After publicly criticising the government’s asylum policy, embroiling the BBC in an impartiality row and fomenting widespread disruption to sports programming, Gary Lineker has said it was ‘“factually accurate” to call the plans “cruel”.
Weeks after the Match of the Day presenter was suspended for criticising government immigration policy, the former England footballer has said he stands by his remarks, in an interview with Men’s Health UK magazine.
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.” He later tweeted: “This is just an immeasurably cruel policy.”
Referring to the tweet, in which he also likened the home secretary’s language to that of 1930s Germany, Lineker said: “I think that is factually accurate.” The BBC’s highest-paid presenter said he wasn’t prepared to back down on language he felt was “fair and true”.
Lineker told the magazine: “I talked about the use of words like ‘invasion’ and ‘swarms’ and ‘criminals’ and ‘rapists’, which I think we should be very careful about because it has real-life consequences.” He added that he has worked with refugee charities for years.
“I wasn’t abusive, I wasn’t saying she [Braverman] was a Nazi,” he said.
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