The UK’s Free Speech Crackdown

Thank God we fought a revolution in this country so that we are not ruled by the idiotic rules of the modern United Kingdom.

Graham Linehan is a comedian and comedy writer who was just arrested in the UK — for his tweets.

Unfortunately, this is not uncommon in the UK. In mid-August, the New York Post titled an article, “UK free speech crackdown sees up to 30 people a day arrested for petty offenses such as retweets and cartoons.” The Post wrote:

Bernadette Spofforth lay in jail on a blue gym mattress in a daze, finding it difficult to move, even breathe. “I just closed down. But the other half of my brain went into Jack Reacher mode,” she said, referring to the fictional action hero. “Every single detail was in this very vivid, bright, sharp focus.”

She remembers noticing that you can’t drown yourself in the toilet, because there’s no standing water in it and the flush button is too far to reach if your head were in the bowl. She’d end up being detained for 36 hours in July 2024. Three girls had just been murdered in Southport, England, at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party. But Spofforth was not under suspicion for the crime.

Instead, horrified, and in the fog of a developing tragedy, she’d reposted on X another user’s content blaming newly arrived migrants for the ghastly crime — clarifying in her retweet, “If this is true.” Hours later she realized she may have received bad information and deleted the post — but it had already been seen thousands of times. …

Her story is one repeated almost hourly in the UK, where data suggests over 30 people a day are arrested for speech crimes, about 12,000 a year, under laws written well before the age of social media that make crimes of sending “grossly offensive” messages or sharing content of an “indecent, obscene or menacing character.”

Four police vehicles arrived at her home days later.

Linehan wrote on Substack:

The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting. Not one, not two—five. They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three tweets. 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.)

The tweet read: “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 ba**s.”

Linehan was arrested for that tweet. He was also arrested for another tweet in which there was a gigantic trans protest in London, of which he tweeted a photo, captioned, “A photo you can smell,” followed by a tweet in which he wrote, “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. F*** em.”

“At Heathrow police station, my belt, bag, and devices were confiscated,” he wrote. “Then I was shown into a small green-tiled cell with a bunk, a silver toilet in the corner and a message from Crimestoppers on the ceiling next to a concave mirror that was presumably there to make you reflect on your life choices. … At one point, I said ‘I bet I know who made this complaint. Lindsay Watson’ (demented ex-copper troon who was fired for his online conduct). Then, lo-and-behold, one of my lawyers sent me this reply to the ‘bollocks’ tweet.”

The reply stated, “That weird ex-copper claims he has reported this to police and is trying to get other troons to do so. Just FYI.”

Welcome to England, the birthplace of the Magna Carta, where they are tearing down the institutions that make a functional society.

WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show

It’s not just that these folks in the UK are interested in tearing away free speech and saying you’re not allowed to tweet a bad thing, that bad tweets might land you in jail: They are importing people from parts of the planet who hate and despise all of the centralizing Western principles, such as free speech.

I write in “Lions And Scavengers” about the coalition of scavengers, about the idea that you have barbarians — the people from outside who hate our civilization — who join forces with the lechers inside our civilization who believe that they are marginalized by our traditional institutions and values, and then they make common cause together. 

That’s the UK in a nutshell.

It is no coincidence that on Tuesday, the Home Secretary of the UK, Yvette Cooper, said that the UK is going to take in refugees from Gaza. She stated:

I confirm that the Home Office has put in place systems to issue expedited visas with biometric checks conducted prior to arrival for children and their immediate accompanying family members. We have done the same for all the Chevening scholars and are now in the process of doing so for the next group of students from Gaza who have been awarded fully funded scholarships and places at UK universities so that they can start their studies in autumn this year.

Later this year, we will set out plans to establish a permanent framework for refugee students to come and study in the UK so that we can help more talented young people fleeing war and persecution to find a better future, alongside capped and managed ways for refugees to work here in the UK.

Congrats to the people of Great Britain. They don’t just have to contend with the insanity inside their borders, but out of some sort of misplaced sympathy, they are going to be importing people who almost certainly do not share their values.

There are plenty of other countries on planet Earth that are more akin ideologically and culturally to the people of Gaza, but according to the wonderful folks in the UK, those countries don’t exist.

There’s been some opposition within Westminster to taking in refugees from Gaza.

Conservative shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick expressed apprehension at the idea of resettling Palestinians in the UK. He wrote in The Telegraph, “The truth is that Gaza’s Arab neighbors are prepared to offer humanitarian support, but consider the idea of inviting Gazans into the country at any scale a risk only a fool would take.”

Which, of course, is true.

This is a misapplied sense of guilt directed at the Third World by the Labor Party in the UK, a belief that in the oppressor/oppressed matrix, the UK is an oppressor; Israel is an oppressor; the people of Gaza are the oppressed, and therefore the people of the UK must accept people who believe that Western civilization is in and of itself wrong and terrible.

As a side note, we should point out at this point here that Qatar — which is essentially Hamas with nicer suits — owns much of London.

“A cursory look at Property Week shows that the Qatari Investment Authority, Qatari Holding and Qatari Diar own 23,253,699 square feet of London, making Qatar the largest owner of London property. Reports vary about the sum invested, alleged to be £35 billion. Qatar’s square footage is more than HM The Queen’s Crown Estate,” Sunday Guardian Live reported.

If you ever wonder why Europe is so warm toward importing people who truly hate their civilization, a big part of the reason is this — money.