FOR supporters of free speech, the week got off to a bad start when comedy writer Graham Linehan was arrested at Heathrow by five armed police officers.
He was kept in a cell for 12 hours and only released when his blood pressure became so high he had to be rushed to Accident and Emergency.
Graham Linehan was arrested at Heathrow by five armed police officers for anti-trans tweets[/caption]
Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said: ‘I don’t believe we should be policing toxic culture wars debates . . . officers are currently in an impossible position’[/caption]
Had he threatened to blow up a plane? Plotted to steal the Crown Jewels? Been found with indecent images of children?
No. His “crime” was taking the mickey out of trans rights activists on social media.
In Keir Starmer’s Britain, it seems, the police have become the paramilitary wing of Pink News.
But towards the end of the week, things had begun to look up.
The Metropolitan Police’s heavy-handed treatment of Linehan has been almost universally condemned.
Cabinet minister Wes Streeting said we may need to “look at” our laws restricting free speech online.
Policing our tweets
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said: “I don’t believe we should be policing toxic culture wars debates . . . officers are currently in an impossible position.”
Even PM Starmer weighed in, telling Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch: “We must ensure police focus on the most serious issues”.
Presumably, that means less time on policing our tweets and more on policing our streets.
As director of the Free Speech Union, I’ve been campaigning for this “reset” for the last five years, so that was welcome news.
It beggars belief that the police spend so much time investigating hurty words when more and more real crimes are going unsolved.
According to the latest data, more than 30 people a day are being arrested under suspicion of committing speech offences.
That’s more than the number of people who were being arrested for un-American activities during the McCarthy era.
Yet in 2023 the percentage of crimes in England and Wales resulting in the offender being caught by the police and taken to court was just 5.7 per cent, down from 16 per cent in 2015.
Whenever one of my neighbours is burgled in West London, I tell them to spray paint the words ‘Transwomen Aren’t Women’ on their front door.
Instead of being fobbed off with a crime reference number, five squad cars and a police helicopter will be there within 30 seconds.
Graham Linehan’s arrest didn’t just provoke questions in our parliament.
On Tuesday, Nigel Farage appeared as a witness before the House Judiciary Committee in the United States Congress where he rang the alarm about the state of free speech in Starmer’s Britain.
“I come from the land of Magna Carta, the mother of parliaments. It doesn’t give me any great joy to be sitting in America describing the awful authoritarian situation we have sunk into,” he told the committee, adding: “At what point did we become North Korea?”
Comparing Britain to North Korea is a bit over the top, but it does capture an important element of the over-zealous policing of political opinion, which is that people on the Right are more likely to get arrested for ‘wrong- think’ than people on the Left.
The Free Speech Union recently had to come to the aid of Julian Foulkes, a 71- year-old retiree whose home was raided by six coppers after he mocked pro-Palestinian protestors online.
In spite of being a former Special Constable, he was arrested and locked in a police cell for eight hours.
Yet the police do nothing when supporters of the Palestinian cause march through our cities every weekend spewing anti-semitic hate.
Graham Linehan’s sin was to be on the unfashionable side of the debate about single-sex spaces.
He was arrested for posting a tweet that, in the words of the Met Police, ‘incited violence’: “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.”
Britain needs a reset
But the same standard does not apply when it comes to protests staged by trans rights activists, where the police are happy to turn a blind eye to T-shirts urging people to “Punch a Terf”.
The solution is to reform our free speech laws, bringing them into line with those of the United States.
Thanks to the First Amendment, speech is protected in America unless it is intended to cause imminent violence and likely to do so, with both limbs of that test needing to be satisfied before someone can be prosecuted.
That would provide a clear standard that everyone understands, including the police.
Yes, we’d have to become a little more tolerant of people tweeting things we disapprove of, but the upside would mean freeing up officers to focus on the things the public care about like shoplifting, knife crime and sexual assault.
Britain desperately needs this reset.
If we continue to send armed police to arrest comedians for making risqué jokes, we really will turn into North Korea.
- Lord Young of Acton is the founder and director of the Free Speech Union.