The Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan was once known for his charming, sometimes surreal sitcoms—Father Ted, Black Books, The IT Crowd—on British TV. These days, however, he is better known for his online crusade against transgender activism. His X feed takes the same approach as Libs of TikTok, cherry-picking videos of criminals and fetishists in a full-scale assault on “gender ideology.”
He is obsessive and offensive. But is he a criminal? The British police seem to think so. Linehan was arrested by five armed officers today on his return from the United States, where he has been working on a new sitcom, and was accused of “inciting violence.” He says this allegation relates to three posts on X. (Authorities have not contradicted him, and British news outlets are treating his account as credible.) In one of the offending posts, he wrote: “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.” Can criminal incitement really occur in a hypothetical situation? If so, we’re going to need a bigger holding cell.
Assuming that Linehan’s account is correct, then his arrest is totalitarian, absurd, and a waste of police time. It is also symptomatic of a wider chill on free speech in Europe, where the selective deployment of laws over hate speech, offense, and incitement has turned the police into the enforcers of progressive values and given them enormous discretionary power.
American readers will be used to conservatives claiming censorship at the slightest provocation, even as they enjoy the First Amendment’s protection from government action. But the problem in Europe is real. In Munich this spring, Vice President J. D. Vance cited police action against a silent anti-abortion protester in Britain as well as a man who burned a Quran in Sweden to make the case that, across Europe, “free speech, I fear, is in retreat.”
Vance’s position in the Trump administration gave skeptical audiences in Europe an excuse to ignore him. Given its illiberal treatment of anti-Israel protesters and others, the White House has all the moral authority of a fox standing next to a heap of chicken bones. Many Europeans were familiar with Elon Musk’s takeover of X, and so had seen firsthand what his version of a “free-speech absolutist” world looks like in practice: a grim parade of snuff footage, violent anti-Semitism, and monetized misinformation.
Nonetheless, Vance was correct to say that parts of Europe have, with the good intention of protecting minorities, enacted extremely illiberal hate-speech and harassment laws. The politicians who passed these laws did not seem to understand that highly disreputable people might try to use these measures to impose civil or criminal penalties on their critics and political opponents. In Germany, following the passage of gender self-identification legislation last year, a male neo-Nazi who claims to be a woman—although he’s kept his handlebar moustache—has made vexatious complaints against newspapers that have publicly disbelieved the sincerity of his transition.
Here in Britain, where I live, laws on “malicious communication” and “public order” mean the police regularly get dragged into soul-sapping online scrums between obsessives who each accuse the other of hate speech and harassment. Huge amounts of time are wasted trying to untangle the truth. The chairman of the Scottish Police Federation, an officers’ group, said last year that a deluge of hate-crime reports, and authorities’ pledge that every one would be investigated, has created “a situation where we simply cannot cope.”
Linehan has previously faced accusations that fall into this category, for which the best outcome would be if everyone involved logged off and got some fresh air. In May, a preliminary judgment found that he had defamed an actor with whom he was arguing online. In 2018, Linehan was given a police warning after a trans woman accused him of harassment for revealing her former male name online. (He countered that he had stepped in because she was harassing his friends.) Linehan was returning to Britain only because he faces trial on Thursday over another harassment allegation, this one following an altercation with an 18-year-old trans woman.
The deeper problem with European laws on speech and hate, however, is the widespread perception that they are selectively enforced. The most obvious example is the disproportionate prosecution of alleged hate crimes against police: In 2021, the BBC discovered that “police officers and staff were the victims in up to half of the hate crimes charged in some areas, despite making up a tiny proportion of the overall number of recorded cases.” (Back in 2006, local police in Oxford insisted on pursuing a case against a drunken student who called one of their horses “gay.”) In practice, hate-speech laws give the police a weapon against people who have annoyed them.
Overbroad legislation also gives the authorities the discretion to pursue disfavored groups and protect favored ones. In May this year, a man was convicted of a public-order offense for burning a Quran—even though England repealed its blasphemy laws in 2008. Conservative campaigners argue that authorities tiptoe around Muslim sensibilities but ignore offenses against Christianity.
Another cause célèbre on the British right has been the case of Lucy Connolly, who posted a message—later deleted—during anti-immigration riots last year, saying that she hoped someone burned down a hotel containing asylum seekers. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years and seven months in prison for publishing material that incited racial tensions, and is now presenting herself as a free-speech martyr. Her post was offensive and inflammatory, but many people convicted of actual violent crimes receive lighter sentences. Cases like this create the perception of “two-tier justice,” a charge that is regularly leveled against the government of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. (His spokesman today criticized Linehan’s arrest.) Overzealous enforcement of speech laws creates a sense of grievance that the far right is primed to exploit.
The debate over transgender inclusion demonstrates the double standard extremely well. Both trans activists and gender-critical feminists, the latter of whom believe that people’s biological sex rather than their self-declared gender should be the basis of law and policy, have extremists in their ranks. And yet the police in Britain seem far more exercised about comments such as Linehan’s than about equally violent rhetoric on the other side—including activism aimed at so-called trans-exclusionary radical feminists. In 2023, two Scottish politicians notoriously posed at a rally in front of a sign that said DECAPITATE TERFS. A police investigation was launched, but no action was taken.
That same year, a trans activist named Sarah Jane Baker—who had previously been convicted of torturing a teenager, and then attempting to murder a fellow inmate while in prison—told a pro-trans rally, “If you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face.” A magistrate found Baker not guilty of encouraging violence, saying that Baker was not making a serious threat but “wanted the publicity.” Compare that case with Linehan’s: If Baker was not convicted, why drag the comedy writer through the legal process for a less inflammatory remark?
I don’t want to downplay the fact that Linehan has a history of involvement in petty, grubby, and wearisome internet arguments. (And I say this as a frequent target of his rage.) But free-speech martyrs are often like this: hard to sympathize with, or hard to defend. Open debate is often obnoxious, upsetting, or rude. But none of these adjectives should make it a police matter.
The post The Arrest That Demonstrates Europe’s Free-Speech Problem appeared first on The Atlantic.
