There have been two stories this past week which could be read as incitement to hitting men in the bollocks. One of the perpetrators was met with five armed officers at Heathrow Airport, the other was lauded as a have-a-go hero. One involved the comedian Graham Linehan, and the other involved the Queen. Only one of them actually carried out the act (admittedly several decades ago), but she wasn’t the one who found herself in a police cell.
The story about a teenage Camilla Shand who, in her own words “whacked a man in the nuts” when he groped her on a train, is told in a new biography of the Queen. It has been used to explain why the Queen became an advocate for women’s rights in later life. Linehan, the creator of the acclaimed series Father Ted, The IT Crowd and Black Books is also a campaigner. As the introduction to his articles on the blogging platform Substack states: “I write about the current all-out assault on woman’s rights.” While Camilla’s campaigning has only served to burnish her reputation, Linehan was cancelled after his gender-critical views brought him into direct conflict with the trans rights movement.
In December he announced he was moving to Arizona as a result of this cancellation. But on Sunday he returned to the UK, only to be arrested, held in a prison cell for hours and questioned about his posts, as he documents in his Substack. While the Met police have not named Linehan, they have confirmed his account of events.
Which brings us to the offending posts. According to Linehan, they are as follows. One, posted on 19 April, shows an image of a trans-rights protest with the comment “A photo you can smell”. This is followed up with “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. Fuck em”. These are indeed offensive and intended to be so. But it is difficult to see how they could be interpreted as incitement to violence. The third tweet posted the next day is more problematic. But only the second half has been quoted in most of the media coverage of the arrest. The whole tweet reads: “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.”
Whether or not you agree with his definition of an abusive act he is making precisely the same argument as the cheerleaders for the young Camilla, although she whacked her groper in the nuts before she called the cops.
This is not Graham Linehan’s first run-in with the police over his anti-trans stance. On Thursday he will appear at Westminster magistrates court accused of the online harassment of 18-year-old transgender activist Sophia Brooks and damaging her phone at a public event last year. He denies all charges.
Linehan’s arrest is further evidence of a faultline in the free speech landscape where the trans debate is concerned. As Helen Lewis writes in The Atlantic, there have been several instances of trans allies calling openly for violence against those whose views they disagree with and who have not been dealt with in this way. A genuinely pluralistic society cannot have two-tier justice in this area.
Linehan’s case raises serious questions about how we police speech online. We know there are consequences when posts go viral and incitement to violence is a reality. But in many cases there are no consequences except to the author of the posts. We may not approve of Linehan’s call to vigilante action against abuse of women’s spaces, if that is what it was. But the suppression of his free expression rights may be more damaging in the long run.
Index on Censorship was founded as a response to the repression of writers and academics behind the Iron Curtain. Advocacy for dissidents remains the priority of the organisation. Some would argue that Linehan is a dissident. It is questionable whether it is ever possible to be a dissident in a country where freedom of speech has genuine legal protections – it is a strange kind of police state where ministers intervene to suggest officers have been too heavy-handed. The real concern is whether Linehan’s arrest is evidence of the erosion of those protections. JK Rowling condemned the action as “totalitarian”, while commentator Piers Morgan said “Britain’s turning into North Korea.” Although this is perhaps overstating it, what happened to Linehan at Heathrow airport this week certainly looks like police overreach. It also seems odd that Linehan has been instructed not to post on X while on bail, surely an unnecessary restriction of his rights.
It is tempting to see this as a comedy arrest by bumbling cops. But a genuinely open society does not police speech with the tactics of an authoritarian state.
