Graham Linehan: free-speech martyr?

“How many police officers does it take to arrest one middle-aged sitcom writer?” Unfortunately, it’s not a joke, said Frank Furedi in the Daily Mail. When Graham Linehan, the co-creator of “Father Ted” and “The IT Crowd”, landed at Heathrow from his home in the US last Monday, five armed police were waiting for him. His alleged offence? A series of posts on X/Twitter in which he had inveighed against trans rights activists.

In one, he called them “misogynists and homophobes”. In another, he had tweeted that if a woman saw “a trans-identified male” in a “female-only space”, she should “make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails punch him in the balls”. Linehan insists he meant it as humour; but even if you think it’s unfunny or objectionable, it was surely not a pressing police matter.

Yet Linehan was arrested and held for 12 hours; he was granted bail only on the condition that he kept off social media. It’s a symptom of a wider issue, said The Times. Britain has a real problem with “the suppression of free speech”.

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‘Inflammatory comments’

The chorus of outrage was predictable, said Marc Burrows in The Independent. But Linehan has spent many years “making inflammatory comments” about trans people, relentlessly hounding “a vulnerable, marginalised group”: he came back to Britain to face charges that he harassed a trans woman and broke her phone. And the truth is that tweets “have real-world consequences”. Free speech has never been absolute. Inciting violence is an offence; and encouraging people to punch trans women certainly sounds like incitement to me.

‘Breathtaking contrast’

I’m no fan of Linehan’s crusade, said Janice Turner in The Times: it has often been “cruel” and counter-productive. “Yet the contrast between the police response to his words and those addressed to women by violent trans activists is simply breathtaking.” Any woman who has spoken out on this subject has received endless death threats and rape threats. We have stopped reporting them because the police just aren’t interested. Yet they seem to jump to attention when trans activists call. The police today mostly won’t attend over a stolen phone or car, even if you can track it to a precise address. “Yet for a problematic tweet, they’ll arrest you at the airport.”