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London
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Armed police officers are a rare sight in Britain, but the Irish comedian Graham Linehan was met by five of them when he landed at London’s Heathrow Airport from Arizona on Monday, before being arrested, searched and questioned.
The reason? Three posts he wrote on X in April, Linehan claimed on his Substack.
“If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act,” Linehan wrote in one of them, in reference to trans women. “Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”
Without naming Linehan – the co-creator of the sitcom “Father Ted” who is a gender critical activist – London’s Metropolitan Police confirmed it had arrested a man in his 50s “on suspicion of inciting violence.” Linehan denied that his posts were “a call to violence” against trans women and has been released on bail.
For Nigel Farage, the populist leader of the hard-right Reform UK party, Linehan’s arrest was “rather timely.” He had been invited to give evidence before the US House of Representative’s Judiciary Committee in Washington on Wednesday, for a hearing on “European threats to free speech.”
Farage, who said he arrived from “the land of Magna Carta,” now had what he felt was a smoking gun – more proof that the UK is sliding into what he called a “really awful authoritarian situation.”
“At what point did we become North Korea?” Farage asked US lawmakers. “Well, I think the Irish comedy writer found that out two days ago at Heathrow Airport.”
While the insurgent Farage needs little excuse to chip away at the flailing Labour government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Linehan’s arrest is the latest in a series of incidents that have fueled a furious debate about Britain’s laws on free speech – one that has put it in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference in February, US Vice President JD Vance rattled off multiple cases in Britain that he said proved free speech was “in retreat” there. Last month, the US State Department published a report claiming that human rights in Britain have “worsened” over the past year, citing “serious restrictions” on free speech.
Although Britain has no codified constitution, and hence no equivalent of the First Amendment to enshrine freedom of speech, the country has had free speech “for a very, very long time,” as Starmer has stressed during his meetings with the US president.
But its laws around free speech comprise a cluster of acts – some decades old – which critics say are struggling to keep pace with digital technology.
In a high-profile case last year, Lucy Connolly, a mother and former nanny, was sentenced to 31 months in prison for a post she sent on X while Britain was convulsed by anti-immigration riots.
The riots were sparked by the murder of three schoolgirls by Axel Rudakubana, the British son of Rwandan migrants. Misinformation about the identity of the attacker prompted mass demonstrations outside the hotels Britain uses to house asylum seekers, some of which turned violent.
“Mass deportations now, set fire to all the f––king hotels full of the bastards for all I care,” Connolly wrote in June 2024. “If that makes me racist so be it.”
Connolly was convicted under the Public Order Act of 1986, which criminalizes distributing threatening and abusive material intending to “stir up racial hatred.” She was released last month after serving 40% of her prison term.
While many on the British right decry that citizens can be imprisoned for social media posts, lawyers have stressed that such speech would have been illegal before the advent of social media.
Whether shouted from Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park or written on X, inciting violence can be criminal in the United Kingdom. “It is possible to cross the line into criminality by words alone,” Max Hill, formerly director of public prosecutions for England and Wales, told the BBC Wednesday. “Tweeting that you should set fire to all the hotels containing migrants … is crossing that line very clearly.”
Although Connolly pleaded guilty to the charge against her, she has since claimed she was a “political prisoner,” becoming a cause célèbre for the online right.
Farage said he hoped to bring her with him to Congress on Wednesday. “Sadly, the restrictions that have been put on her banned her from making the trip, which is a very, very great shame,” he said.
Although much of the fury has been fanned by the right, Starmer’s government has also come under fire from the left, with pro-Palestinian activists also claiming their speech is being unfairly policed.
After activists with the Palestine Action group broke into Britain’s largest airbase in June and damaged two military aircraft, the British government designated the group a terrorist organization. Under the Terrorism Act 2000, terrorism includes action involving “serious damage to property” in support of a political objective.
Because supporting terror organizations is also proscribed, protesters aligned with Palestine Action have since been targeted. Police arrested 466 people in a single day during a protest in London in August.
The spectacle troubled some of Britain’s most prominent legal authorities. Jonathan Sumption, a former Supreme Court justice, wrote in the British newspaper The Independent that “merely indicating your support for a terrorist organization without doing anything to assist or further its acts should not be a criminal offense and is consistent with basic rights to free speech.”
After Linehan’s arrest, the head of the Metropolitan Police called on the government to “change or clarify” the laws his officers must enforce.
Mark Rowley said the decision to arrest Linehan “was made within existing legislation – which dictates that a threat to punch someone from a protected group could be an offense.” But he said his officers had been put in an “impossible position,” with Britain’s laws drawing them into “toxic culture-wars debates.”
He urged the government to “limit the resources we dedicate to tackling online statements to those cases creating real threats in the real world.” Asked by parliament about the arrest, Starmer also said the police must “focus on the most serious issues.”
While British institutions creak under the pressure of changing technology, Farage said it offered a warning to the US. “I’ve come today to be a klaxon, to say don’t allow piece by piece this to happen here in America,” he told Congress.
US Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, countered that the UK prime minister has not shut down the right-wing news broadcaster GB News, where Farage has hosted his own show, which is critical of the British government. He also said the leader of a Reform council barred a local newspaper and website from interacting with the authority.
“To the people of the UK who think this … free speech impostor and Trump sycophant will protect freedom in your country, come over to America and see what Trump and MAGA are doing to destroy our freedom,” Raskin said.
“You might think twice before you let Farage ‘make Britain great again.’”