It’s taken a brave football star to inject morality into our shaming debate on migrants | Will Hutton
The Conservative party and its media outriders have overreached themselves in the Lineker affair. The stop the boats" policy, which flouts democratic, legal and humanitarian standards to reach new heights of cruelty in our proposed treatment of asylum seekers, is not just another political controversy. It goes to the heart of what kind of country we are and how policy should be conducted in a democracy. Authoritarian regimes everywhere progress by breaching one convention as a launchpad for breaching the next until, finally, they land their prize of subordinating human rights to their partisan and untrammelled will. But human rights are indivisible; one breach leaves the rest diminished and weakened.
No less fundamental in a democracy are the rules of engagement in the public square. Debate, however passionate, must respect facts. While our broadcast media are regulated to serve that end, upheld by a system of public service broadcasting of which the BBC is the anchor, our newspapers are not. Newspapers, particularly of the right, have increasingly been edited not as journals but as propagandists of rightwing ideology in which facts are subordinate, serving profoundly political ends. The callous extremes of the stop the boats" scheme could not have been conceived, nor the extravagant language used to defend it, without the poisonous climate they created. They are necessarily ardent critics of the BBC, even stricken and enfeebled as it is, because it stands in the way of how they want to frame political and cultural argument - part of the march towards the unconstrained exercise of executive privilege, the attacks on human rights and the diminution of our democracy.
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