I Posted on X. The British Police Arrested Me.

I was arrested at Heathrow, thrown in a cell, rushed to the hospital as my blood pressure spiked, and then silenced online—all for posting on social media.

By Graham Linehan

09.02.25 —

** You may not know Graham Linehan’s name. But you should. The Irish comedian and co-creator of the popular sitcoms Father Ted and The IT Crowd was long considered one of the most successful comedy writers in the United Kingdom.

** Then he became one of Britain’s most outspoken critics of trans ideology. First Linehan was criticized for a 2008 episode of The IT Crowd which activists called transphobic when it re-aired years later. Then, in 2018, Linehan praised as “heroes” protesters at London’s Pride Parade who had carried banners that read “transactivism erases lesbians.” Ever since, Linehan has been the target of a relentless campaign by trans activists. He has been sued, repeatedly banned from X, and ostracized from the showbiz community. Linehan has said that accusations of transphobia have made it impossible for him to find work in Britain. Last year, he moved to the United States.

** On Monday, Linehan was arrested by British police at Heathrow Airport, thrown in a cell, then rushed to the hospital for dangerously high blood pressure. All of this for the crime of three posts on X in April.

** Today, we bring you Graham Linehan’s story, told from his hospital bed. —The Editors

Something odd happened before I even boarded my flight from Arizona to London. When I handed over my passport at the gate, the official told me I didn’t have a seat and had to be re-ticketed. At the time, I thought it was just the sort of innocent snafu that makes air travel such a joy. But in hindsight, it was clear I’d been flagged. Someone, somewhere, had made a phone call.

The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting. They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three posts on X. In a country where pedophiles escape prison, where knife crime is out of control, the state had mobilized five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer for these three posts (and no, I promise you, I am not making this up).

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When I first saw the cops, I actually laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “Don’t tell me! You’ve been sent by trans activists,” I said. The officers didn’t react.

This was the theme throughout most of the day. Among the rank and file of the police, there was a sort of polite bafflement. They were entirely professional and even kind, but most had absolutely no idea what any of this was about.

Once the officers began reading me my rights, and I realized what was happening, the red mist descended. The officers saw how upset I was and treated me gently after that. They even arranged for a van to meet me on the tarmac so I didn’t have to be perp-walked through the airport like a terrorist. Small mercies.

At Heathrow police station, my belt, bag, and devices were confiscated. Then I was shown into a small, green-tiled cell with a bunk and a silver toilet in the corner.

Later, during my interview with an officer, the tone shifted. He asked about each of the posts in turn, with the sort of earnest intensity usually reserved for discussing something serious like. . . oh, I don’t know—crime?

I explained that the post about punching a trans-identified man in a female-only space was a serious point made with a joke. Men who enter women’s spaces are abusers, and they need to be challenged every time.

The officer mentioned the term trans people. I asked him what he meant by the phrase. “People who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth,” he said.

“Assigned at birth?” I responded. “Our sex isn’t assigned.” He called it semantics. I told him he was using activist language.

Eventually, a nurse came to check on me and found my blood pressure was over 200 mm Hg—stroke territory. So, I was escorted to the emergency room, where I wrote this piece after spending about eight hours under observation.

The doctors suggested the high blood pressure was stress-related, combined with long-haul travel and lack of movement. I feel a contributing factor might have been that I’ve now spent eight years being targeted by trans activists working in tandem with police in a dedicated, persistent harassment campaign, all because I refuse to believe that men can become women.

I was offered bail, on one condition: I am not to go on X. That’s it. No threats, no speeches about the seriousness of my crimes—just a legal gag order designed to shut me up while I’m in the UK, and a demand I face another police interview in October.

The fact that the individual officers were civil doesn’t alter the fundamental reality of what happened. I was arrested at an airport like a terrorist, locked in a cell like a criminal, taken to the hospital because the stress nearly killed me, and banned from speaking online—all because I made jokes on X.

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.

Graham Linehan is an Irish comedian and co-creator of the sitcoms Father Ted and The IT Crowd.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5769309&forum_id=2),#49232867)

Britain’s Free Speech Crisis—and Ours

Five British police officers just arrested a comedian for his posts on X. As J.K. Rowling put it: ‘This is totalitarianism. Utterly deplorable.’

By The Editors

09.02.25 —

On Monday, Graham Linehan—the creator of several hit British sitcoms, including Father Ted and The IT Crowd—arrived from Arizona at London’s Heathrow Airport. Awaiting him there were five armed police officers who were under orders to arrest him.

Linehan’s supposed crime? A series of posts on X deemed anti-trans by British authorities. As the Metropolitan Police put it, Linehan was under arrest on “suspicion of inciting violence.”

The closest he gets to that in his offending posts is a call to “make a scene, call the cops, and if all else fails, punch him in the balls” if any of his followers encounter a biological man “in a female-only space.” (It’s perhaps worth noting, again, that he is a comedy writer.)

The position Linehan finds himself in is all too common. Under the guise of protecting “public safety,” British authorities now routinely question or arrest people for online speech. According to The Times of London, police in the UK now make more than 30 arrests a day for purportedly offensive posts on social media.

J.K. Rowling’s blunt response to Linehan’s detainment was right: “What the fuck has the UK become? This is totalitarianism. Utterly deplorable.”

Linehan describes the arresting officers as polite and even baffled as to why he was being detained. They placed him in a “small, green-tiled cell” at Heathrow’s police station, but his treatment took a sharp turn when the interrogation began. As he was questioned about his posts and his views on gender, he began to feel sick with stress.

A nurse “eventually” checked on him and found his blood pressure had entered “stroke territory.” He was then sent to the ER. (Read him tell the full, disturbing tale of what happened when he landed.)

Linehan was ordered to stay off X. His freedom now depends on him shutting up. And that, of course, is no freedom at all.

This isn’t the first time Linehan’s views on gender ideology have gotten him in trouble with the law. In 2018, a spat with a trans activist on what was then Twitter earned him a warning from police. Refusing to back down from his beliefs, he soon found himself out of work. His 16-year marriage crumbled not long after, an event Linehan blamed on financial woes and legal pressure stemming from his activism. Late last year, he announced he was moving to America.

His ordeal—especially this latest turn—is another alarming example of the United Kingdom’s turn against free speech.

But there are many Graham Linehans.

We’ve reported on the woman arrested for praying in silence. The 41-year-old mother with PTSD sentenced to 31 months in jail for a post about immigrants that she quickly deleted. The Scottish grandmother detained for standing outside an abortion clinic with a sign that read “Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want.” The arrival in the UK of de facto blasphemy laws. And on and on.

While Keir Starmer insists that free speech is alive and well in his country, the evidence is not on his side.

All of this is part of a deeply worrying pattern in that country, one that has gone into overdrive under Keir Starmer’s Labour government. And while Starmer insists that free speech is alive and well in his country, the evidence is not on his side.

Americans who mention these stories are often accused of using Britain’s internal affairs to fuel a culture war at home. But while some social media addicts doubtless take it too far, we believe that Americans should be profoundly concerned about the treatment of people like Linehan.

Why? First because America and Britain are the world’s foremost liberal democracies and are grounded in the same common law. Our Constitution is deeply influenced by long-standing British legal precedent dating back to the Magna Carta in 1215. Since long before our revolution, the fortunes of the UK and the U.S. have been inextricably linked.

Policies that take root in one country also have a way of spreading to the other. Margaret Thatcher’s experiments in economic liberalization were a preview of Ronald Reagan’s similar reforms. The rise of Bill Clinton provided a road map for Tony Blair. Today, we see the insurgent right-wing populists of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party battling their way to the top of the polls in an obvious imitation of President Donald Trump’s Republicans.

And while it’s true that we have the First Amendment and Britain does not, it would be a mistake for Americans to take our freedom of speech for granted.

Cancel culture in the U.S. has so far largely been a phenomenon driven by bad actors in the private sector: online mobs, tech executives keen to stay in the good graces of the progressive left, Slack activists who took control of newsrooms. While that trend has abated here in recent years—though there is a lively debate about whether wokeness lost or simply won so massively we no longer see it—in Britain we see the scolds and censors taking cancel culture to its natural next step, using the state not only to vilify but to punish those who disagree with the ruling party line.

It is relatively easy to imagine a left-wing government taking power in the U.S. and, like Starmer before them, curbing constitutional protections in the name of combating “hate speech” and “misinformation.”

This is not to say that criticism of the First Amendment is confined to the left. Vice President J.D. Vance was correct when he said earlier this year that free speech is “in retreat” across Europe. But Trump has, at times, appeared more interested in weaponizing cancel culture against his critics than doing away with it completely. His executive orders against law firms that represented his enemies is a clear-cut example of using the power of the state to chill dissent.

The situation is worse in Britain, but free speech is increasingly endangered on both sides of the Atlantic. A poll conducted last year by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) found that a majority of Americans (53 percent) now believe the First Amendment “goes too far in the rights it protects.” That number includes 52 percent of Republicans and 61 percent of Democrats.

As is always the case in any free-speech crackdown, some groups are privileged over others. In Britain, this has effectively created a “two-tier” justice system that punishes people like Lucy Connolly while turning a blind eye to serious criminals.

“This is the shameful reality of life under the ‘two-tier Labour Party’ running our country right now,” Conservative opposition leader Kemi Badenoch told The Free Press on Tuesday. “Serious crimes like burglary and assault go uninvestigated, while five police officers are sent to arrest a man over his tweets. This is all about the priorities of those in power, who are more interested in defending fringe ideologies than making our streets safer.”

Even Starmer, who faces dismal approval ratings, sounded critical of Linehan’s treatment, with a spokesman for the prime minister saying the police have other priorities, namely violent crime. Yet a “Banter Bill” currently working its way through parliament with Starmer’s blessing would penalize idle speech in pubs. It does this by defining “harassment” as speech that offends any server or bartender.

While it’s true that we have the First Amendment and Britain does not, it would be a mistake for Americans to take our freedom of speech for granted.

The chilling effect here is deliberate. As Dominic Green has noted in these pages, Britain’s speech laws “already hamper discussion of key political topics such as illegal immigration, the Labour-linked ‘grooming gangs’ scandal,” and “Britain’s recent about-face on gender reassignment for children.” When Britain’s ruling class diverges with everyday citizens on sensitive cultural topics, the government’s go-to solution is censorship.

The fates of America and Britain are intertwined. So when liberalism is under threat in one country, it is only a matter of time before it comes under threat in the other. Hopefully, the absurdity of Linehan’s treatment will shock Brits into fighting to reassert their speech rights.

Until then, Americans should learn a lesson from the catastrophe unfolding overseas: Freedom of expression is a very rare thing, and it will crumble without robust protection. And those Americans who think the First Amendment goes “too far” in protecting views they disagree with must confront the reality that, should we abandon the cornerstone of our Bill of Rights, we all may become subject to arbitrary censorship by the state.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5769309&forum_id=2),#49232878)

Inside Britain’s Working-Class Uprising

Migrant-hotel protests, gender ideology wars, the grooming-gang scandal—ordinary people are pushing back against the luxury beliefs of Britain’s elite left.

By Brendan O’Neill

This article was originally published in The Spectator.

There are dark whispers on the internet about Britain’s coming “race war.” The protests outside migrant hotels prove the “native English” have had a gutful of these “invaders,” say nefarious actors on X. Others foresee a civil war: a showdown between a haughty left and a resurgent right over the very soul of the kingdom. I see something different: a class war.

Okay, maybe not a “war.” It’s not the Russian Revolution, or even a rerun of the Battle of Orgreave. But the class tensions in these clashes outside migrant hotels seem undeniable to me. On one side we have the keffiyeh-adorned, often quite plummy defenders of “open borders.” And on the other, working men and women, many of them mothers, all wrapped in the English flag as they state their case for the restoration of our nation’s sovereignty. Tell me this isn’t the “left behind” finally standing up to the turbo-smug posh left that loves to lord it over them.

Witness the clashes across the UK last month. In London, Liverpool, and Bristol, and in parts of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland too, good people gathered to protest against the plonking in their communities of hundreds of unvetted men from faraway regressive cultures. And almost everywhere they were greeted by counterprotesters sporting the rictus sneer of people who know better. “Racists,” some shouted at the little people. Well, they’re uneducated oiks who like to wave the flag of their country—they must be racist, right?

Their differing paraphernalia spoke to the simmering class antagonism. The counterprotesters waved the Palestine flag, the ultimate vanity accessory of the middle-class left. They wore keffiyehs, the uniform of the self-righteous. The other side had on normal clothes—nothing culturally appropriated from Arabs. And their only banner was the St George’s or the Union flag. They expressed pride in their nation, whereas their mockers on the other side of the police line seemed consumed by pride in the self.

A grassroots longing for national restoration versus the hobby activism of the virtuous bourgeoisie: These are the battle lines today. For me, the migrant-hotel rebellion is the most thrilling showdown we’ve seen in years between ordinary people and the overeducated possessors of “luxury beliefs.” This is a revolt of “the plebs” not only against the lunacy of giving four-star bed and board to the hundreds of illegal migrants who rock up on our shores every day, but also against the entire luxuriant moralism of an activist class blissfully blind to the struggles of everyday Brits.

Are we living through the twilight of luxury beliefs? The thin ideologies of the professional-managerial classes seem to be dropping like flies. Their neo-religion of open borders is under savage pressure from that army of mums saying the thing you’re not meant to say, the thing that was madly branded “far right” for years: that borders are important. That the very first principle of sovereignty is you must know who or what is crossing into your territory. Centuries of common sense marshaled against the new and nuts idea that nationhood is outdated.

Before that, their post-truth ideology of trans took one hell of a beating. The UK Supreme Court’s ruling that a woman is a woman—duh—brought scientific reason to bear on that craziest of luxury beliefs: that you can have a penis and be a lady. Even Prime Minister Keir Starmer fell under the spell of that one. There’s been such a hearty uprising of British women sick of this sexist and unscientific nonsense that Britain has been christened “TERF Island.” Perhaps we’re the island where luxury beliefs come to die.

And let’s not forget 2025 is the year when people finally pushed back against the idea that it’s “Islamophobic” to talk about cultural tensions. The grooming-gang scandal was forced back onto the political agenda by everyday Brits sickened by the idea that it’s more important to maintain the “multicultural peace” than to speak frankly about what was done to working-class girls. The luxury of silence on such a grave issue is one working-class communities cannot afford.

I wonder if it is the destiny of the English to do with peaceful protest what Donald Trump has done with executive orders—push out all the destructive eccentricity that has self-identified as “wisdom” these past few years. There’s a brilliant gender-critical group called Sex Matters. To that we might now add “borders matter.” And “sovereignty matters.” And “communities matter.” That’s what I hear working-class communities saying right now to their too often indifferent superiors—we matter.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5769309&forum_id=2),#49232881)