Many will remember celebrity outlaw Ronnie Biggs landing at Gatwick Airport in May 2001 and being immediately arrested. Having participated in the Great Train Robbery of 1963, in which £2.6 million was stolen and the driver badly beaten, he subsequently escaped prison and lived for decades as an international fugitive. Most would agree that this arrest, however dramatic, was more than justified.
But you might struggle to make the same case for Graham Linehan, the comedy writer most famous for Father Ted. Yet there he was, apprehended by five armed police officers after landing at Heathrow Airport on Tuesday, as though he were a gangster of the most feral kind. His crime? Posting a handful of tweets that caused some offence.
As for those tweets: on 19 April, he posted an image of a transactivist protest in London along with the caption “a photo you can smell”. When challenged by a user for the “unnecessary comment”, he replied: “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. Fuck em.” The third was posted on 20 April, and in it Graham wrote: “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.”
Those of us accustomed to the churn and clatter of social media have become adept at explaining the obvious to the congenitally literal-minded. And so, with infinite patience, Graham outlined the thinking behind this comment on his Substack, saying that it “was about the height difference between men and women, the bollocks being closer to punch level for a woman defending her rights and certainly not a call to violence”. In any case, as the lawyer Sarah Phillimore pointed out, there is nothing illegal about tweeting advice that any father would have said to their daughters about how to handle a men encroaching on their personal space. “If you want to arrest my dad for this,” she writes, “he’s in a jar on the dresser.”
For Graham, this is only the latest act in an ongoing circus of persecution: one with multiple ringmasters. He was first contacted by the police back in October 2018, when he was given a verbal warning for “deadnaming” and “misgendering” trans activist Stephanie Hayden. A later police visit was prompted by a complaint about Graham’s tweets by Adrian Harrop, a doctor whose license to practise medicine was temporarily suspended for “insulting” online conduct. “This was the visit that really shocked my wife and frightened her”, Graham told me. “It’s one of the main reasons we broke up”.
There has, over the years, been a concerted effort by trans activists to weaponise the police against their victims, aided by the ideological capture of law enforcement. Consider the different standards at play here. It is now commonplace for trans activists to threaten violence and rape against their adversaries, and yet police rarely investigate. After two SNP politicians were photographed at a trans rally in Glasgow in front of “decapitate TERFS” placard, complete with guillotine, no arrests were made. Compare this with the routine hounding of feminists by police simply for expressing their gender-critical views. Perhaps the police might wish to refresh their memory about the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on sex in the Equality Act, and its implications for the rights of women and gay people.
The misuse of police powers has been bad enough, but it has been accompanied by Graham’s broader cancellation by the very industry that once feted him. Unable to make a living in television since 2018 — due to his vocal opposition to gender ideology and the threat it poses to women’s rights — he had no choice but to relocate to Arizona where he has been working on a sitcom for Friendly Fire Studios, with me and a new company we have established with actor and comedian Rob Schneider and writer and producer Martin Gourlay. A full draft of the series has already been written and, if we can successfully put it into production, it will be the sharpest riposte to those activists who have tried to ensure that Graham never writes again.
The farce of Graham’s arrest at Heathrow has already garnered worldwide attention. J.K. Rowling has described it as “totalitarianism”. Joyce Carol Oates has cited it as proof that “the UK is, or has become, an authoritarian government”. Perhaps sensing that the UK is fast becoming an international laughing stock, even Keir Starmer has weighed in, his spokesperson making clear that the police should be focusing on issues that “matter most to their communities”. Given his party’s appalling track record on free speech, this is almost as funny as a line from Father Ted.
But as absurd as it sounds, the arrest of a comedy writer at an airport is by no means the most egregious example of state overreach in recent years. 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. Freedom of Information requests by The Times revealed that over 12,000 people are arrested each year for offensive comments posted online, and an estimated quarter of a million of us have been logged by police as perpetrators of “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHIs), mostly without being informed.
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.
Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 proscribe the sending of material that is deemed “grossly offensive”: a hopelessly subjective notion. The Communications Act further prohibits words that cause “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”. If every person who posted such messages on social media were convicted tomorrow, the prison population would exceed the number of law-abiding citizens. Either way, these laws are clearly both draconian and incoherent.
Moreover, the very concept of “protected characteristics” makes a nonsense of the principle of equality before the law. Few would object to protections against discrimination on the basis of immutable qualities in the workplace. but there is no sound reason to create differential tiers of law enforcement. In all “hate crime” guidance, “perception of the victim” is the determining factor, as a 2019 report from the Home Office made clear. No actual evidence is required for someone to be recorded as a hate criminal.
Finally, we should introduce sensible laws on “incitement to violence”. The Lucy Connolly case has drawn international attention to the folly of our present laws, in which a nasty but hastily deleted tweet by someone with no influence whatsoever resulted in a 31-month prison sentence. The US standard, known as the “Brandenburg Test”, offers a model of best practice. It makes clear that the speech in question must be deliberately aimed at inciting violence, likely to do so, and that any impact should be imminent. If the UK had an equivalent on the statute books, police would no longer be wasting so much time and money on offensive tweets and memes.
There can no longer be any doubt that free speech is under life-support in Britain, and to keep ignoring the sheer weight of evidence is a labour of perversely Herculean proportions. Many commentators are claiming that the arrest of Graham Linehan could be a tipping point, but this will only be true if the public’s rising frustration can be directed into action. It has been grotesque to witness the state’s ongoing harassment of an acclaimed comedy writer, but perhaps one consolation is that it might finally jolt Westminster out of its complacency.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe