The Daily Mail’s attack on Gary Lineker should scare anyone who cares about free speech It may have passed you by, but Britain’s most powerful newspaper is engaged in a nasty little spat with the […]

It may have passed you by, but Britain’s most powerful newspaper is engaged in a nasty little spat with the presenter of Match of the Day.

On one level, it’s a minor domestic that amounts to very little. Why should we care that the Daily Mail appears to have it in for Gary Lineker? But on another level, it reveals a deeply worrying trend in public discourse that the bitter divisions over Brexit and Donald Trump have greatly exacerbated, and which, if unchecked, could threaten the very concept of freedom of speech.

Political tweets

To recap, Lineker has used his Twitter account – he has 5.6million followers – to make a number of political points in recent months. In between his lament for Leicester City’s descent of the Premier League and his plugs for Match of the Day are various expressions of support for refugees and opposition to Mr Trump.

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Lineker never shirked from getting in where the boots are flying, and he isn’t of a mind to back down now

Back last October, he said that he thought the treatment of child refugees arriving in Britain was racist. “What is happening to our country?” he tweeted.

And since America chose its new president, he has given voice to his disenchantment. “America appears to have gone completely insane, with lunatics running the asylum,” read one of his recent tweets. Nothing with which to take issue here, you may say.

Even if you don’t agree with his views, Lineker, as a citizen of the world, is entitled to his opinion, and Twitter is the medium for the pithy apercu.

‘Holier Than Thou Hypocrite’

On Thursday this week, the Daily Mail devoted two pages to an ad hominem attack on Lineker, calling him in the headline a “Holier Than Thou Hypocrite”. There appeared to be very little in the way of a news angle for the piece, which was presented as an investigation into Lineker’s tax affairs, but the paper didn’t hide their distaste for his views on Brexit, Trump, Nigel Farage and the French far right (the precise opposite of theirs).

“Barely a day passes without him giving us the benefit of his oh-so right-on views,” said the Mail.

Maybe the real reason for the Mail’s offensive can be found buried in parentheses near the end of the piece. It says Lineker is “prone to using lawyers to muzzle coverage of his colourful love life”. As it so happens, a legal suit is pending between Lineker and the Mail over a diary story some months ago which asserted that the former footballer behaved inappropriately with his ex-wife on an aeroplane.

I pay my taxes and I speak up

Despite warnings from his friends not to take on such a powerful opponent over a relatively minor allegation, Lineker decided to sue for libel. You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to believe that the Mail may be getting their retaliation in first. Throughout a football career which saw him score 48 goals for England (the third highest of all time), Lineker never shirked from getting in where the boots are flying, and he isn’t of a mind to back down now.

“This intolerance will stop people from speaking their mind for fear of the heavy artillery of the forces of conservatism”

Following the Mail’s piece, he tweeted: “I have always paid my taxes on time and in full”. He added that he would continue to “speak up for refugees and immigrants and British values of tolerance and free speech”, and that he wouldn’t be “bullied” by the Mail. His Twitter feed is full of supportive messages, which will not surprise the Mail. The paper referred to Twitter as “the smug echo chamber of wooly liberalism”. Really? I have found it precisely the opposite.

The name-calling is one thing. There is a substantive issue at stake here. The binary nature of the EU referendum, and the divisions exposed by the American election, have given rise to a much greater intolerance and intemperance in public exchanges, creating an atmosphere in which those who dare to oppose the new political realities are shouted down. This, in turn, will stop people, whether famous or not, from speaking their mind for fear of finding the heavy artillery of the forces of conservatism being trained on them.

The Daily Mail’s campaign against Gary Lineker is nowhere near the most egregious example of this latent nastiness. Extremist language is increasingly used in the mainstream. Right wingers who have applauded the rise of Trump, defending his more outrageous statements by invoking his rights to say what he likes, are uninterested in engaging in nuanced argument. Those who oppose them are regarded, to borrow a famous Daily Mail phrase, as enemies of the people.

For everyone who prizes tolerance, balance and freedom of speech, these are dangerous times indeed.