Overreach doesn’t cover it. Five police officers, all carrying guns, swooping on a 57-year-old comedy writer over his salty social media messages supporting women’s rights. Despite his outraged protests he was bundled into a cell and interrogated. And this is England, Great Britain. Not some tinpot dictatorship or autocracy. A democracy built over centuries on the values of free speech. What price free speech now?
Father Ted scriptwriter Graham Linehan has long campaigned online against transgender women using women-only spaces. He was arrested at Heathrow by five armed Metropolitan Police officers as he returned to Britain, and accused of “inciting violence” in relation to three posts he made on X (formerly Twitter) while living in the US.
One of the messages read: “If a trans-identified male is in a female only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”
Linehan insists that that last exhortation was a joke; not meant to be taken literally. It certainly doesn’t make me smile; I think it’s borderline offensive and certainly ill-judged. But that’s free speech, isn’t it? We’re free to be… well, borderline offensive and ill-judged.
But the cause of this man’s arrest, incarceration and questioning? Really? The backlash wasn’t long coming. Harry Potter author JK Rowling: “What the **** has the UK become? This is totalitarianism. Utterly deplorable.”
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch: “Sending five officers to arrest a man for a tweet isn’t policing, it’s politics. Under Labour we see burglary, knife-crime and assaults go unsolved, while resources are wasted on thought-policing.”
Lord Young, director of the Free Speech Union: “I don’t think there is a better illustration of how low we’ve sunk when it comes to free speech… if this was a scene for a sitcom about the descent of Starmer’s Britain into an authoritarian banana republic, the editor would reject it as too implausible.” So – not even a case of life imitating art, then. Welcome to the Theatre of the Absurd.