Dystopian fiction often brushes over the most chilling part of the road to madness, which is the road itself. Authors hint at some great calamity or war that sets things in motion, and describe in vivid detail the hulking bureaucracies that grind all courage or curiosity from human beings. But rarely do they place readers in the pot with the frog, watching freedoms dissolve one by one.
This week, Graham Linehan, the creator of Father Ted and the IT Crowd, found himself in just such a pot. As he stepped off a plane from Arizona to Heathrow, five armed police officers greeted him on the tarmac. “When I first saw the cops, I actually laughed,”
he later wrote on Substack. “I couldn’t help myself. ‘Don’t tell me! You’ve been sent by trans activists.’”
The officers didn’t laugh. The comedy writer was arrested for three tweets which might have offended some trans people. His belongings were confiscated and he was taken to a cell with a steel toilet and concave mirror. His reflection in that mirror — “presumably there,” he wrote, “to make you reflect on your life choices” — should prompt us in Britain to take stock, too.
(Thank God he didn’t mention Bacon)
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Sometimes it takes an ocean of distance to appreciate such a profound moral upheaval. As chance would have it, the day after Linehan’s arrest, Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain’s right-leaning Reform party, testified before the U.S. House of Representative’s Judiciary Committee on threats to free speech in Europe.
“At what point did we become North Korea?” he asked U.S. lawmakers. “Well, I think the Irish comedy writer found that out two days ago at Heathrow Airport.”
It was an exaggeration but the sentiment is well-placed. The right to free expression is unequivocal: you either have it, or you are somewhere on a sliding scale towards authoritarianism.
Linehan’s arrest, for the following tweets, suggests we are sliding rather fast. In one, Linehan joked: “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.”
Another mocked a trans protest as a “photo you can smell,” followed by: “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. F–k em.”
These remarks may not be to everyone’s taste. Linehan himself later admitted the first was “not one of my best.” But that is besides the point. In a free society he should be at liberty to hold such views openly and without fear of arrest.
That society, however, has not existed for some time. The British police now make around
30 arrests per day for offensive posts on social media. Each year, thousands of people are detained and questioned for messages that could conceivably cause “inconvenience,” “anxiety,” or “annoyance” to others.
Graham Linehan's arrest over posts criticizing trans activist only the latest example of the U.K.'s slide into authoritarianism
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In arresting Linehan, the police may have overplayed their hand. Even the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, himself skeptical of free expression, admonished them for pursuing tweets over serious crimes.
One hopes the arrest of a comedy writer for jokes, a sign of tyranny that is almost a cliché, proves the wake-up call the country so badly needs.
