Graham Linehan arrives at Westminster Magistrates Court in London. Photo / Getty Images
For months, right-wing politicians, including United States Vice-President JD Vance, have accused Britain of chilling free speech by arresting people who posted inflammatory anti-migrant messages online during last summer’s riots.
At the same time, left-wing activists in London are waging a legal battle against the British Government for arresting peaceful protesters who carried signs in support of a pro-Palestine organisation that the government has labelled a terrorist group.
Until last week, British police and the Government had staunchly defended the arrests on both sides of the ideological spectrum as necessary for public safety.
But the dramatic arrest last week of a comedian turned anti-transgender activist — the latest clash over the limits of free speech in Britain — may be causing officials to rethink their position.
That has the potential to reshape the contours of a debate that has implications for politics, free expression, and criminal justice.
“This one did seem actually kind of tailor-made to produce widespread outrage, partly because of the absurdly melodramatic way in which he was arrested,” said Gavin Phillipson, a professor of law at the University of Bristol in England.
“But it could be a kind of tipping point where there’s a serious examination of the laws we have on the books.”
Graham Linehan, an Irish comedy writer, was arrested by five police officers as he got off a plane at Heathrow Airport on suspicion of inciting violence against transgender people online.
He had posted several social media comments in April, including one saying that anyone who sees a transgender woman in a “female-only space” should “make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls”.
Linehan’s vivid online description of his arrest and lengthy questioning by the police triggered another wave of condemnation from the country’s right-wing politicians and press, who decried an out-of-control police force and a government determined to clamp down on opinions it deemed offensive.
“Sending five officers to arrest a man for a tweet isn’t policing, it’s politics,” said Kemi Badenoch, leader of the opposition Conservative Party, adding that police resources were being “wasted on thought policing”.
Several transgender advocacy groups, however, warned that hate crime was on the rise, and one said they understood Linehan’s online post to be an “unambiguous call for vigilante violence”.
The incident seemed likely to escalate the political debate.
However, for the first time, senior police officials and top government ministers hinted they were open to the possibility that the arrests and prosecutions of hundreds of British citizens over the past year might be going too far.
In a statement, Mark Rowley, the commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, said his officers should not be “policing toxic culture wars”, saying that the complexity of the current law put them in “an impossible position”.
Rowley, who oversees London’s 46,000 police officers, vowed to implement a “more stringent triaging process to make sure only the most serious cases are taken forward in future, where there is a clear risk of harm or disorder”.
Wes Streeting, Britain’s Health Secretary, echoed the commissioner, declaring that “we want the police to focus on policing streets rather than tweets”.
And Prime Minister Keir Starmer declined to defend Linehan’s arrest, saying instead that “we must ensure the police focus on the most serious issues”.
The reaction to Linehan’s case highlights how British authorities are struggling to balance competing principles of law.
Should police err on the side of public safety by aggressively cracking down when speech calls for violence or harassment?
Or should they prioritise freedom of expression, tilting away from arrests and prosecution when the speech in question is not a clear and immediate threat?
For more than a year, a debate over those questions has been largely led by conservative political figures including Vance; US President Donald Trump; Nigel Farage, the right-wing populist British politician; and Elon Musk, the billionaire mogul whose social media site X has abandoned efforts to moderate potentially harmful content from users.
In the summer of 2024, when posts on X falsely blamed the murder of three young girls in the English town of Southport on a recently arrived Muslim asylum-seeker, anti-immigrant riots broke out in towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland, fuelled online by far-right agitators.
Police cracked down hard, arresting and eventually prosecuting several people for violating laws against speech that incites violence.
Although opinion polls showed that the crackdown was widely supported by the British public, some conservatives seized on the arrests, calling them unwarranted suppression of political views.
Vance, barely in office a month when he visited Europe in February, accused Britain of a “backslide away from conscience rights” and claimed that the greatest threat to Europe was not from Russia or China but from “within”.
“In Britain, and across Europe,” he said at a security conference in Munich, “free speech, I fear, is in retreat.”
Unlike America, which has the First Amendment guaranteeing free expression, long-standing laws in Britain protect the right to free expression and assembly but only when they don’t contravene other rights, including privacy or the right to be free from harassment.
Anger at the British Government is also growing from liberals inside the country, who accuse Starmer’s government of using national security laws meant for terror groups like al-Qaeda and Isis to shut down a pro-Palestinian activist group and many peaceful supporters.
In June, the British Government put the group, Palestine Action, on its list of terror organisations, after its members continued a campaign of property destruction aimed at companies and the British military, which they accused of helping Israel in its war in the Gaza Strip.
Since then, police have arrested more than 1000 people — not for participating in property damage, but for expressing support for Palestine Action.
Hundreds have been arrested during weekend protests for holding up signs that said “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”
The country’s courts are examining whether Palestine Action should have been designated a terrorist group. In the meantime, supportive protesters have turned it from a question about the definition of terrorism into one about free speech.
“I have great sympathy for the police,” said Paul Wragg, a professor of media law at the University of Leeds, north of London.
He said that the public would likely be outraged if people were seriously injured or died because of violence that was incited online and the police had not tried to intervene.
He added: “We’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. Of course free speech is important.”
Wragg called hateful comments about transgender people and migrants “toxic” and “abhorrent” to most people.
And he said that free speech is not an absolute right in the United Kingdom. He said the legitimate debate over how to enforce those laws appropriately is mired in what he called a “toxic culture war”.
In the US, Trump and Vance have accused their political rivals of suppressing speech even as they have moved aggressively to silence their own enemies.
The President has fired career officials he disagrees with, pushed to shut down museum exhibits that he doesn’t like, and has attacked law firms, media companies, and universities.
Last week, Trump signed an executive order criminalising the burning of the American flag, waving aside a landmark 1989 Supreme Court case that said doing so was political speech protected by the First Amendment.
Trump called that court “sad” even though Justice Antonin Scalia, who was serving on the court and is a conservative icon, once said that flag burning must be protected because it was “the main kind of speech that tyrants would seek to suppress”.
Wragg said that in both countries, “we are being driven apart into these polarised groups who don’t want to talk to each other because they are insistent, they are right”, blaming that in part on social media sites that amplify outrage and disagreement.
Those divisions were on full display on September 3, when the issue of free speech in Britain raged on both sides of the Atlantic.
In a congressional hearing room in Washington, Farage accused his own country of sinking into an “awful authoritarian situation”, comparing Britain to North Korea.
Farage clashed at the hearing with Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the panel, who noted that the British politician had called for a ban on a pro-Gaza protest in London last year and prevented journalists he disagreed with from attending his party’s annual political convention.
Farage mostly dodged the accusation, saying that “I can’t think of banning anybody” but said that maybe somebody else in his party might have done it.
Just hours earlier in Parliament, Starmer accused Farage of flying to America to “talk down our country” and defended “a long history of free speech in this country”.
The day of remarkable, split screen moments — Farage’s outrage in Washington and Starmer’s indignation in London — was a demonstration of how difficult it may yet be for either country to find a middle ground solution that satisfies most people.
Jeffrey Howard, a professor at University College London, said Farage’s comment comparing Britain to North Korea was “just preposterous”.
Compared to the US, “the British and the Europeans have different views about where to draw those lines,” he said.
“The important thing to stress is there’s reasonable room for reasonable disagreement.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Michael D. Shear
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