Not for the first time, the BBC crumbles under pressure from the tories and their supporters - funnily enough, supporters who include the BBC chairman and the BBC director general. And then all the other sports presenters and commentators decide not to support the BBC in their action of taking Lineker off the air. So no MOTD tonight.
I’d note that other BBC presenters seem to be able to make comments on politics outside their BBC job without anyone complaining. (Andrew Neil, for example, is editor of the Spectator, so he’s making political comments every week.) I also note that the chair and DG are not unbiased in this issue, nor unconnected with the government. Further, how delighted are the tories to able to create a distracting furore (which might even be what their illegal immigrant bill was primarily intended to do)?
And there was me thinking that the BBC were left wing and anti British.
Andrew Neil hasn’t worked for the BBC since 2020.
MOTD will still be aired this evening but without the pundits.
Actually, I just read that the beeb has decided to take MOTD off the air this evening. I think that was due to all the other presenters deciding to not cover for Lineker.
According to the BBC website MOTD will still air without the pundits. However, some other sports programmes have been dropped ie. Football Focus, Final Score and Fighting Talk. So, We shall see …
Where did you see your information re: MOTD being dropped completely?
Fair challenge, I read it in scanning a few news channels so I may have misread it. Lets see what happens…
Agree with Starmer - the BBC shouldn’t have caved in to tory demands:
They should probably also update their rules - by not banning talk about humanitarian related topics. Anything hateful, yes, but not when it’s someone trying to speak out against injustices against humanity (particularly the most vulnerable).
Although I didn’t see the original Twitter exchange, I did have to laugh at this Skit between Hugh Bonneville and Jason Watkins - priceless! 
GB News announce ‘alternative’ Match of the Day without any football footage
GB news has announced that they are stepping up to give the people what they “need” and will put on an alternative to BBC’s Match of the Day.
The problem - they don’t own the rights to broadcast match footage.
Mark Dolan reveals the plan in this clip, saying if the BBC will “not serve” its audience then they’re going to try and fill the gap.
“I am Gary Lineker, and to make it really feel like Match of the Day, GB News are going to pay me £1.3 million,” he joked.
If I can stay awake I will watch GB News Alternative. Sounds fun!!
Gary Lineker is always bleating on about something but his brain can’t keep up with his mouth.
Years ago he claimed he received racist abuse because he has a naturally dark skin so people assumed he was black. He always has to jump on whatever band wagon is passing by.
You either have free speech or you don’t. We don’t.
My brain can keep up with my own mouth - but it can’t keep up with Suella Braverman’s mouth! 
I was as shocked and appalled as Gary Lineker was by what came out of Braverman’s mouth when she spoke in the Commons about 100 million asylum seekers then said “Let’s be clear - they are coming here” -
What???!! considering the real numbers of asylum applications are less than 1 million last year, using that figure was deliberate fear-mongering and then she escalated her dog whistle strategy by what she said on Good Morning Britain when she was challenged about it.
It wasn’t just the policy she was presenting - it was the deliberate fear-mongering and unnecessarily inflammatory rhetoric she was using that was so awful - the kind of language and rhetoric we have come to expect from members of thuggish groups like the National Front - totally inappropriate inflammatory language for a senior member of the Government to use - it worries me to think that someone like her is in charge of our home office - god help us all.
Gary certainly wasn’t the only person to react in the words he first tweeted
“ Good heavens, this is beyond awful.”
I was watching her say it at home and I was horrified by the exaggerated rhetoric she used in a ploy to spread enough fear to get people to accept the policy she was unveiling - my thoughts were similar to Gary Lineker only mine were a bit less polite!
Then when I saw she had compounded this exaggeration in a newspaper article she had written
“There are 100 million people displaced around the world, and likely billions more eager to come here if possible.”
She really is laying it on thick, BNP-style.
Good for Gary Lineker for speaking up about it.
You don’t think that’s a lot?
hopefully this might mean less football on tv, thanks Lineker
I think People are worried about the level of asylum seekers we have now, at less than 1 million a year - they will be going into panic mode when the Home Secretary starts announcing there’s about 100 million and “they are coming here” !
Deliberate fear-mongering to panic people into agreeing to whatever policy the government wants to implement.
Thanks to Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages, we got a back-stage view of how Government Ministers and their staff talk about how to present a policy to inject the maximum fear factor when they want the public to support some policy they want to implement - as we have seen, the language they use and the tone they take is carefully calculated to manipulate us.
I was just trying to point out that there are officially 67m people here so 1m more is rather a lot.
My problem with the current situation is this - and this is really happening and not in the headlines :
So there was no need for Braverman to use such exaggerated rhetoric when she launched her policy - The point I was trying to make was that it is irresponsible of a Government Minister to use such scaremongering tactics, as it doesn’t take much nowadays to light the blue touch paper and stir some of these far right thugs into violent clashes with immigrants.
It’s not scaremongering. We have a problem. It’s taken me a long time to realise that there is a problem. But there it is. I’m not far right by the way. I am liberal, but you have to face facts.
Surely, you will agree that telling a population of 67 million that 100 million people “are coming here” is a message that would overwhelm most people if they believed it.
The fact is,100 million people are not “coming here” , the fact is less than 100,000 claimed asylum last year (I think it was about 90,000, which included 45,000 people who arrived in small boats) so why did she try to make it sound like 100 million people are on their way to U.K.?
In my opinion, it was a dishonest and scare-mongering to exaggerate the figures in that way.