It would be easy to conclude that if you want to have an influence on British political life you have to be a name in top-level football.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Manchester United striker Marcus Rashford succeeded where many politicians had failed in getting free school meals to disadvantaged children. In the past fortnight, the England women’s football team, the ‘Lionesses’, have used the leverage from their 2022 Euros title-winning run to secure over £600 million in government funding to give girls the same opportunities in sport that boys currently enjoy. And over the past few days, the former England striker Gary Lineker has been the focus of opposition to the controversial proposals by Rishi Sunak’s government to severely curtail the right of asylum in the UK (although the story of Lineker’s future as presenter of the BBC’s football highlights programme Match of the Day is threatening to overshadow his opposition to the asylum policy).

If suggesting that footballers are more influential than politicians seems a flippant remark, it’s not. We may well have reached the point where ‘celebrities’ (however you define them) have more clout than politicians, in which case their comments have to be taken more seriously than just to dismiss them as celebrity fluff – they become part of the checks and balances of a democratic society. And when Lineker talks about something of which he has direct experience – he has taken refugees into his own home – his comments come with added gravitas.

It’s important to note what he’s actually said, as some of the more hysterical reporting of it might lead you to think he’s accused the British government of sending people to gas chambers. Having described the policy as “beyond awful” in an initial reaction on his personal Twitter feed, he said in a second tweet that the proposed new UK asylum policy was “an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s.” Note the important nuance that the reference to Germany in the 1930s was about the language, not the policy.

I must declare an interest here. My father’s side of my family came from Germany and were thrown out for being Jewish. My father came to Britain as a Kindertransport refugee, my grandfather spent 12 days in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and great aunts and great uncles perished in other camps.

As a result, I have spent a lot of time mulling over what made an otherwise civilised country (Germany spawned Beethoven, Dürer, Goethe, numerous philosophers, and many proponents of civilised thinking) slip into 12 years of appalling madness. One of my conclusions is that good people failed to speak out when unacceptable practices started becoming mainstream, and by the time they did it was too late. That’s why my gut instinct is to applaud Lineker for having the courage to call out a quite awful asylum policy, which may well be illegal under international human rights treaties. Many references to Nazi Germany are gratuitous; this one isn’t.

That still leaves the question of whether Lineker breached the BBC’s code on impartiality. I can see legitimate arguments for both yes and no, although the waters are muddied by the fact that the BBC is horrendously inconsistent on this: both the director-general and the chair are political appointments who have strong links to the Conservative party, and numerous contributors to the BBC’s news output make party-political comments outside their BBC work (Lineker contributes only to sport on the BBC).

But if celebrity comments are now part of political discourse, if free speech is to mean anything, and if Lineker has not breached his requirement to remain impartial in his BBC work (which he clearly hasn’t), why has the BBC suspended him? It reeks of political interference by the government, and with so many pundits and commentators supporting Lineker, the BBC has painted itself into a corner that it can only come out of if it stands up to the government, saying it will not be cowed into silencing a presenter’s right to free expression outside BBC work. The BBC’s statement announcing Lineker’s suspension said “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.” But aren’t most opinions potentially political? Is Lineker’s right to an opinion to be limited to whether he wants red or blue icing on his birthday cake?

Interestingly, media reports suggest the British public is split down the middle on the Lineker issue, and I suspect that split is directly linked to the position people held on immigration before Lineker posted his tweet. That in itself suggests a dangerous entrenchment of positions that allows no place for nuance, which in turn backs up Lineker’s point that we are using the language of an era where only uncompromisingly extreme positions had any traction in public debate.

There’s one other factor that links the three football influencers: they all have international experience. Rashford has played for Manchester United and England abroad, the Lionesses have done the same and won an international nations tournament, and Lineker has lived in Spain and Japan while playing for clubs in those countries. All three have more international experience than the average Briton. Maybe there’s a lesson there about a broader perspective, which Sunak’s asylum bill is doing nothing to promote.

* Chris Bowers is a two-term district councillor and four-time parliamentary candidate. He writes on cross-party cooperation and in 2021 was the lead author of the New Liberal Manifesto.