“Just how bad is the state of free speech in England?” an American podcaster asked me at the end of August. Not great, I said, but nothing like as cataclysmic as some U.S. commentators claim. I mean, we’re hardly North Korea.

I spoke too soon. Two days later, the Irish scriptwriter Graham Linehan was met at Heathrow Airport by five armed police, taken to a cell, and held for 19 hours. His offense? Three posts on X in which, in admittedly strong language, he told trans activists what he thought of them.

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“When did Britain become North Korea?” was the front page of the next day’s Daily Mail, the United Kingdom’s bestselling newspaper. The following day, Nigel Farage made the same analogy in front of a congressional committee.

They have a point. Armed police are a big deal in Great Britain, generally deployed only when there is a terrorist threat. Yet here were five officers dragging a middle-aged comedian to a cell for getting on the wrong side of men who claim to be women.

How did things get so bad in the land of Magna Carta? Under what law was Linehan detained? Or, come to that, Lucy Connolly, who posted incendiary remarks at the time of some anti-immigration rioting last year and actually went to prison for over 12 months?

This is where it gets interesting. Successive Labour governments have passed laws that subordinate free speech to the sensitivities, real or imagined, of minority groups. The Blair government put hate crimes on the statute book, laying down harsher sentences for offenses that were deemed racist. The current Labour administration then passed the Online Safety Act, imposing heavy fines against platforms that do not impose stringent age verification procedures.

These, though, were not the laws under which Linehan was detained nor Connolly jailed. They were accused of breaching the 1986 Public Order Act, a Thatcher-era statute aimed at preventing incitement.

Most countries, including the United States, punish incitement. But incitement has traditionally been understood to mean deliberately provoking a crime. In 1969, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction of a man called Clarence Brandenburg, who had organized a Ku Klux Klan rally in Ohio at which he demanded “revengeance” against black and Jewish Americans.

The judges decided that, whatever animus Brandenburg had against these groups, there was no realistic chance that his listeners were going to be moved by his words to commit a specific felony. Saying “Let’s go and torch that synagogue in Cleveland Heights,” counts as incitement. An inchoate threat of “revengeance” against Jews does not.

That, to my mind, is a sensible distinction and, in general, the British criminal justice system tries to apply it. A couple of months back, an Irish republican rap musician was filmed onstage telling his audience: “The only good Tory is a dead Tory! Kill your local MP!” No one was moved to plant a bomb in the House of Commons, and he was not charged. A different rap singer used the stage at Glastonbury to lead a chant of “Death, death to the IDF!” Again, it seemed unlikely that any of the stoned festivalgoers would catch the next flight to Ben Gurion Airport and attack a soldier, and no prosecution ensued.

Then again, neither Tory MPs nor IDF soldiers are treated as groups with protected characteristics. In almost every case of police heavy-handedness, the abuse has been directed against black people, Muslims, immigrants (the Connolly case), or transgender people (the Linehan case). What seems to be happening is that the British police, some of whom are a touch slow-witted, have gotten it into their heads that simply to cause offense to certain categories of person is a crime.

In other words, it is not the law that has changed but its interpretation. For the first three decades of its existence, the 1986 Public Order Act was applied narrowly and strictly. Only much more recently have we seen it wielded against the expression of opinions. In the Linehan case, even the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, complained that the police should have had other priorities.

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In short, free speech is in decline in the U.K., not because its politicians have passed laws against it, but because its standing government machine, including judges and ambitious police chiefs, spent too many hours doing diversity training.

One of President Donald Trump’s achievements has been to send a signal, not just to federal agencies but to universities, charities, and corporations, that the Great Awokening is over. In Britain, by contrast, the state machine hums along, heedless of the wishes of the people at the controls.