JD Vance Continues To Be Vindicated About Free Speech in the UK

Vice President JD Vance continues to be completely vindicated about the disintegration of free speech in Europe and the U.K.

In February he told The Daily Signal’s Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell that “there have been infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British … but also affect American technology companies, and, by extension, American citizens.”

At the time, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer brushed these criticisms aside, saying he was “very proud,” of the U.K.’s history protecting free speech and claimed “that it will last for a very, very long time.”

By very, very long time I guess he meant a few months.

On Tuesday, the well-known Irish comedian Graham Linehan, who co-created a few highly regarded sitcoms in the U.K., posted on Substack that he had been arrested when he arrived at Heathrow airport over posts he made on X.

Linehan has drawn the ire of the Left by continually criticizing the gender identity movement. It appears that they’ve now decided to unleash the police to shut him up.

Linehan wrote on Substack that he had a feeling something strange was going on when he was boarding his flight in Arizona. He said that after showing his passport at the gate Linehan was told that he, “didn’t have a seat and had to be re-ticketed.”

Linehan chalked this off to the general misery of air travel but wrote cheekily, “In hindsight, it was clear I’d been flagged. Someone, somewhere, probably wearing unconvincing make-up and his sister/wife’s/mum’s underwear, had made a phone call.”

Linehan described how after he arrived in Heathrow, he was apprehended by five police officers who informed him he was under arrest for three posts he made on X.

“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 (and no, I promise you, I am not making this up),” Linehan wrote.

You can see for yourself the social media posts that apparently warranted police attention.

In one post, Linehan was making somewhat a serious point when he wrote, “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.”

In another post he made fun of a photo of transgender activists by writing that it was a “photo you can smell.” And in the third post he called transgender activists “misogynists and homophobes.”

It’s worth noting that Linehan has already had to flee to the United States, where these posts would be considered protected speech under the First Amendment, to continue what has been a highly successful career in comedy and scriptwriting.

The Irish-born writer announced at the end of 2024 that he was moving to the U.S. because after speaking out against radical gender ideology he couldn’t find work. He had been banned from Edinburgh’s Leith Arches over his views. Linehan said when making the move to Arizona that in the U.K., “freedom of speech is in bad shape at the moment.”

That turned out to be spot on.

Unlike the gasbag Hollywood liberal types who talk about moving to their third or fourth home in Canada every time a Republican wins a presidential election, Linehan had a very good reason to think his freedom was in jeopardy. It was.

This isn’t the only time someone has been arrested for social media posts in the U.K.

The Times, a British newspaper, reported in April that more than 30 people are arrested on average every day in the U.K. under “section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988.”

Section 127 makes it illegal to use any “public communications network for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety to another person.”

That law has allowed U.K. authorities to aggressively and increasingly police speech.

The Free Speech Union, a public interest group in the U.K., noted that “officers from 37 police forces made 12,183 arrests in 2023, the equivalent of about 33 per day. This marks an almost 58 per cent rise in arrests since before the pandemic. In 2019, forces logged 7,734 detentions.”

Every day we get more evidence that the U.K., like apparently most of Europe, is willing to drastically curtail the free speech rights of its people in the name of political correctness. Most arrests seem to revolve around people criticizing immigration policies or groups the Left considers a protected class, like gender identity activists.

Some are calling this high profile arrest a turning point in the debates over speech in the U.K. I certainly hope it is.

The U.K. now has blasphemy laws for a new, woke religion. And I can’t say I’m surprised. For years, the lurch toward totalitarianism has been, from my Yankee perspective, obvious.

The U.S. seemed to very much be heading the same direction during the Great Awokening. But Americans woke up.

Call it our longstanding tyrannophobia. Maybe it was our remarkable constitutional heritage, our cultural and legal commitment to free speech. Or maybe it was providence.

Whatever the true source, there’s no denying that there’s been a substantial turning of the tide as Americans emphatically rejected institutional wokeness with the re-election of President Donald Trump. We are trying to fix the problem, but it festers in Europe.

Will the U.K finally rouse from its slumber? There are signs, flags really, that they’ve had enough. But the hour is late. Let’s hope the arrest of a comedian is the wake up call they needed.

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