I have been lamenting Britain’s authoritarian turn for years. Yet even I was taken aback, physically repulsed in fact, by a news alert that pinged my phone today. It was from the Telegraph. It contained just 11 words — 11 words that ought to chill the blood of all who believe in liberty. This is what it said: ‘Graham Linehan arrested by five armed police officers for trans tweets.’
So this is England. A country where a once-beloved comedy writer can have his collar felt by cops over things he said on the internet. A country where a cultural legend can be treated like a common criminal simply for expressing his heartfelt beliefs. A country that seems hell-bent on mimicking China by dispatching its heavies to harass a writer for the ‘crime’ of thinking dissenting thoughts. This has got to be a line in the sand. This, surely, will be the moment when everyone, from Keir Starmer down, says: ‘Enough.’
You’re either with Graham Linehan or you’re with tyranny
I’m sure I don’t need to tell you the moral transgression, the wicked notion, for which Mr. Linehan found himself surrounded by armed men earlier today. It’s because he thinks men are not women. It’s because he believes in science. Linehan is now as famous for his fierce and unflinching defence of biological reality as he is for having penned such comedy classics as Father Ted and The IT Crowd. And he has suffered for his sinful thoughts.
In a Substack post, Linehan says he was nabbed after arriving on a flight from the US. He is suspected of ‘incitement’ over posts he made on X about a ‘trans-identified male’ going into ‘a female-only space’. He has been released on bail and his bail comes with one simple, stringent condition: he must not go on X. Sin utterers of old were forced to wear a scold’s bridle to stop their wicked chatter – now they’re brutishly shut out from social media.
It sounds to me like someone has taken offence to something Linehan said online – probably something most of us would consider a perfectly reasonable view – and then snitched on him to the police. Then the cops made their move, guns at the ready, as the foul dissenter touched down at Heathrow. What kind of country lets its police be used as the armed wing of petty grievances? Not a very democratic one, that’s for sure.
Linehan became unwell at Heathrow. Officials became concerned for his health after taking his blood pressure and took him to hospital. Let us speak frankly: this is obscene. It heaps shame on our nation, this bristling birthplace of the modern ideals of liberty, that a writer should be confronted by armed men and caused to become unwell merely for holding and expressing certain beliefs. This is a dark day in the history of English liberty.
We are witnessing nothing less than the persecution of Graham Linehan. The haranguing of a man for daring to demur from the post-truth lunacies of our morally lost elites. Mr Linehan is the most noted victim of that toxic mix of moral cowardice and therapeutic censorship that now passes for ‘progressive’ activism. First he was cold-shouldered by his old comedy colleagues, then he was frozen out by the media, and now he’s questioned by men with guns. This is the militarisation of cancel culture.
How could we do this? This supremely talented Irishman comes to England to share his gift for comedy and just a few years later he found himself demonised, shamed, shouted down, arrested – and all because he thinks if you have a penis you are a man and you should stay out of women’s spaces. That image of Linehan becoming poorly as cops interrogated him should haunt the neo-McCarthyites – this horror is on you.
Linehan is our John Wilkes. Wilkes was the trouble-making newspaperman who frequently found himself in the Tower for his government-bashing screeds. He’s our John Lilburne, the 17th-century pamphleteer who was whipped for his heretical beliefs, once so badly that his shoulders ‘swelled almost as big as a penny loaf’. He’s our William Prynne, the voluble polemicist of the 1600s who was frequently arrested and assaulted for his wrongthink. Though at least Linehan has been spared the ignominy of having the letters S and L branded on to his cheeks to mark him out as a ‘seditious libeller’, as happened to Prynne.
That’s essentially what he is accused of, though: seditious libel. Giving voice to ideas the establishment doesn’t like. Daring to cock an eyebrow at supposed right-think. In all of the above cases, people rallied to the defence of the heretics and argued for the full, unfettered liberty to utter. That’s what we need to do now. No ifs, no buts. You’re either with Graham Linehan or you’re with tyranny. Someone should make a T-shirt: ‘Je Suis Graham.’ I’ll wear it.
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