cup and certain finals in various sports (whose rights must be sold to free terrestrial broadcasters), and the snooker world championship. Losing it could well tip the wider corporation into terminal decline, at least in the form we know it.
It is, of course, odd that such a moral crisis should stem from elite football, of all things. We are not long past the World Cup, held in winter to accommodate the obviously corrupt victory of Qatar in the competition to host it. The same Gulf nation looks set to snaffle up Manchester United soon.
The government white paper on the future of football, though it contains a number of modest reforms, makes no mention of state-backed clubs whatsoever, and is set to confirm the course of financialisation largely inaugurated by the foundation of the Premier League three decades ago. Lineker’s nose is relatively clean (if we discount the Walkers crisps tie-ins), but many of the prominent figures who came out in his support are easily painted as hypocrites - this one having ‘shilled’ for bookmakers, that for some state sportswashing jolly. Football has never looked so extravagantly corrupt as it does today.
Yet it retains a mystical hold over the British psyche. Having moved back to my home town recently, I was surprised to discover how many distant acquaintances are still regulars at home games of the big local team (although this is a good year for them, admittedly). Even the elite of the elite retain, among their fans, a sense of ownership wholly incommensurate with the economic reality of the situation. I have not been able to clearly compare this phenomenon with the fans of American sports teams, who are likewise quite zealous, but who have been for far longer subject to the real subsumption to big-money sport. Do they likewise feel that the various general managers and CEOs are mere custodians of something that will long outlast whatever grubby compromises are made?
Hypocrisy, so the saying goes, is the tribute vice pays to virtue. Such is perhaps the common problem of the BBC and English football alike. ‘Impartiality’ is bogus, but its persistence in the BBC’s self-image testifies to the sense that a media organisation which produces - among other things - great music, great sports coverage and great dramatic programming could be part of the national patrimony. Football is ever in need of its popular reach to justify the extraordinary cynicism of its parasitic administrators.
The two unstable phenomena briefly united, in the pictures of Leicester fans lining up for their selfies with Lineker, when he showed up for the home game on March 11; those images will outlast any of the match itself. There is a glimpse of a BBC shorn of its allegiance to the party of the state, which may increasingly see it as surplus to requirements; and of a sport governed by fans rather than vast amounts of cash and vacuous glitz.
To get there, of course, we need more than gestures. The BBC promises a review of its regulations, which will presumably close any remaining loopholes in the ‘Lineker clause’. There have been calls to take the appointment of BBC chair out of the hands of the government; but who then will appoint the appointers? No serious reform of football, meanwhile, is possible without political coordination across borders, and so none shall be forthcoming.
The bourgeoisie and bourgeois state have proven incompetent custodians of both these institutions of mass culture.
paul.demarty@weeklyworker.co.uk
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‘The party organ of the state’ Weekly Worker September 26 2019: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1268/the-party-organ-of-the-state.↩︎