Graham Linehan’s free speech falls foul of the law.
On September 1st, as he landed at Heathrow Airport, Graham Linehan was arrested by not one, not two, but five armed police officers, under suspicion of “inciting violence.” What was the crime that the famed comedy writer, creator of Father Ted and The IT Crowd, had committed? It must have been especially egregious for five police officers to intercept him at Britain’s busiest airport. Perhaps it was smuggling drugs. Or maybe membership of a cell organizing a terror attack.
In reality, it was a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter). The content of these posts was primarily on the topic of transgender people, with the most-cited one suggesting that women should confront transwomen in female-only spaces with statements like “Call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.” Rude? Yes, but that is not illegal (yet). Offensive? Perhaps. Criminal? Therein lies the issue.
The arrest has, somewhat predictably, caused waves across the Atlantic, as well as in the pages of The Atlantic, for being a free speech issue and a “clear indication of state overreach.” Regardless of your stance on free speech, it did seem a little over the top to confront Linehan with five cops.
Not a month ago, Vice President JD Vance warned against the United Kingdom going down “a dark path” of censorship. As the Online Safety Act came into force, enabling “censorship of footage of such protests on major platforms like X, on the basis that the footage could incite harm or encourage violence,” questions have been raised over Britain’s increasing hostility to the free speech necessary for a vibrant civil society to flourish.
Social media really is the flashpoint for this debate in our country. Last year, 30 arrests were made each day in Britain for “offensive online messages,” amounting to just shy of 11,000 throughout the year. Part of the reason is the complex web of laws that have failed to keep pace with the changing nature of digital communication: the Malicious Communications Act (1988), passed in a time when email was a luxury, made it a crime to send a message that is “indecent or grossly offensive” or intended to cause harm.
Crucially, the act of sending the message is the crime. This was entrenched further in the Communications Act (2003), which specified in Section 127 that it is illegal to “send a message that is “grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing.”
On the specific topic of transgenderism, Britain is treading an odd line: in April, the Supreme Court in Britain ruled that the biological definitions of “man” and “woman” are also the legal definitions as outlined in the Equality Act (2010), to which anti-trans (or gender-critical) activists such as Linehan, as well as JK Rowling, Helen Joyce, and Professor Kathleen Stock, celebrated. This is also the reason Linehan posted what he did: by this point, it was legally established that transgender individuals should, for example, use the bathrooms to which their biological sex relates.
But his comments were considered arrestable offenses under the Public Order Act (1986). Ostensibly drafted to deal with riots and affrays in the street; its capacious text includes inciting violence, and “threatening” and “abusive” speech as well. These are of course subjective concepts; and the average onlooker will have noted which chanting rioters don’t get arrested and which controversial social media commenters do.
Free speech has become a dark topic in Britain and, absurdly, a stance on which indicates where on the political spectrum you sit. The quote from Evelyn Beatrice Hall, often misattributed to Voltaire, that “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” is almost always thrown around in this debate, and while the latter half may be hyperbolic, the gist of the message is sound: disagree all you like, but regulating speech is a ratchet that only turns in one direction. That is why we should all be liberal on the issue of free speech, because if we set the precedent of controlling what people say and establish the means to do so, those powers could well be turned against us.
Even Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley criticized the use of law enforcement to police what he termed “toxic culture war debates,” saying officers are stuck “between a rock and a hard place” under existing law. It was welcome that he suggested the police should not be arbitrating matters of speech, but is the defense that the police officers were simply doing as they were told sufficient?
At the root of the matter, Linehan is a comedian. He was making jokes, on a platform famed for its caustic humor, around an issue that was (at least he believed) legally settled. Policing humor and comedians is something we thought we’d done away with in Britain; but if the police are forced to act by our bad laws, then perhaps those laws need fixing. Or better yet, doing away with altogether.
