The Graham Linehan arrest must prompt free-speech reform

It is time to think clearly about our laws.

Illustration by Gary Waters / Ikon Images

At last! The laws of our great nation are finally being strictly enforced at the border. But conservatives are never satisfied!

I have on more than one occasion been told implicitly or explicitly that I am wasting the time of the emergency services. When a man with blood dripping from his face lay on the road in Charring Cross after his bike was struck by a car, the voice on the phone would not stop asking if (in my expert opinion) he really needed an ambulance. As I watched the bag containing my livelihood fly northward after being lifted from a Wetherspoons I was told that the police will “look into it”. I am still waiting to hear back. But I understand, of course, that the miracle of free emergency services is not something to be taken for granted, and that in a world of limited resources, the Metropolitan Police must prioritise.

On Monday 1 September, we saw the fruits of such discrimination. As Graham Linehan disembarked a plane from Arizona, he was met with five (count them) armed police officers to confiscate his belongings and escort him away to the police station. He had been caught red-handed trying to smuggle the ethos of the American first amendment across the border.

It is not the first time the British police has apprehended someone on suspicion of a wrongful social media post. And the rationale for such operations is never precisely clear. In 2022, a man was arrested by Hampshire Police for retweeting a quite grotesque image of a swastika made out of a collage of pride flags. If this is indeed criminal behaviour, the curious feature of this case is that at the very moment Darren Brady was placed in handcuffs he was stood next to the designer and poster of the original tweet, Laurence Fox, who was not himself arrested. Confronted with this inconsistency, one police officer responded, “Because someone has been caused, obviously, anxiety, based upon your social media page. That’s why you’ve been arrested.” Not for the action, then, but the reaction.

More and more, these arrests are bringing the UK into international disrepute. In recent years this has typically been a rallying point for the British right, with Nigel Farage’s rather unimaginative complaint to the United States Congress on Wednesday that our country has “become North Korea” serving as a case in point. It is becoming easier and easier to laugh at Britain from abroad and cry from within it, something opponents of Farage’s plausible rise to future power ought keep in mind. Keir Starmer, for his part, had some choice words about this transatlantic badmouthing. “You cannot get more unpatriotic than that,” he said to the Commons. “It’s a disgrace.” His deep offence is palpable. Perhaps he should have had Farage arrested when he landed back at Heathrow.

But the left, too, are beginning to realise the dangers and outrage of policing speech. Think of the 522 protestors arrested in London on 9 August alone for displaying placards and signs after the proscription of Palestine Action. Or recall Paul Powlesland, a barrister who after the death of Queen Elizabeth was threatened with arrest for holding up a blank piece of paper in Parliament Square, with a police officer soberly explaining that the sign “may offend” people if he were to, at some later point, write “not my king” on it. During that same episode of national neurosis, Symon Hill, a resident of Oxford, had the gall to call out, “Who elected him?” as he passed by a local proclamation of the accession of our new King on his way home from Church. Arrested and charged. A 22-year-old woman in Edinburgh went as far as to actually write, “fuck imperialism, abolish the monarchy” on a sign. Arrested and charged. A man in the same city heckled Prince Andrew, former friend and alleged fellow hobbyist of convicted pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein, during a procession, calling him a “sick old man”. While being dragged away by the police he was assaulted by two separate members of the public. Arrested and charged. The heckler, that is: the assaulters were not even questioned.

Linehan’s arrest is therefore not so much shocking as it is emblematic. He tells us that his first reaction was to laugh. Laughter turned to rage as was presented with three X posts as an explanation for his detainment. He was presented, for his part, with three tweets he had published as an explanation for his detainment. One is a photograph of some trans activists, an image he wrote you could “smell”. A nasty sentiment, and not something I would ever tweet, but not criminal. In the same thread, he writes, “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. Fuck em”. Again, hardly the epitome of proper manners, but hatred is not a crime in the United Kingdom. (Yet.)

In a third tweet, he wrote, “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.” This is perhaps the most sensational of the lot, and the most plausibly unlawful. It is far too easy to complain about a man being “arrested for a tweet”; it is the content of the tweet which is relevant. Even the most steadfast free-speech activist does not believe that literally all speech should be legal: libel and copyright are two trivial examples, but most people also agree that incitements to violence are not to be tolerated.

But I think it is fair to say that nobody (including the police) believes he was seriously attempting to encourage any actual violent behaviour. Linehan claims that the tweet “was a serious point made with a joke”. Many voices, including the Prime Minister and the Met commissioner, have implied that the arrest was an overstep and a waste of police time. No major figure has defended it. Everybody knows it is a farce, especially as the UK becomes increasingly notorious not only for social media arrests, but also for its failure to combat serious crime. Health Secretary Wes Streeting summed up the sentiment in saying that he would rather see “police on the streets rather than policing tweets”.

After all, it is not as though Linehan was imagining a particular violent act against a particular individual. It is not as though he named someone and publicly expressed a direct intent to violently assault them. No, that is what the health secretary did in 2009, when he tweeted twice fantasising about throwing columnist Jan Moir under a train, in one post indicating an intent to set up a vigilante organisation dedicated to the project. It is perhaps easy, then, to see why he would like to direct police attention away from the twitterverse, and why he understands so naturally that not all tweets should be taken quite so seriously.

And perhaps that is the point. The case for freedom of speech has not changed in hundreds of years, and even absent considerations of principle, can be made solely on account of self-interest. After all, you may like to see offensive characters thrown in jail, and such a policy may prove effective so long as the government shares your interpretation of offence. But to what will you appeal when the wind changes, and those same laws are weaponised against you?

We are again confronted with the boring and crucial question, “Who gets to define the terms?” And here I address those who support Linehan’s arrest, or indeed any of the arrests mentioned above: a great irony of this case is that Linehan accuses transgender women in female-only spaces of “committing a violent, abusive act”. He is now complaining about being apprehended for an act wrongfully considered violent and abusive. Even if you think Linehan’s view is groundless or exaggerated, it is worth considering what happens in a world where it gains popular acceptance. If our police force retains a lax definition of what suffices as “violent” or “abusive” enough to arrest perpetrators, then what happens when a government is elected who shares his sentiment?

I think it’s time for us to define our terms objectively, remembering, when we design our laws, to predict how the most evil and incompetent government we can imagine might employ them. Best put legal safeguards in place now to criminalise only specifically defined and actually dangerous behaviours, and protect the rest, while we can prove that we are not doing so post hoc to save our own skins against laws we were perfectly fine with yesterday, when it was somebody else’s problem.