It’s taken a brave football star to inject morality into our shaming debate on migrants | Will Hutton

The Conservative party and its media outriders have overreached themselves in the Lineker affair. The “stop the boats” policy, which flouts democratic, legal and humanitarian standards to reach new heights of cruelty in our proposed treatment of asylum seekers, is not just another political controversy. It goes to the heart of what kind of country we are and how policy should be conducted in a democracy. Authoritarian regimes everywhere…