by Malcolm Clark, spiked
Graham Linehan’s arrest follows more than a decade of LGBT indoctrination in UK police forces.
The arrest of Graham Linehan for the crime of tweeting has rightly provoked near-universal outrage. On Monday, the Father Ted writer was detained by five armed police officers as soon as he stepped on to the tarmac at Heathrow Airport, where he had arrived from Arizona. He was told that three gender-critical tweets from April were being investigated on suspicion of ‘inciting violence’.
Labour has tried, unconvincingly, to echo the anxiety and disgust felt across the nation that Linehan’s arrest has provoked. UK prime minister Keir Starmer said policing social media should not be a ‘priority’ for the Metropolitan Police. Health secretary Wes Streeting was slightly more forthright, claiming that he wanted to see coppers ‘policing streets and not tweets’. Neither offered a robust defence of free speech.
It’s understandable that Labour is less than sure-footed on this subject. After all, the arrest of Linehan marks the culmination of a long decline in British policing, beginning nearly 20 years ago, at the fag-end of Gordon Brown’s premiership. Since then, police forces across the UK have effectively turned into the armed wing of the very organisation that Streeting used to work for: Stonewall, the LGBT lobby group.