Eyes on the real story folks

 

CAPTION: Happening here soon - again. Members of a group of Jewish refugees from Czechoslovakia are marched away by police at Croydon airport on 31 March 1939. The refugees were detained at the police station because their documents were not in order. They were put on a flight to Warsaw but threatened to jump out of the window if the plane took off. The pilot refused to fly, so they were deported the following day.

THE BBC is once again providing succour to the Government, and I don’t mean by temporarily removing Gary Lineker from his role as presenter’s of Match of the Day.

While most are vociferously defending what Lineker said - and of course it should be defended - they are not talking about the actual Illegal Migration Bill which caused the furore. Most are too busy tweeting in solidarity with Lineker and now Ian Wright and Alan Shearer who have also refused to appear on MOTD, and condemning the BBC, with only a few voices still focused on this horrendous bill.

Lineker’s co-presenters have not refused to appear because of their concern for refugees. They are acting in solidarity with their co-presenter and friend. Their beef is only that they believe he was treated unfairly. And he was. But let’s not pretend that these people are suddenly our allies. Lineker is in this, but almost by accident. Would he have tweeted what he did had he known the consequences? We will never know. But he did, and the BBC reacted with their usual bias.  They haven't ever given any of their other presenters a slap on the wrist for their obvious partisanship. Jeremy Clarkson called for striking workers to be shot and remained on air! They didn’t rush out to prevent Lineker from appearing when he tweeted, just before a GE, to “Bin Corbyn”. Of course Jeremy Corbyn, always graceful, was one of the first to defend Lineker and has continued to do so, saying on LBC that he should be reinstated.

Unlike the Labour Party whose MPs were saying just two days ago how wrong Lineker was to tweet what he did but who have since U-turned – as they do so often – and are now saying how wrong the BBC is. They might yet rival Theresa May in U-turns and they’re not even in government!

The bill:

 

In what the UN says is a “clear breach of the refugee convention” this bill will allow the government to criminalise, detain and deport asylum seekers. If a refugee or migrant attempts to enter the country by crossing the channel, they will incur a lifetime ban from claiming asylum in the UK. 

The bill will impose an annual cap, decided by parliament, on the number of people who can claim asylum via safe routes. The UNHCR described it thus: “The legislation, if passed, would amount to an asylum ban – extinguishing the right to seek refugee protection in the United Kingdom for those who arrive irregularly, no matter how genuine and compelling their claim may be.”

It will also place constraints on the right of asylum seekers to appeal decisions in court, the Government obviously learning from its Rwanda plan where it has faced legal difficulties. So in all likelihood we could see an increase in deportations. And we can’t expect Labour to come out in opposition to these deportations given Starmer and co have been saying people were not being processed and deported quickly enough.

So has it come down to a footballer to do the opposition’s work for them? Almost. Caroline Lucas wrote a very good article condemning Suella Braverman and the bill in the Metro on Wednesday, where she said “This is baseless ‘them and us’ rhetoric - it’s disgusting and divisive, and it should play no role in political discussion” and most importantly “one of the most effective ways to stop people risking their lives in the Channel is to set up comprehensive safe and legal routes now”. And Bell Ribeiro-Addy tabled a cross-party reasoned amendment to “throw out the Tories’ latest assault on refugees” which Lucas and decent backbench Labour MPs co-signed.

Lineker had tweeted: "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 most of us can see that he is quite right. We are indeed already well on the road travelled by the Nazis and we desperately need to come to a screeching halt.