Africa Today News, New York can confirm that a former England team captain, Gary Lineker has been temporarily eased off from his role as presenter of the BBC’s flagship football highlights Match of the Day show against the backdrop of his criticism of the UK government’s new policy towards asylum seekers.
The removal of Lineker from the show by BBC – a national institution in the UK that has been airing since the 1960s – marks an extraordinary development and was followed by an outpouring of public support for Lineker and a slew of his colleagues announcing they would not appear on the show without him.
Africa Today News, New York reports that trouble started on Tuesday when Linker twitter to his 8.7 million followers, Lineker – one of England’s greatest football players and now among the UK’s most influential media figures – said the language used by members of the UK government towards asylum seekers was similar to that used in Nazi Germany.
‘The BBC has decided that he will step back from presenting ‘Match of the Day,’ the BBC said late on Friday, ‘until we’ve got an agreed and clear position on his use of social media’.
‘We have never said that Gary should be an opinion-free zone, or that he can’t have a view on issues that matter to him, but we have said that he should keep well away from taking sides on party political issues or political controversies,’ the BBC said.
Conservative Party members of parliament had called on the BBC to discipline Lineker after he tweeted that the government’s plan to detain and deport asylum seekers arriving by boat was ‘an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s’.
‘There is no huge influx. We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries,’ he wrote.
The government called Lineker’s Nazi comparison inappropriate and unacceptable while some members of parliament said he should be fired.
Meanwhile, Lineker has yet to make an official comment on his temporary dismissal, though one of his former BBC colleagues – Dan Walker – said he had been in contact with Lineker and asked him “whether he is stepping back or whether the BBC have told him to step back”.