The arrest of the comedy writer Graham Linehan at Heathrow Airport on Monday has triggered a predictable chorus of outrage. Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick called it “ridiculous”. Elon Musk branded the UK a “police state”, and JK Rowling asked, “What the f*** has the UK become?” Nigel Farage announced he’ll raise the case before the US House Judiciary Committee as evidence of Britain’s slide into “authoritarian censorship”.
It’s right to scrutinise how police use their powers, but strip away the performative outrage and the story gets a lot more straightforward: a man who has spent years allegedly making increasingly inflammatory comments about a vulnerable, marginalised group faced consequences for behaviour that reportedly crossed legal lines.
Linehan, often seen as gender-critical, confirmed in a blog that he was arrested on suspicion of inciting violence, pointing to three posts he’d made on X (Twitter) from April, including one that read: “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.” A specific instruction that encouraged physical violence against a vulnerable group.
Linehan is already facing separate charges for allegedly harassing a transgender woman and damaging her phone – charges he denies. In the past, he’s joined female-only dating apps to expose trans users he felt weren’t “feminine enough”. He’s been escalating for years. Arresting him isn’t an unprecedented assault on British liberty.
And depressingly, trans rights are, yet again, being used as a political football. Again, individual cases are being weaponised to advance broader culture war narratives whilst actual transgender people, just trying to get on with their lives, deal with an atmosphere increasingly hostile to them, fuelled by attitudes that fester online and then spill into the real world. Which raises another question — why are the Metropolitan Police doing X’s job for them?
Downing Street declined to comment directly on the arrest, describing it as "an operational matter for the police", but Sir Keir Starmer's spokesperson emphasised that the prime minister and home secretary “have been clear about where their priorities for crime and policing are, and that's tackling anti-social behaviour, shoplifting, street crime, as well as reducing serious violent crimes like knife crime and violence against women.”
Health secretary Wes Streeting put it more bluntly: “We’d rather see our police on the streets than policing tweets.” He’s missing a really important point: tweets have real-world consequences. It was tweets that incited riots after the horrible killings in Southport last year. Lucy Connolly rightly faced jail for calling for people to set fire to hotels housing Muslim asylum seekers. It was X who waved that content through. When platforms refuse to enforce their own rules, what alternative are we left with?
The authorities don’t always get the balance right. The arrest of Palestine Action supporters under terrorism legislation suggests a system happy to stretch the letter of the law when it needs to make media-friendly political points. But Linehan’s case is different. He’s spent years chipping away at a vulnerable community. When you repeatedly test the boundaries of acceptable speech, eventually you’re going to find them.
I have a transgender family member, someone I love dearly, and I’ve watched this debate with a growing disgust. Real families are dealing with real challenges, while politicians and commentators treat trans people's existence as an abstract philosophical problem to be debated. Every case like Linehan’s becomes another opportunity to refight the same tired culture war battles, whilst transgender children face rising levels of abuse and harassment.
Free speech has never been absolute. We’ve always drawn lines around incitement, harassment, and threats of violence. The question isn’t whether these lines should exist, but where they should be drawn and how they should be enforced. Claiming that any restriction on speech automatically makes us a police state is the kind of hyperbole that makes serious discussion impossible.
Linehan’s arrest isn’t the death of British comedy or the birth of totalitarianism. It’s just a system responding to behaviour that allegedly crossed the line. If that makes some people uncomfortable, perhaps they should ask themselves why they’re so invested in defending the right to target vulnerable minorities with increasingly extreme rhetoric.
The scandal here isn’t that Graham Linehan was arrested. The scandal is the political and social atmosphere and the light-touch moderation of tech companies that emboldened him to make those posts to begin with.
