Britain under Labour has taken another extraordinary turn. Graham Linehan, the award-winning comedy writer behind Father Ted, The IT Crowd and Black Books, says he was arrested by five armed police officers at Heathrow Airport, all for posting gender-critical views online.
Linehan, 57, who has become an outspoken critic of the trans movement, revealed in a blog post that he was detained the moment he stepped off a flight from Arizona last week. His alleged crime? Three tweets written in April.
“The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting. Not one, not two – five,” he wrote. “They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three tweets.
“In a country where paedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is out of control, where women are assaulted and harassed every time they gather to speak, the state had mobilised five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer for this tweet.
I promise you, I am not making this up.”
Among the posts in question was one declaring: “If a trans identified male is in a female-only space he is committing a violent, abusive act.” Another showed a photo of a trans rights demonstration captioned “a photo you can smell.” Linehan followed it with: “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. F— em.”
According to his account, Linehan was bundled into a van, stripped of his belongings, locked in a cell and interrogated over the “terrible tweets.” He said officers earnestly quizzed him using activist language.
“The officer conducting [the interview] asked about each of the terrible tweets in turn, with the sort of earnest intensity usually reserved for discussing something serious like… oh, I dunno – crime?…” he said.
“He mentioned ‘trans people’. I asked him what he meant by the phrase. ‘People who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth’.
“I said ‘Assigned at birth? Our sex isn’t assigned.’ He called it semantics, I told him he was using activist language. The damage Stonewall has done to the UK police force will take years to mend.”
The stress of the ordeal reportedly sent Linehan’s blood pressure soaring above 200, forcing officers to escort him to A&E. He spent eight hours under observation.
Upon release, Linehan says he was handed a single bail condition: a ban from posting on X (formerly Twitter). He now faces trial at Westminster Magistrates’ Court this Thursday on charges of online harassment and criminal damage relating to a separate incident with transgender activist Sophia Brooks.
Linehan did not mince words about what his experience means for Britain:
“I was arrested at an airport like a terrorist, locked in a cell like a criminal and taken to hospital because the stress nearly killed me… banned from speaking online – all because I made jokes that upset some psychotic crossdressers.
“To me, this proves one thing beyond doubt: the UK has become a country that is hostile to freedom of speech, hostile to women and far too accommodating to the demands of violent, entitled, abusive men who have turned the police into their personal goon squad.”
A Metropolitan Police spokesman confirmed: “On Monday, 1 September at 13:00hrs officers arrested a man at Heathrow Airport after he arrived on an inbound American Airlines flight. The man in his 50s was arrested on suspicion of inciting violence. This is in relation to posts on X. After being taken to police custody, officers became concerned for his health and he was taken to hospital. His condition is neither life-threatening nor life-changing.”
Main Image: Credit – re:publica 2013 Tag 1 – Graham Linehan Uploaded by Schreibvieh. Image licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
