Home Secretary plays the ‘Holocaust’ card in migrant row

Home Secretary Suella Braverman has played the ‘Holocaust card’ in defending her immigration policies.

Home Secretary Suella Braverman has been the first to play the victim card in an ongoing row with the BBC over the UK government’s immigration policy.

Speaking to Nick Robinson’s podcast Political Thinking this morning, Braverman (who is herself a Buddhist of Goanese ancestry) said that she had been “personally offended” by the comments of Gary Lineker, the former England footballer who has been presenter of Match of the Day for more than twenty years.

Braverman added:
“My husband is Jewish, my children are therefore directly descendant from people who were murdered in gas chambers during the Holocaust. And my husband’s family is very – feels very – keenly the impact of the Holocaust, actually.”

Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker

Lineker, one of the highest-paid broadcasters in Britain, has repeatedly expressed politically-correct views on Twitter and recently criticised the government’s immigration policies. Replying to an opponent this week, Lineker tweeted:
“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?”

Predictably the row has degenerated into both sides playing the ‘nazi’ card, and Braverman clearly feels that her tangential connection to the ‘Holocaust’ gives her some advantage in the victim stakes.

Lineker’s comments were stupid and should be criticised for their foolishness, not because they might offend someone married to a Jew.

The underlying point of course is that St Gary is another symptom of the crude political correctness that can be expected from the football industry after several decades of relentless ‘anti-racist’ indoctrination.

Ron Atkinson – former manager of West Brom, Manchester United, Atletico Madrid, and Aston Villa – is among several well-known broadcasters whose careers were swfitly ended because of politically incorrect comments (in Atkinson’s case made in private).

In earlier generations, ‘racism’ when expressed by people within football was inevitably crudified, and so is ‘anti-racism’. No big deal either way, and not grounds for sacking – provided that (within reason) football commentators are also allowed to express anti-immigration sentiments. Provided it is not obligatory to kneel in memory of black criminal George Floyd, and provided it is permissible for BBC broadcasters to assert that White Lives Matter, none of us should be too worried about Lineker and his ilk expressing their opinions.

The problem is that only one side of the political fence is considered acceptable.

Perhaps the case should be put to Mr Lineker in those terms, and that would I think silence him rather more effectively than attempts at straightforward censorship!

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