How many police officers does it take to arrest one middle-aged sitcom writer? That might sound like a joke – but there’s nothing funny about the answer.
When 57-year-old Graham Linehan, co-creator of the sublime Channel 4 comedy Father Ted, arrived at Heathrow from the US on Monday, armed police were waiting for him… five of them.
He was arrested ‘on suspicion of inciting violence, in relation to posts on X [the social media platform]’, according to a statement from the Metropolitan police.
One of the contentious tweets featured a picture of a trans rights demonstration in London, which Linehan captioned, ‘a photo you can smell’. Another denounced the demonstrators: ‘I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. F*** em.’
The third stated: ‘If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space he is committing a violent, abusive act.’
It went on to advise: ‘Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.’
Graham Linehan was met by five armed police at Heathrow Airport on Monday and arrested ‘on suspicion of inciting violence’
The arrest is part of a disturbing pattern of heavy-handed harassment by police intent on punishing people for refusing to conform to narrow Left-wing ideologies. And the Prime Minister has earned his reputation as ‘Two-Tier Keir’ for exactly this reason
Linehan contends this last comment was meant as humour. You might well feel it’s not very amusing – but you might also feel that it isn’t an incitement to genuine violence.
Either way, it is impossible to understand what impelled senior police officers to send five firearms specialists to make the arrest, as the writer’s flight landed from Arizona. He could not have been regarded as a potential international fugitive or a physical threat, let alone some kind of terrorist.
Yet that is how he was treated… as though he’d posted a bomb warning or tried to smuggle a gun through Customs.
His arrest over a series of facetious posts on social media proves beyond doubt that a significant proportion of the police force in the UK has become radicalised.
What used to be our basic means of ensuring law and order has now become a subdivision of the LGBT rights charity Stonewall. They have made the trans issue their own institutional crusade.
The gender-critical activist Maya Forstater, who co-founded an organisation called Sex Matters, found police on her doorstep in July 2023, following a complaint of alleged ‘transphobia’
The Free Speech Union post on social media after Linehan’s arrest, which was retweeted by JK Rowling. He claims he had to go to a hospital (pictured) because he was so stressed
The Irish comedy writer is the co-creator of the sublime Channel 4 comedy Father Ted
If this arrest was a unique aberration, we might shake our heads in disbelief and move on. But it is part of a disturbing pattern of heavy-handed harassment by police intent on punishing people for refusing to conform to narrow Left-wing ideologies.
The Prime Minister has earned his reputation as ‘Two-Tier Keir’ for exactly this reason. The Government is unashamedly using the police to silence opposition to its social policies, on immigration, on taxes and much else.
The hounding of women’s rights campaigners who oppose trans dogma is the most egregious example. The gender-critical activist Maya Forstater, who co-founded an organisation called Sex Matters, found police on her doorstep in July 2023, following a complaint of alleged ‘transphobia’. The inquiry remained open for 15 months.
At first police refused to reveal why they were investigating her, though Forstater was warned that, if she refused to co-operate, she could be marked as a ‘wanted’ woman and face eventual arrest. Later, she was informed that a complaint had been made about one of her social media posts regarding a transgender GP.
‘It may well be that persons who have seen my tweets are offended or upset, or would prefer that I did not utter them,’ Forstater said. ‘There is no right not to be offended in a democratic society, nor to use the powers of the state to destroy other people’s rights in pursuit of your own political goals.’
The writer Julie Bindel was also visited by police after a complaint about one of her tweets was lodged by a transgender man in Holland.
Two officers visited her last November, at a Sunday lunchtime, and asked her to report to the police station the following day, to explain herself to a senior officer.
Ms Bindel refused. If they wanted her to speak to a senior officer, she said, they should have brought one along. The police retreated, she said, ‘with me haranguing them all the way to the door about the scandalous failure of the British justice system, and the shocking waste of police resources – with two constables sent to investigate a tweet, when complaints of domestic violence are too often ignored until women are murdered by their partners.’
This is a double travesty. When disturbing domestic incidents routinely go unchecked, while tweets are policed so aggressively, this country clearly has its priorities very wrong.
As an angry Linehan said yesterday: ‘To me, this proves one thing beyond doubt: the UK has become a country that is hostile to freedom of speech, hostile to women, and far too accommodating to the demands of violent, entitled, abusive men who have turned the police into their personal goon squad.’
But it is also a shocking waste of limited police resources that could be put to far more urgent use in a country where much crime is now routinely ignored by the authorities, from shoplifting and burglary to drug dealing.
It is indisputable that the ostentatious refusal of police to investigate such crimes does lead directly to an increase in lawlessness.
Whether it’s masked youths on electric bikes delivering packages of cocaine around our suburbs, or gangs swaggering around supermarkets stealing goods by the shelfload, criminals now feel increasingly emboldened by police indifference. Meanwhile, convicted criminals – including potentially paedophiles and rapists – are being released early to relieve overcrowding in our prisons.
Yet all of us are made to feel that we should be very careful about what we say online, or even in private, for fear of committing a ‘non-crime hate incident’. That nebulous wording is all the more ominous for being a self-contradiction: if it’s not a crime, why is it worth investigating?
As books such as Franz Kafka’s The Trial and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four have chillingly taught us, it’s a short step from guarding what we say out loud, to self-censoring our own thoughts. The overt aim of the police is to discourage us from free thought, as well as free speech.
This applies much more widely than to trans issues alone. The journalist Allison Pearson was visited early one Sunday morning last November by an officer who claimed to be, ‘investigating an incident or offence of potentially inciting racial hatred online’.
In fact, her provocation had been to tweet a photo of two police officers posing for a photo next to two men with a flag in the colours of the Pakistani political party Tehreek-e-Insaf. Mistakenly believing the picture was taken at a pro-Gaza protest, she captioned it: ‘Look at this lot smiling with the Jew haters.’ Ms Pearson later deleted the post when her error was pointed out.
When Ms Pearson refused to attend a voluntary interview, the case was closed, though Sussex Police noted spitefully: ‘We do not take the view that a crime did not take place, rather that there was no realistic prospect of conviction based on the evidence available.’
So where did the crime occur? Inside her mind?
Small wonder that last month the US State Department raised concerns about the erosion of free speech in Britain. UK citizens, it warned, face ‘serious restrictions on freedom of expression’.
To be schooled in the basics of free speech by Donald Trump’s White House is deeply embarrassing for this country, the birthplace of free speech. But as the arrest of Graham Linehan illustrates, embarrassment is the least of our problems.
- Professor Frank Furedi is the Director of the think-tank MCC Brussels
