It sounds like the sort of thing that happens in shady, autocratic third-world regimes. A man returning home from a trip to the US, gets through passport control to find five police officers waiting for him. His alleged crime? A few jokes on social media. Send him straight the gulag!
I’ve known the comedian Graham Linehan for a while. Similar to my unlikely friendships with Rosie Duffield and JK Rowling, we have found common cause in fighting for the rights of women and girls.
Graham has been a brilliant warrior in the war on gender ideology from the outset and he’s taken awful abuse for it.
I am familiar with these bullying tactics and I know exactly what it is like to be attacked for defending women’s single-sex spaces.
But Graham’s arrest should serve as a warning to everyone who values freedom in Britain. The values of free speech are being slowly eroded by people weaponising the law and using it for petty squabbling. Five police officers should not be sent to silence a comedian for saying what most people believe, no matter who is complaining.
The whole episode raises serious questions. What does it say about our country that someone can be flagged as they fly home from the US, not for terrorism, trafficking or fraud, but for expressing opinions online?
Why are our limited policing resources being used to hunt down comedians, while child grooming gangs are left to operate for decades without serious intervention?
Why are burglary victims routinely told police can’t attend because of limited resources, yet five officers can be dispatched to arrest a man who dares to say what everyone else thinks – that men can’t become women, and do not belong in women’s spaces?
Graham Linehan has been a brilliant warrior in the war on gender ideology from the outset and he’s taken awful abuse for it, writes Kemi Badenoch
The truth is that Labour are happy for this insane situation to continue. They nod along as speech is policed, as the law is twisted beyond recognition, as the police are turned into social media referees instead of crime-fighters.
The Conservatives tried to scrap Non-Crime Hate Incidents this spring. Labour MPs voted against it. They might now remonstrate against Linehan’s arrest, but they preside over the atmosphere of intolerance that got him arrested in the first place.
Reform are just as bad. Only a few weeks ago, when challenged on the issue of putting men in women’s prisons, Nigel Farage said it was about ‘risk assessment’.
This is the very issue Graham was campaigning on, and which provoked the police overreaction. Reform are comfortable employing advisers who would put men in women’s prisons.
Labour indulge this ideology, Reform enable it. Only the Conservatives will stop it.
As I have said before, if the law is allowing the police to do this, the law must be changed.
In Government, the Conservatives deferred too much to police leadership, enabling them to engage in destructive identity politics when they should have been fighting crime.
That is why I am setting out bold new Conservative policies to put this right and to put the police back on the side of the public. We will ensure the Public Order Act is fit for purpose in today’s world, which is vastly different from when it was introduced in 1986. We will make sure that people cannot be arrested simply for saying what everyone knows to be true.
We will scrap Non-Hate Crime Incidents and ensure the police prioritise actual policing rather than politics – making it clear that officers should be hunting burglars, fraudsters and grooming gangs, not comedians at passport control.
And we would hold police leaders to account, forcing them to justify when resources are wasted on political stunts instead of crime. Freedom is not a gift from the state. It is our birthright. Generations fought for it before us, and we will not let it be chipped away by bad laws, weak politicians and overzealous police chiefs.
Britain should never be a country where speaking plain truths and making jokes, even offensive ones, makes you a criminal.
It should never be a country where grooming gangs are protected by silence, while comedians are hunted for tweets.
That is upside-down justice and it corrodes trust in the institutions meant to serve us.
The test of any government is whether it will defend the people who play by the rules, or whether it will indulge the bullies and the bureaucrats.
Labour and Reform have chosen the latter. Conservatives will choose the former.
