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“We’ve had free speech for a very long time, it will last a long time, and we are very proud of that”. This is how Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer responded to President Trump’s and JD Vance’s suggestion that the UK has a problem with free speech, just a few months ago in the Oval Office.
Now fast forward to today.
The prominent comedian and co-creator of Father Ted, Graham Linehan, was just arrested on his return to the UK, from America, by five armed police officers.
Why?
He was arrested ‘on suspicion of inciting violence, in relation to posts on Twitter/X’.
Yes, you read that right.
A prominent comedian was just met and arrested by five armed police officers because of some views he posted on X.
What did he post, exactly?
He said if ‘a trans-identified male is in a female-only space he is committing a violent abusive act’. He said people who witness this act should ‘call the cops’ and, if all else fails, ‘punch him in the balls’. And he described trans rights protestors as ‘misogynists and homophobes’, adding: ‘F*** em’.
Sorry, but are we seriously meant to believe these posts are ‘inciting violence’?
And are we seriously meant to believe it is somehow acceptable, in modern Britain, that somebody who shares these views should be arrested by armed police, hauled off to a police station, and told he cannot share anything else online?
Does this look like Britain, the home of free speech, free expression, and individual liberty, to you? Of course not. It looks like a dystopian hell-hole.
Five armed police officers is who you send to arrest members of Islamic State and hardened criminals who pose a serious threat to the public, not a popular comedian, well-known for his gender critical views, who happens to say something challenging.
What on earth was London’s Metropolitan police thinking? And as journalist Sam Ashworth-Hayes asks: ‘What does it say about Britain when mocking purveyors of transgender ideology results in your arrest by gun-toting officers of the law?’
Yet, while shocking, this is not just about a single case.
What all this symbolises, what all this represents, as I’ve written before, is a much broader and longer-term attack on free speech on these islands and which our utterly hapless leaders, including Keir Starmer, continue to deny is happening.
On one level, as my colleague Professor Frank Furedi points out, what this case proves beyond doubt is that a large part of UK police has become politicised and radicalised.
Instead of remaining politically neutral, police in the UK have essentially morphed into a kind of politically-motivated subdivision of the radical “progressive” crusade, having been successfully infiltrated over the years by militant groups, like Stonewall.
In turn, police have willingly used heavy-handed harassment, intimidation, and public shaming to ensure the masses loyally follow, and certainly do not challenge, the narrow radical left progressive orthodoxy that now unites our ruling class.
Those who do, like Linehan, are punished publicly, hauled off by the authorities, thereby ensuring others will not dare challenge the same orthodoxy.
As I’ve noted before, drawing on research in psychology, while the architects of this radical left progressive regime think of themselves as ‘liberal’ and ‘open-minded’, in reality they are dogmatic, authoritarian, and rigid in their thinking, lashing out at those who challenge their pro-immigration, pro-trans, pro-globalism beliefs.
And while, today, Keir Starmer and Labour Minister Wes Streeting might have issued statements variously complaining about the heavy-handed approach and calling for a change of direction, the blunt reality is that the police were only responding to how this authoritarian progressive regime was imposed on our country by their own Labour Party, between 1997 and 2010, then mainstreamed by the useless Tories, between 2010 and 2024, and is now being entrenched by Starmer’s Labour, today.
The expansion of the deeply Orwellian ‘hate laws’. The rise and spread of ‘non-crime hate incidents’. The expansion of taboos like ‘far-right’, ‘hate’, and ‘misinformation’ to discredit opinions and beliefs the elite class merely disagree with.
Labour’s forthcoming definition of ‘Islamophobia’. Our ongoing membership of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Communications Act of 2003. The Online Safety Act of 2023. The way in which genuine political diversity has been stripped out of our strongly left-leaning universities.
All this and more is …
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