As a cultural observer it strikes me that every so often there may be a cultural moment which seems significant. The death of Princess Diana, the Brexit vote, the primary Biden/Trump presidential debate. These were all occasions once I felt something had happened, something had modified.
Only time will tell but I believe the arrest of Graham Linehan may prove to be such some extent – especially on the planet of culture wars and identity politics.
Linehan is one among the UK’s best-known comedy writers – famous for shows equivalent to the IT crowd and above all Father Ted. Perhaps I shouldn’t have liked the latter? After all, it mocked the Catholic Church and at times was crude and crass … and yet I loved it.
I didn’t take it too seriously, and yet it also provided moments of perceptive insight into each culture and church. And above all, it had a high quality which has develop into all too rare in contemporary comedy shows – it was funny!
This week Linehan was arrested as he returned from the US to the UK. As he explains in his own words, “The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed cops were waiting. Not one, not two—five. They escorted me to a non-public area and told me I used to be under arrest for 3 tweets. In a rustic where paedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is uncontrolled, where women are assaulted and harassed each time they gather to talk, the state had mobilised five armed officers to arrest a comedy author for this tweet …”
You could argue that the tweet is in poor taste. You might think it’s rude and never funny. But is it worthy of arrest? And does it require five armed officers to arrest him?
Linehan suggests, “I used to be arrested at an airport like a terrorist, locked in a cell like a criminal, taken to hospital since the stress nearly killed me, and 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 develop into a rustic that’s hostile to freedom of speech, hostile to women, and much too accommodating to the demands of violent, entitled, abusive men who’ve turned the police into their personal goon squad.”
There is no doubt that he was targeted. This was not PC plod deciding to show as much as Heathrow as if it were a significant drug bust. No, this was an order from higher up the chain – precisely because Linehan has develop into a goal for the trans ideologues ever since he began to campaign for girls’s rights.
In going against the narrative that men can develop into women he has paid a heavy price. The Father Ted musical was cancelled (costing him hundreds of thousands), and he claims that it also cost him his marriage, friendships and further profession opportunities with Channel 4 and the BBC.
It isn’t any surprise that he was targeted. But it’s a shock that the police at the moment are apparently getting used because the thought police for the trans activists.
Ironically when the federal government has tried to argue that there isn’t any such thing as two-tier policing, Linehan’s arrest provides evidence that two-tier policing may be very much in vogue within the UK. When Jo Brand joked about throwing acid on Nigel Farage there was no arrest. When Wes Streeting posted about wanting to push a Daily Mail columnist in front of a train there was no arrest. When many participants in Pride this yr held signs reading ‘Punch a TERF’ there have been no arrests.
Chanting ‘burn the witch’ won’t get you arrested. You can shout ‘death, death to the IDF’ and face no consequences. In today’s Britain encouraging people to chop other peoples throats shouldn’t be incitement to violence (providing you’ve got the precise political beliefs). But Linehan’s ‘punch up’ joke required five armed cops to make an arrest!
This is a pattern of censorship and attempted thought control that’s being repeated throughout the Western world. Finnish MP, Päivi Räsänen, has been dragged through the law courts since 2019 for daring to query the Lutheran Church’s support for a Pride event in Helsinki.
In Germany you possibly can be arrested for saying that a politician is fat. In Australia and within the UK, governments are preparing latest blasphemy laws which can, in effect, make it illegal to criticise Islam.
In Australia a New South Wales Court has just ruled that calling two biologically male soccer players who discover as female ‘male’ is against the law, punishable by a high-quality of $200,000. Apparently telling the reality in NSW is now against the law. Anyone who dares to disagree risks being fined and compelled to undergo ‘re-education’.
All of that is profoundly disturbing. And yet the case of Graham Linehan may mark a turning point. The overwhelming majority of individuals, including many commentators, politicians and journalists, even some who’ve been indoctrinated into the trans cult, can see that sending armed cops to arrest a person for a tweet, is a ridiculous overreach.
Even senior police at the moment are starting to grasp that. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley stated that officers are in an “unattainable position” when policing online speech, suggesting that the present laws force them to analyze cases like Linehan’s, which he described as a part of “toxic culture wars debates”.
He also argued that the police mustn’t be involved in such matters and called for the federal government to make clear or change the law to limit resources dedicated to tackling online statements unless they pose a transparent risk of harm or disorder.
As a minister within the Christian church, I actually have been coping with, and welcoming, trans people in my church for a few years. But I is not going to lie about them, or for them. No government can compel me to state what’s a falsehood.
I feel of 1 brave university lecturer who, when asked to sign a trans policy stating that men could develop into women, refused to achieve this. His colleagues suggested that he not risk his profession, and that he should just go together with what all of them knew was rubbish. He refused to achieve this on the grounds it was unscientific, and ultimately, the university was forced to back down and alter its policy. Maybe if more of us followed the instance of that man in addition to the likes of Linehan and JK Rowling, we’d stop this unscientific, illogical, unloving and totalitarian ideology.
Most of the elites could have been captured by it, especially after their mandated Stonewall training, but the remaining of the world is just not buying it.
Perhaps the farcical arrest of Graham Linehan will probably be the canary within the coalmine that wakes society as much as what is happening – and causes us to say ‘enough is enough’. I believe and hope that our Father Ted moment will probably be a major one for the UK – and beyond.
David Robertson is the previous minister of St Peters Free Church in Dundee. He is currently the minister of Scots Kirk Presbyterian Church in Newcastle, New South Wales, and blogs at The Wee Flea.
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