John Cleese’s Fight Against The Humorless U.K. Thought Police

John Cleese doesn’t care if he’s arrested if that’s the cost of speaking the truth. In fact, he looks forward to it.

5Pillars, a British Muslim news organization, has reported the Monty Python star to the U.K.’s Prevent program for X posts and comments critical of Islam. Prevent is a counterterrorism program meant to stop radicalization before it turns into violent terror attacks. While Prevent’s intentions are noble and even necessary, its broad mandate against extremism, paired with the country’s lack of free speech protections, functionally allows the department to be used as a censorship cudgel against opinions that run contrary to leftist social tides in the U.K.

Cleese calls the reporting “One of the proudest moments of [his] life,” and has not let this intimidation slow him down. He’s still cracking jokes and using his rapier wit to call out the ills he sees in British society, from mass migration of Muslims to men claiming to be women forcing their way into women-only spaces.

Cleese has good reason to fear that handcuffs and a mug shot may be imminent. The U.K. takes so-called hate speech, also known as common sense, incredibly seriously. Just ask fellow comedian Graham Linehan. The “Father Ted” creator was arrested at Heathrow Airport and held for 12 hours for X posts criticizing transgenderism. While he was rightfully released and later received £25,000 and an apology, not everyone accused of wrong speech is so lucky.

Eighteen-year-old university student Henry Nowak was fatally stabbed by a Sikh man, Vickrum Digwa. Rather than handcuff his assailant, the police restrained the dying Nowak, all because Digwa falsely claimed racial abuse. Digwa was eventually tried, found guilty, and sentenced to prison; that’s cold comfort for Nowak’s family. A bright young man’s fatal wounds were ignored because bad words were deemed worse than physical violence.

The U.K.’s stifling of free speech and expression is not just a flesh wound.

Applying this “extremism” charge, Cleese is especially galling and quite humorous in light of the actor’s extensive and well-documented history of countering it on either side.

Cleese was the quintessential anti-woke centrist before it was cool. He didn’t drift rightward as much as the Left sprinted to extremism. And as a writer and comedian, Cleese does what he does best: acknowledge the absurdity in hopes of influencing hearts and minds toward common sense.

The actor has long been a vocal and active supporter of the center-left Liberal Democrats and, before that, the original Social Democratic Party, or SDP (the one that ran from 1981-88, not the continuing party from 1988-90, or the successors in 1990). Cleese participated in a 1987 broadcast in support of the then SDP-Liberal Alliance, in which he satirically extols the appeal of extremism on either the far Left or far Right, in an effort to encourage collaboration and bipartisanship.

He played the voice of reason in an oddly prescient sequence in the hysterical 1979 film “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.” In a parody of revolutionaries more focused on complaining and arguing among themselves than endeavoring to improve their society, fellow Python Eric Idle demands that the group fight for his right to have babies, as he wishes to be a woman. What was a punchline 50 years ago is considered a serious conversation. His character could be at risk of arrest in today’s United Kingdom.

You don’t need to agree with everything Cleese says to find this growing tide of censorship worrying. When certain groups can use the government to turn criticism into crime, everyone is less free. You shouldn’t have to risk jail time to give your opinions about the state of your country, but since that is the sad state of affairs across the pond, at least the voice is clever, witty, and fearless.

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Paulina Enck is a media specialist in Washington, D.C.

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