You may or may not be interested in his football punditry or his favourite crisps, but Gary Lineker has been in the headlines recently because he posted a tweet suggesting that the rhetoric of the present Conservative government and the Illegal Migration Bill they are seeking to bring into law is “an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s”. I can’t track down the original tweet but my research suggests it was not an out of the blue statement but one that came to a follow-up to his comment on a video posted by Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, where Lineker said “Good heavens, this is beyond awful.” To be fair, having a Home Secretary go on record as saying “Enough is enough. We must stop the boats” deserves a comment like that. The Conservative party, who have now been in government for over a decade, are very good at spilling such bile but apparently less effective at dealing with things they allegedly will not tolerate.

Afterwards, Braverman said (on the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast) “To kind of throw out those kind of flippant analogies diminishes the unspeakable tragedy that millions of people went through and I don’t think anything that is happening in the UK today can come close to what happened in the Holocaust. So I find it a lazy and unhelpful comparison to make.” Excuse me, Ms Braverman. I think you’ll find that the Holocaust happened in the 1940s and Mr Lineker was referring to the period in which such evil grew before spewing forth it’s ‘fruit’. Oh for a senior Conservative politician who has a grasp of either historical chronology or the consequence of dehumanizing rhetoric (not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 1930s).

I’ve already written to my MP, using the starting point provided on the Safe Passage website. One of my friends has already emailed Jane Hunt directly and has had a response suggesting that she has no more sense of conscience and justice in this area than Braverman demonstrates. Still, the more people who express their view, the harder it is for them to justify their illusion that the majority of people in the UK really think such nonsense. Hopefully the Illegal Migration Bill (aptly named because, in terms of international law, it is indeed illegal) is the thing that will sink without trace and our politicians can find a few brain cells to devote to the matter of how we can provide safe passage for those fleeing homelands under real threat of harm because of their background and beliefs.