Brass tacks of Britain’s latest free speech scandal.
JJ STARKY
We’ve seen yet another speech arrest that has utterly shamed our nation.
Yesterday, Irish comedian and Father Ted-creator Graham Linehan revealed that upon arriving to Heathrow airport from the United States, five armed officers from the Aviation Security Operational Command Unit arrested him.
His suspected crime? Three tweets. The worst of which said that if a trans-identified female (a biological male) committed abuse or violence in a female-only space, “call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls”.
Another post read, “a photo you can smell” attached with an image of a pro-trans protest and “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes (likely referring to certain radical trans activists). F*ck em”.
To be clear: Graham is an Irish national living in the U.S. He was arrested for tweets he posted four months ago, from foreign soil.
After five officers detained him, they seized his belt, bag, and devices.
The Metropolitan Police, which controls the Aviation Security Operational Command Unit at Heathrow, later confirmed the reason. They suspected him of intentionally stirring up hatred, under Part 3A of the Public Order Act 1986.
This is an “either way” offence that can be tried either in the Magistrates’ Court or the Crown Court.
On summary conviction in the Magistrates’ Court, the maximum penalty is six months’ imprisonment and/or a fine. If the case proceeds to the Crown Court, Graham could face seven years’ imprisonment and/or an unlimited fine.
That’s if the Crown Prosecution Service—led by Stephen Parkinson, a chief prosecutor known for backing Black Lives Matter and promoting “anti-racist” authors—prosecutes Graham.
Magistrates first determine if the seriousness of the offence exceeds their sentencing powers. If they conclude it does, the case is automatically sent to the Crown Court.
If a magistrate accept jurisdiction, the defendant has the right to choose whether to be tried by magistrates or to elect for a jury trial in the Crown Court.
Many might not know but the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 amended the Public Order Act 1986 to include offences of “stirring up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation”. It came into force in 2010.
Gordon Brown, Tony Blair’s former understudy, was Prime Minister when the amendments were passed and added.
Of course, the curious part is that Graham did not reference any sexual orientation in his posts. He was referencing men who claim to be women—decisively not a matter of sexual orientation but gender.
So if this goes to trial, the Met Police and CPS may end up with egg on their face. Unless a judge also misreads or misapplies the law, as has happened many times before.
In the police interview, which Graham released a recording of today, officers used pro-trans language. As he recalled:
He (a male police officer) mentioned “trans people”. I asked him what he meant by the phrase. “People who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth.” I said “Assigned at birth? Our sex isn’t assigned.” He called it semantics, I told him he was using activist language.
At one point, Graham’s stress pushed his blood pressure past 200—stroke territory. A nurse was called, he was taken to hospital, where he was kept under observation for eight hours.
But the worse part was yet to come.
To secure bail, the Metropolitan Police gave Graham an ultimatum. One that most people in Britain, or anywhere in the West, would likely not consider lawful.
They declared he could be released if he promised not to post on X while the case was ongoing.
In short, they arrested him at an airport like a terrorist, locked him in a cell like a criminal, and silenced him like a dissident, under threat of being held on remand for an extended period—all because a comedian made jokes, statements, comments, whatever you want to call it, online.
To understand the culture that allowed such blatant free speech rights violations, we need not look any further than the Met’s current chief, Sir Mark Rowley (of course he’s already a Sir).
He’s faced serious criticism for authoritarian and reckless behaviour.
Among his past actions? Rowley was filmed grabbing a journalist’s microphone and reportedly breaking it after being asked a question about “two-tier policing”, recklessly branding a group of protestors as “far right” with next to no evidence, and even seemingly threatening foreign nationals with arrest over online posts—something he has since sadly made good on.
Notably, Rowley and his team haven’t arrested Health Secretary Wes Streeting. Despite the fact he not only joked about pushing a Daily Mail columnist, Jan Moir, under a train but also Dutch politician Geert Wilders back in 2009.
In fairness to Streeting, he has condemned the arrest, suggesting that existing legislation is not fit for purpose. Unfortunately, he was also quick to deflect blame away from the Met Police.
As commentator Chris Rose wittily quipped on X, “Graham Linehan should have joked about pushing people ‘under a train’ like our Health Secretary, Wes Streeting”.
The Free Speech Union has today announced it will help Graham sue the Met for wrongful arrest, false imprisonment, and violating his free speech rights.
As for Britain, it’s hard to say anything other than, unlike Linehan’s actually arguably comical joke, we as a country have become a sick one.
They’ve kept pretty quiet about this but Starmer is currently pushing through new legislation that could make the sort of censorship Graham was subjected to more common.
His new Policing and Crime Bill introduces something called a “Respect Order”. Police and potentially other authorities would apply for them through the courts.
Such an order can force someone to do or stop doing “anything described in the order.” The threshold? Minimal. A judge simply needs to believe, on the balance of probabilities, that the person “has caused, or is likely to cause, harassment, alarm or distress to any person.”
So, in theory, police could persuade a judge that an online post caused someone “distress”. The poster could then be legally compelled to delete it, avoid the topic entirely, stay off social media, or even hand over their device passwords.
And to think Starmer had the temerity to say we have a long history of free speech in front of President Donald Trump nearly a month ago. Behind-the-scenes, he’s laying the groundwork to undermine what we have left of it.
- Do you believe our best days lie ahead?
- Will you keep watching as our politicians and broadcasters push for yet more surveillance, censorship, and control?
- If you want to push back—if not today, maybe someday—supporting independent journalism can (genuinely) make a real impact.
- In the past year, The Stark Naked Brief reached over 120 million people on X. Sometimes, all it takes is one post—one uncomfortable truth—to wake someone up and put a dent the uniparty’s monopoly.
This article (The Arrest of Graham Linehan—Everything That Stinks) was created and published by JJ STARKEY and is republished here under “Fair Use”
See Related Article Below
The arrest of Graham Linehan should be a turning point
When a comedy writer is seized by armed police over tweets, Britain’s free speech crisis can no longer be ignored.
ANDREW DOYLE
How many more controversies will it take? The arrest of comedy writer Graham Linehan by five armed police officers as he landed at Heathrow Airport has become an international news story because it so self-evidently tyrannical. The stress of the ordeal raised his blood pressure to an alarming degree and he was rushed to hospital. With the help of the Free Speech Union, Graham is now suing the Metropolitan Police. You can donate to his crowdfunder here.
It is reassuring to see that some action is being taken against such chilling state overreach, but when will our politicians follow suit? Many of us have been warning about this ongoing assault on liberty for many years, and at every watershed moment we’ve been led to believe that something will be done. Then, inevitably, the ‘blob’ is activated and swallows up any potential for progress in its viscous and undulating folds.
So when Sir Mark Rowley, head of the Metropolitan Police, complains that the police are acting on unclear laws, and that the responsibility for the maltreatment of the likes of Graham lies with those in power, he’s overlooking the impact of the activist middlemen. Let’s not forget that the Home Office has twice instructed the College of Policing to stop the recording of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs) and has been ignored. Or that the chairman of the College of Policing, Lord Herbert, said the solution to the complaints about NCHIs might be to rename them. As though the public’s concerns about this brazen authoritarianism might be assuaged with a touch of rebranding.
Rowley’s buck-passing is likewise inadequate. He claimed that Graham’s arrest was necessary because officers ‘had reasonable grounds to believe an offence had been committed’, which is palpably untrue. He said: ‘I don’t believe we should be policing toxic culture wars debates and officers are currently in an impossible position’. He also made clear that police would continue to behave in this way ‘unless the law and guidance is changed or clarified’.
But this is precisely the problem. At present, a quango called the College of Policing trains officers in England and Wales. In my article for UnHerd about Graham’s arrest (which you can read here) I make the case that the College of Policing has become woefully unfit for purpose due to activist capture. For a long time, agitators within the system have reinterpreted and fudged the actual law in favour of what they would like it to be. This has led to some police acting in potentially criminal ways. Most egregiously, there is clear evidence of systemic bias against gender-critical individuals within the police force, and a reluctance to apply identical standards to trans activists who routinely post threats of death and rape and are rarely investigated for it.
Ideological capture of the law means corruption. Many will recall when the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) released a false statement in the case of Lucy Connolly, saying that she had ‘told officers she did not like immigrants and claimed that children were not safe from them’. This was entirely untrue – she had been specifically talking about the dangers of illegal immigrants who had not been vetted – but by the time the CPS issued a correction, she had been sentenced to 31 months in prison.
I have sympathy for those police officers who are hamstrung into enacting vague authoritarian directives from above, although we have also seen individual officers gleefully abusing their powers to punish wrongthink. We should never be in a situation where the CPS and police are misrepresenting the truth to secure convictions for political or ideological reasons. It’s reminiscent of the febrile atmosphere following posthumous allegations of sexual abuse against Jimmy Savile, when it was revealed that prosecutors and police had withheld evidence in forty-seven cases of rape and sexual assault which would have seen defendants exonerated. They were so determined to fulfil their conviction quotas that there were willing to sacrifice citizens who they knew were innocent.
And yet for all the apologies, the robotic recitations that ‘lessons have been learned’, nothing is ever actually done to rectify the problem. Why has no law been passed to enable the government to remove judges who clearly prioritise activism over justice? Why are no politicians grappling the nettle of ‘hate speech’ laws and wrenching them from the statute books? Why has no-one in parliament even suggested abolishing the College of Policing and replacing it with something that would train police to uphold the law, not act as armed goons for the genderist movement?
Writing about his arrest on his Substack, Graham pointed out that the arresting officers were ‘using activist language’. Specifically, one of the officers had defined ‘trans people’ as those ‘who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth’. The reason why trans crybullies have been able to weaponised the police against their targets for so many years is that their high priests currently hold sway in the upper echelons of the policing administration.
Don’t believe me? Alex Marshall, former chief executive of the College of Policing, was the recipient of the top award from Stonewall, the UK’s most prominent genderist campaign group. Marshall was appointed as ‘LGBT envoy’ to the government, and it was only one year into his tenure that ‘non-crime hate incidents’ were introduced. This is unlikely to be a coincidence. One former detective told me that for twenty-five years policing has ‘been pulled around, by the nose, by self-appointed community leaders and fringe political groups’. Police officers, in other words, are being trained to defy the government in order to enforce the ideological beliefs of campaigners.
If Graham’s arrest is to have any positive outcome, it must be that those in power now commit to making actual steps towards healing this rotten system. Rowley is right that police are being misled, but our current government has no desire to do away with the unelected officials and bureaucrats in administrative positions who effectively set the agenda.
When asked about Graham’s arrest at Prime Minister’s Questions, Keir Starmer managed to hold a straight face while saying: ‘We have a long history of free speech in this country. I’m very proud of that and I will always defend it.’ Very well. Let’s see him abolish the College of Policing, repeal all ‘hate speech’ legislation, do away with the notion of ‘protected characteristics’, and implement laws to tackle activist influences in the CPS, the judiciary and the police. If he cannot commit to any of this, his defence of free speech will be seen for what it is: the empty cant of a leader who looked the other way while liberty died.
This article (The arrest of Graham Linehan should be a turning point) was created and published by Andrew Doyle and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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