Graham Linehan is an Irish comedy writer and co-creator of the popular British sitcoms Father Ted and The IT Crowd. He was forced to leave home when some of his strongly worded tweets against transgender ideology led the entertainment industry to blackball him.
Linehan ended up in Arizona, working on a new sitcom for Friendly Fire Studios with comedian Rob Schneider. He flew back to the UK on business and, after landing at Heathrow Airport, was promptly arrested by five beefy British bobbies.
Linehan had run afoul of the authoritarian British laws against "hate speech." He was told he was being arrested for three tweets from earlier this year, criticizing transgender ideology.
Matt Margolis wrote about the surreal arrest on Tuesday. “When I first saw the cops, I actually laughed. I couldn’t help myself. ‘Don’t tell me! You’ve been sent by trans activists.'” Linehan wasn't far off in that ridiculous assertion.
Radical ideologies have captured the police in Great Britain. It's not only trans ideology; the British police are also arresting people for anti-Islamic speech and anti-gay posts on social media.
According to information gleaned from a Freedom of Information request by the Times of London, there have been more than 12,000 arrests for offensive comments posted online, while an incredible 250,000 people's personal information has been logged by police "as perpetrators of “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHIs), mostly without being informed," according to Andrew Doyle, writing in UnHerd.
"We have seen journalists visited by police for wrongthink; citizens imprisoned for posting memes; prosecutions for controversial Halloween costumes; teenagers convicted and jailed for offensive jokes," writes Doyle. What's worse is that there has been very little pushback among the political class.
Free speech is dying in Great Britain because the people in power who are in the best position to defend it are sitting on their hands.
In spite of all this, there has been no serious effort among the political class to actually change things. There have been occasional overtures: the shadow Home Secretary, Chris Philp, has called for the abolition of NCHIs, while previous Home Secretaries have explicitly instructed the College of Policing to end the practice. But all have been ignored. The Court of Appeal has ruled that NCHIs are “plainly an interference with freedom of expression”. Yet nothing has changed, because the activists deeply embedded in the system believe they know best.
There is, though, plenty that our elective representatives could do to address Britain’s totalitarian spiral, if only they could grow a spine. For starters, Parliament should abolish the College of Policing; its activist influence, long apparent, has led to inconsistent and arguably unlawful behaviour by officers trained to believe that it is their job to audit the speech and emotions of the public they serve.
Parliament should further abolish all “hate speech” legislation. Given that no two governments can agree on a definition of “hate”, these nebulous laws are routinely exploited to chill free speech. Section 18 of the Public Order Act 1986 explicitly outlaws ‘“threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour” if it is intended “to stir up racial hatred”. Quite apart from the liberal principle that the state should not be attempting to intuit our private motivations, the charge of “racism” is so often misapplied that the law is effectively rendered useless.
A small ray of hope appeared on Wednesday when the head of the Metropolitan Police ("Met") called on the government to "change or clarify" the law on hate speech.
Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley defended the officers involved but recognized "concern caused by such incidents given differing perspectives on the balance between free speech and the risks of inciting violence in the real world."
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Even Britain's Wokester-in-Chief, Labour Party Prime Minister Keir Starmer, got nervous when he saw his country becoming a world laughingstock. During question time, he told parliament that the police must "focus on the most serious issues " and deal with issues that “matter most to their communities.”
Sir Mark said his officers "had reasonable grounds to believe an offence had been committed," but that police more broadly had "been left between a rock and a hard place" when investigating online speech.
He continued: "I don't believe we should be policing toxic culture wars debates and officers are currently in an impossible position."
Sir Mark said police will have to "make similar decisions in future unless the law and guidance is changed or clarified".
He said he hopes this happens "without delay", but said the Met would be taking immediate action to update how it decides which cases warrant a police investigation.
Sir Mark said: "As an immediate way of protecting our officers from the situation we find ourselves in today, we will be putting in place a more stringent triaging process to make sure only the most serious cases are taken forward in future – where there is a clear risk of harm or disorder."
"The police, supposed guardians of the law, have become players in the activists’ capture of the institutions," writes The Spectator's Stephen Pollard. The key is the redefinition of criminality to encompass what used to be perfectly legal in a free society.
"Increasingly, giving offense is being taken by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service as prima facie evidence of criminality," Pollard writes.
The elites in Great Britain can't escape the fallout from Linehan's arrest on what anyone who respects free speech would say are specious grounds. The passage of these "hate crime" laws and applying them so broadly to transgender activists' ideas of being given "offense" may have finally roused some notion of pushback by some of the elites who stood by and watched as radicals hijacked the sacred idea of free speech and twisted it to serve their own agenda.
There is no law in America against giving offense — yet. But we came perilously close to such policing during the Biden years. If "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," are we still willing to pay it?
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