Gary Lineker is stepping back from presenting Match of the Day over a row over the BBC's impartiality terms, the broadcaster confirmed on Friday.
Lineker has come under fire for comparing the language used by the government in their asylum plans to 'that used by Germany in the 30s' in a tweet on Tuesday. The former England striker said the policy set out by Home Secretary Suella Braverman was 'beyond awful'.
In a reply to someone else responding, he then said: “There is no huge influx. We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?”
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Lineker has stood by his tweet in the following days amid calls from members of government that the BBC speak to him about their impartiality.
A spokesperson for the broadcaster said on Wednesday that it is having a 'frank conversation' with Lineker, and a brief statement has confirmed he will be stepping back from presenting Match of the Day.
The statement said: "When it comes to leading our football and sports coverage, Gary is second to none.
"We have never said that Gary should be an opinion free zone, or that he can't have a view on issues that matter to him, but we have said that he should keep well away from taking sides on party political issues or political controversies."
Braverman insisted that Lineker's comment 'diminishes the unspeakable tragedy' of the Holocaust, calling the comparison between her language and that of Nazi Germany 'lazy and unhelpful'.
“I think it is, from a personal point of view, to hear that characterisation is offensive because – as you said – my husband is Jewish, my children are therefore directly descendant from people who were murdered in gas chambers during the Holocaust,” she told 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.”
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