Celebrities Won’t Save Us

And they won’t end deadly asylum policies

Photo by DESIGNECOLOGIST on Unsplash

I know I’m swimming against the tide with this one, but I found it hard to celebrate Gary Lineker’s latest foray into high politics earlier this month.

For those living outside the UK and scratching your heads: Lineker is an English footballer (soccer player) who played professionally in the seventies and eighties before becoming a sports journalist. For the past 25 years he’s presented the popular programme Match of the Day on British public television (the BBC).

Given the cultish obsession with football in England, Lineker, like Match of the Day, is a household name, even in homes where no match has ever lit up the small screen.

Two weeks ago, Lineker made the front pages for what some deemed an act of admirable courage but was, for others, a show of poor sportsmanship: a comment on Twitter that compared Conservative policy on refugees to Nazi propaganda. The context was the announcement of a new law to “stop the boats”, aimed at preventing asylum seekers from reaching English shores from France via the Channel. Lineker described it as “an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s”.

Lineker’s tweet went viral and a flurry of controversy ensued. Objections to comparisons with Nazism competed with cries for freedom of speech. The BBC briefly suspended Lineker on the grounds that he had compromised the public broadcaster’s impartiality guidelines (though, as others were keen to point out, a number of BBC journalists have made controversial political comments without being censured and censored). Following much objection, including a show of solidarity from fellow sports presenters, Lineker was reinstated.

I agree with Lineker about the government’s asylum policy. While I’m wary of comparisons to Nazism, which are often facile and ahistorical, the proposed law on asylum undeniably presents people seeking asylum as “others”. It paints those people as criminals (the words “illegal” or “illegally” appear twice as often in the proposed law as “asylum”) and stresses the imminent dangers they pose to people in Britain, promising to “detain and swiftly remove” anyone arriving on boats without legal documents.

The law basically echoes the language used by members of the current government to describe the supposed threat posed by “illegal immigration”. The Home Secretary Suella Braverman recently claimed that as many as 100 million asylum seekers around the world could attempt to come to the UK by boat (a number the Refugee Council argue is grossly exaggerated) and has defended the “stop the boats” policy as necessary to prevent “waves of illegal migrants breaching our border” and protect the “law-abiding patriotic majority”.

So Lineker, like many in the UK and abroad, is appalled by our government’s aggression towards refugees and has used his public profile to voice objection. That’s admirable enough. What’s less cause for celebration is how quickly, following reactions to Lineker’s tweet, media attention shifted away from the asylum policy and the risks it poses to the lives of people seeking asylum to Lineker’s career and his act of heroism. One commentator captured the tone of the ensuing media storm when he implied that Lineker is uniquely brave for “inject[ing] morality into our shaming debate on migrants” – another overstatement in a discussion generally characterised by hyperbole.

“Speaking out” against an unjust asylum policy can be an act of solidarity. But in a world where celebrities and influencers constantly compete for fandom by making newsworthy statements on social media, there’s a risk of fetishising the act of speaking out, as if those with the loudest voices were the only ones with the power to effect change.

The most important voices in any discussion about asylum are the voices of the people seeking asylum. Yet one recent survey of reporting on the “migrant crisis” in UK newspapers across a broad political spectrum found that a common feature was a failure to represent the stories of asylum seekers themselves:

refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants are often only present within news coverage as a statistic … [they are] rarely presented as full and complex humans – with jobs, education, histories and families. Indeed, asylum seekers rarely appear within news stories at all.

The article goes on to argue:

[C]hoosing authority sources, and failing to give asylum seekers a voice dehumanises and marginalises those at the centre of the story and privileges politicians and public officials and their narrative. This … may reinforce a narrative that portrays asylum seekers as an economic or security risk. The use of civil society voices such as NGOs may seem more sympathetic to an asylum cause, but again by choosing an NGO rather than refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants to speak, denies them the ability to tell their own stories.

One of the main criticisms of contemporary discourse on asylum and migration – especially that coming from right-wing politicians, tabloids and commentators – is precisely that it dehumanises those people (this, by implication, was also the gist of Lineker’s comparison to the Third Reich). Yet, as the above study states, the failure of media outlets generally to seek out and publish the stories of those seeking asylum also contributes to this process of dehumanisation.

Speaking out against government policy might sound heroic. But when the speakers are members of the elite, this act risks amplifying the words of those who already have a strong public voice at the expense of those with little or no access to the media, including people seeking asylum. Celebrities would be better off using their influence to make space for the stories of those who are least heard in narratives around asylum – and most affected by asylum policy.

Pen in Fist is written by me, C Lou Hamilton, aka Dr Carrie. To find out more about my activism, follow me on twitter. You can access my other writing, and information on my editing and translating work, on my website. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Pen in Fist for free here.