The BBC’s highest paid pundit has compared new measures aimed at enforcing Britain’s borders to the actions of Nazi Germany.
Gary Lineker, one of the BBC’s main soccer pundits and a former player of the sport has attacked the country’s government for its latest attempt at securing Britain’s borders, comparing it to measures imposed by Nazi Germany.
Announced on Tuesday, the new scheme puts a legal duty on the country’s Home Secretary to see illegal migrants detained and removed from Britain, with those being deported back home or to an agreed third-party country — such as Rwanda — to be banned from ever returning to the UK.
The new measures have been billed by the government as the final cure to the country’s ongoing boat migrant crisis, though many progressive pundits, NGOs and international organisations are extremely upset that the UK would consider actually enforcing its own borders.
One of these individuals is former footballer Linker, who took to Twitter to describe the measures as “truly awful”, even comparing the measures to those implemented by Germany under Hitler.
“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,” The Telegraph reports him as writing in a now-deleted tweet.
The BBC has now reportedly “spoken to” the pundit, who is paid £1.35 million per year from the publicly-funded broadcaster, about the tweet.
The criticism is far from being out of character for Lineker, who is used to spouting his progressive hot takes on the internet.
Lineker found himself in hot water only late last year after he appeared to defend human rights-abusing Qatar for hosting the world cup, saying that the competition’s next host, the USA, as being “extraordinarily racist“.
“And we’re off to America in four years’ time, with Canada and Mexico, but obviously America’s an extraordinarily racist country,” he said, comparing the U.S. to Islamist Qatar. “So, there’s always issues but it was more the fact that we just pointed out a few facts.”
Although he received a certain degree of backlash for this comment, Lineker’s latest stunt of comparing the UK to Nazi Germany appears to have crossed a line for many, with a number of pundits now demanding that he be fired from his publicly-funded post at the BBC.
“Andrew Bridgen got sacked for making WW2 references as an MP. So should Gary Lineker as a taxpayer-funded BBC pundit!” arch-Brexiteer Nigel Farage asked.
Even the UK’s Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has waded into the row, saying that she is “disappointed” by the comments about the new measures, which she insists are “lawful, proportionate and compassionate”.
“It’s plain for anyone to see that the British people have had enough of this situation of thousands of people coming here illegally at huge cost to the taxpayer and undermining our laws, and, in fact, British generosity,” she said, insisting that the Conservative Party administration were “on the side of the British people” with the new measures.
Hardline leftists in the country however are up in arms, with one Labour MP, Khalid Mahmood, saying that the measures would increase “xenophobia and racism” in the country.