Football is hard to ignore. Whether you enter into its world as a fan, or as a parent - keen to take advantage of its architecture to socialise a child. Or maybe as a critical bystander, only tempted to watch for 90 mins when your country could be a world beater. Love it or loathe it, football dominates the back pages of every newspaper, and every now and then, takes over the front pages too.

Because it reaches parts of the population others cannot reach, football is often used as a lens through which to address wider socio-political-economic issues. Through football we can talk about gender more broadly but also masculinity specifically; about race; about well-being and a performance culture; about capitalism, local and global; about behaviour, including addiction; about physical and mental health; about field dynamics and relational strategy; about localism / nationalism / Europeanism / interationalism and so much more.

Manchester United’s Marcus Rashford championing free school meals for every child that needs it, is well-known; Arsenal FC offering computer classes to newly arrived immigrant mothers, less so.

Marcus Rashford scores for free school meals

All this attention is generated by the intrinsic attraction of the sport itself - a drama of high energy, super-skills and the prospect of winning over an opposition in an infinite game that might see you lose to the same team a week later. But football also offers belonging, friendship, humour - it's a home and a pretext for communication to many people, especially men, who might otherwise be alienated from sociability.

Was it an own goal?

When Gary Lineker first tweeted out his comment on the dangers of political language, our fear was that he had scored an own goal. And much of what immediately followed - censure and suspension by his BBC employers - would back up that thought.

It's not 'safe' to reference the 1930s as similar to anything - because nothing compares to the Holocaust. Unless you are specifically referring to what was happening at that time with respect to pogroms, you risk relativising an unrepeatable event. Early in the day’s news cycle, we anticipated that pressures on the BBC - not just from the government - would result in Lineker being forced to step down. And that would be a sorry waste, on so many fronts.

However, by the end of the day, we were beginning to see this differently. Partly because the BBC itself is in such an evolutionary state.

When Lineker is being reprimanded by his employer, is it a BBC on the corrective - forbidding partiality? Or is it a BBC on the defensive - petrified of being de-funded altogether by a government on the warpath? It's hard to know what is at stake for freedom of speech when the BBC has become an instrument of the right wing state, accused by governing ministers for the past ten years of being too progressive.

BBC in evolution

This is not new. As much as 25 years ago, the BBC was being called into question by an organisation known as Conflict and Peace Forums and later developed by The Freedom Forum in London. The topic of a three day event August 25-29 1997, on Peace Journalism drew in speakers like Nick Pollard, Head of Sky News, Maggie O'Kane senior journalist on the Guardian, Sebastian Cody, Editor of After Dark on C4, Mark Brayne, European Editor at BBC World Service and Chief Creative Officer at the BBC, Patrick Younge.

The central question at the time (see recent editorial) was: when journalists claim to "just report the facts", where do the facts come from? Stepping up to the Kosovo war at the time, the BBC was revealed as ignoring the political-economic structures that made war inevitable. Peace journalism had to be named, as a response to the 'war journalism' that was not being acknowledged.

However, without a glamorous spokesperson sharing insights in real-time (many of us still had numbers as email addresses in that period, let alone a Twitter account) the conference had little impact in the UK (although peace journalism is now taught in over ten countries, often at university level).

So when Gary Lineker used a tool of public deliberation available to us today - Twitter - he could be forgiven for underestimating the likely BBC response. Who knew whether they would be on the offensive or defensive. In this era of ducking and diving, BBC News online often takes one perspective in the headline, but shares alternatives on related pages.

On the other hand, he could have been carefully hoping for exactly this response. As an employee of one of the largest public UK institutions, the very vehicle of British identity globally, he would know that his words have agency. It has the energy of an intervention - a re-frame of British values.

Voice of football and fairness

But more than that - if that is imaginable - it was from his position as prime pundit of the Premier League. Whether he claims it or not, he has the 'voice of football' as one of his vectors of influence. People from every class and origin tune in to his performance on Match of the Day every week, expecting to hear his 'reasonable and informed' assessment of a sport that engages their emotions more than any other event in the week. He's an authority on who is climbing and who is falling. And, in an era of VAR, professional dives and global ownership of clubs distorting outcomes, millions hear him out on what is fair and what is not.

Like few before him, Lineker sees his responsibility to 'the people' of Britain and steps up to the plate. In taking on the government at this time he is using the two most powerful instruments of British soft power - the BBC and the Premier League - to tell a different story about British values and British people. He is challenging head on what it means to be 'on the side of the people', knowing that will be heard not only by football fans all over the world, but by football fans in this country too. The people, he holds, are not on the side of cruelty to refugees arriving by boat to the UK.

Gary's intervention comes at a time when many fear we are on a slippery slope towards the kind of right-wing remaking of British law that makes us vulnerable to fascism (see AG Co-initiator's Pat Kane's column here). Lineker deliberately places the emphasis on language for a reason: metaphors and imagery were primary, visceral tools of fascist governments in the past. They were the means by which political operators could deliberately trigger emotions and create extreme divides in the minds of the people, obliging them to take sides against an imagined other.

Use of language

In The March On Rome, a timely and deeply evocative film about the rise of fascist dictator Mussolini in Italy released this past week, director and narrator Mark Cousins describes how language and image are used to entrance the general public. By falsifying film footage of relatively small crowds of disaffected people, giving the impression of an unstoppable force marching for freedom from an imagined foe, Mussolini was able to take power from a centrist government with amazing ease. He then used his position to glorify violence (unnecessary wars) and intimidate the vulnerable (including women) in the name of national virility.

A core source of Mussolini’s 'method' was the book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind by Gustave Le Bon, which identifies the human propensity to be swayed by others when in close proximity, or part of an overly defined group mind-set. It also describes the kind of language that can control crowds and cause them to follow the leader. Others who read that book, Cousins notes, include Hitler, Franco and Freud. More recently, Trump and Bolsonaro reference Mussolini: Trump followers' march on the Capital Hill looks eerily familiar.

Sport of course thrives on competing tribes, even generating extreme divides (check local derbies such as Liverpool v Everton or Celtic v Rangers). Undoubtedly, some fans go to a match to experience exactly the possibility of not only winning, but of humiliating the other side. If you stand in a football crowd, it's hard to resist joining in the taunting chants of your home team.

However there are rules to the game, off pitch and on, which everyone respects and abides by. Moreover, there are innumerable media outlets that cover the whole scene and champion the characteristics of the whole culture of football, rather than just one team. Parents take their children because it can be joyous and educational; when non-sporting social tragedy occurs (as it did in Manchester United, Liverpool and Leicester City everyone shares in the grief. It is exactly in this potential cauldron of emotion, that a voice like Gary Lineker's is so important.

How to use your privilege

He's not the first. When Gareth Southgate backed the 'taking of the knee' as a stand against racism for the England team, he was also challenged as being partial. But Southgate didn't back off: if anything, he escalated the political relevance of that action and elevated football to the very context within which social change can and must happen. In so doing he - and Lineker - are saying that every crowd is made up of individual, intelligent human beings, capable of thoughtful compassion for the vulnerable. As white men of privilege, they are modelling how to use their power to make way for others.

No doubt the government, currently claiming Gary's suspension has nothing to do with them (while stepping in nevertheless), will continue with the myth of 'we have no choice’, around the issue of migration. Their characterisation of refugees (despite agreeing they are victims of traffickers) as 'hordes' of 'invaders', attributing maleficence to their very helplessness, will go unchecked. Whipping up fear in the public space allows these politicians to pose as saviours: courageous for pulling up the drawbridge that some of them crossed only one generation ago.

But there is a choice. Even in Italy's far-right government of today, the emphasis is on helping refugees arriving on boats and targeting the traffickers. More widely across our own British polity, there are better, wiser and more compassionate responses - including from the Scottish national parliament. More and more people are considering our responsibility to those whose countries are suffering from the ongoing effects of colonialism and our punitive debt programmes. Or more recently, we’re starting to grasp how our relentless growth economy has destroyed the habitats of the global South, forcing so many into a nomad existence that might end up in a boat heading our way.

Meantime, let's thank Gary Lineker for calling out the language that wants to infantilise us, to rob us of our agency (and empathy) in the face of our global crises. Let’s celebrate the evidence that in the world of football - so often underestimated as a scene for social transformation - it was easy for Lineker’s colleagues to stand by him and signal compassion first. And in so doing, make a stronger claim about British values that ultimately, will benefit everyone.

Alternative Editorial: Who Speaks For The People?