The police are further to the Left than Owen Jones now - "If you’d have told someone 20 years ago that the police would become the most dangerously politically correct institution in Britain, they’d have scarcely believed you... Since then, we appear to have emerged into a parallel universe. Everyone in the British establishment suddenly believes in free speech and is denouncing Linehan’s treatment. Keir Starmer, with one eye on Washington, has told the police to focus on policing the streets rather than the tweets. Wes Streeting has suggested our speech laws should be reviewed. Even Owen Jones, cancel culture’s answer to Mary Whitehouse, has criticised the arrest, albeit while beating up on the poor bloke for being “beyond awful”. Of course, this lot have often been deathly silent as scores of gender-critical women have been cancelled and harassed by the police for daring to advocate for their sex-based rights. (Though Streeting, to his credit, has been on more of a journey.) Even so, with the ignoble exception of new Green leader Zack Polanski – who has been on the airwaves this past 24 hours supporting Britain’s Poundshop Stasi to the hilt – the response to Linehan’s case among the faux-Left elite has been remarkably more reasonable. This tells us something about the state of the police, who have tumbled much further down the woke-authoritarian rabbit hole than many still realise. The explosion of speech-related arrests – the fact that police in England and Wales are now feeling the collars of at least 30 people a day for saying offensive things online – is as much about the zealotry of the cops as it is about what’s on the statute book. They often go well beyond what even our outrageously illiberal laws require. Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine were arrested at their home in Borehamwood in January, after they got into a protracted, largely online row with their daughter’s school. They were arrested at home, in front of their daughter, had their devices seized as if they were drug dealers or terrorists, interviewed and held for eight hours, and investigated for five weeks, only to be told that Hertfordshire Police would be taking no further action. Or take the case of feminist Kate Scottow, who was arrested in 2018 for causing “needless anxiety’ to a man she dared to call “he” on social media. Shockingly, that case even got as far as a conviction. It took a subsequent appeal for our supposedly world-leading criminal-justice system to realise that, as of yet, it is not actually a crime to accurately describe someone’s sex. Metropolitan Police chief Sir Mark Rowley claims that officers have been put in an impossible position by overly broad legislation. Following Linehan-gate, he too is calling for the law to be changed. But the truth is the police have been going out of their way to crack down on dissent and protect the public from hurtful words, even if it means letting a few burglaries and assaults slip. Non-crime hate incidents – the dystopian practice whereby cops secretly draw up lists of “hateful” speech or conduct – weren’t ushered in by an Act of Parliament, but by the College of Policing quango. In 2014, it published guidance instructing officers to automatically record reported “hate incidents”, “irrespective of whether there is any evidence to identify the hate element”. Long derided as the armed wing of bigotry, police in recent decades appear to have made the most perverse over-correction. Rather than treat everyone fairly, they have concluded the best way to burnish their image is to act as the personal goon squad of brittle, identitarian activists, and become willing participants in the brainwashing offered by groups like Stonewall. They seem to have come to the conclusion that Britain’s sexual or ethnic minorities desperately want to be protected from offence, rather than actual crime. Now the authoritarian consequences of this woke glow-up are plain for (almost) all to see."
Two tier policing is a myth
Why has the Left abandoned free speech? - "This remarkable example of police and judicial overreach and disregard for free speech drew widespread condemnation, much of it from the Right and centre-Right. The government has also condemned the arrest but supported the laws under which it happened – surely an unsustainable position. On the Left however there has been some support for Linehan’s arrest, most notably from the newly elected leader of the Green Party, Zack Polanski. It seems from this and other incidents that support for free speech is now definitely Right-coded while the advocacy of censorship and regulation of speech and expression is clearly Left-coded... One reason perhaps is that the establishment is always hostile to free expression and the cultural Left is now the establishment. Arguably we have had a religious transformation, in which Christianity has been replaced by a kind of identity politics as the “public doctrine”: offences against it count as blasphemy to be punished. Another major reason is a transformation in the concept or category of the Left. Its central meaning used to be an economic doctrine of egalitarianism and economic collectivism – which was compatible with classical liberal ideas about expression. It now has become a cultural doctrine. It is founded on ideas around identity, and the need to criticise subordination and domination. Since language and speech are held to play a key part in this, they can and must be regulated."
The right support freedom of speech. Therefore freedom of speech is bad
Britons can no longer honestly say we live in a free country - "If the police really had no choice but to make an arrest – a well-prepared and therefore time-consuming arrest in the case of Linehan, since he was cuffed as soon as he landed in Britain – they would have no choice but to arrest the legions of burglars and shoplifters who commit their crimes undeterred. They would also lack the discretion to make other choices that prompt accusations of “two-tier justice”. In Epping for example, the police escorted professional agitators to counter locals protesting against the asylum hotel. But in London, officers stopped a Jewish campaigner walking through an anti-Israel march route to “prevent disorder”. Just as they did with activists of other kinds, police forces have chosen to enter the culture wars – siding with, funding and receiving training from the trans activists at Stonewall – and the consequences are clear. But police culpability does not let the Government off the hook. Forces may choose to exercise their powers in these inappropriate ways, but they should not be free to do so, and if the law is abused it must change. The explanation for forty-year-old laws suddenly being used to attack free speech probably reflects a change in police culture, especially among chief constables, the politicisation of police training, and the widening scope of the law encouraged by prosecutors and judges. Laws like the Equality Act and Human Rights Act, and the creep of so-called “non-crime hate incidents”, have also played their part. It is not good enough for the Prime Minister to blithely claim we do have free speech, or we do not have blasphemy laws, or deny the existence of “two-tier justice”. The buck stops with him, and if we want to preserve our right to free expression we need drastic change."
Green leader Zack Polanksi is a menace, but his deputy worries me most - "Ali declared that Israelis “are not victims, they’re occupiers”, and urged the world to “support the right of indigenous people” to “fight back against occupiers”. Now, I don’t know about you. But personally, I wouldn’t hail the single bloodiest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust as a “fightback against occupiers”. Nor would I argue that the proscribed terrorist group Hamas had the “right” to perpetrate it... Polanski said it was “proportionate” to arrest the comedy writer, because his tweets about trans people were “totally unacceptable”... If Polanski thinks it’s fine to arrest someone for posting something offensive on social media, does he think his own deputy should have been arrested, too?"
Trans activist ‘threatened to sue police if they didn’t investigate Linehan’ - "He said: “I think [trans activists] get great joy out of destroying peoples lives. “Just getting me into this seat is an end in itself. It is almost irrelevant if I get convicted. Putting me through this is enough. They are sadistic.”... Linehan told the court that he had been promoting the gender-critical movement for more than 10 years and trans activists had “made his life hell”. He said the campaign, which he felt he had a “moral duty” to pursue, had cost him his family, his friends, his career and led to him leaving the UK permanently... The comedy writer accused police of working on behalf of trans-activists and said he had received credible death threats but “nothing was done about it”. He said: “They don’t understand the issue and they believe everything trans activists say to them … I don’t think there is a conspiracy. I just think a lot of institutions have been captured by trans ideology.” Earlier, the court heard that the Metropolitan Police initially dropped the investigation into Linehan but reopened it after Ms Brooks threatened them with legal action... The comedy writer said: “Police in the UK have become a sort of errand boy for these men.” Linehan said that the pro-trans movement was “very male, abusive, sadistic” and filled with “dangerous” men. He said that he had “always had a thing about bullies” and he thought Ms Brooks was “disgusting” for allegedly bullying women. He said he viewed Ms Brooks, who he referred to as a man, as being a “young soldier in the trans activist army” and described the teenager as a “snide misogynist”. He told the court that Ms Brooks, who he refers to as Tarquin, had been harassing people anonymously online and in person before he began posting about the activist. He denied his social media posts amounted to a campaign of harassment and he only wanted to “destroy” Ms Brooks’s anonymity. “I was trying to inform people as to the activities of a dangerous activist,” he added... He claimed that the “violence and toxicity” in the gender debate came entirely from the pro-trans side. “No one from our side has ever sent a rape threat, a death threat or anything like that”, he said."
How Graham Linehan went from comedy star to woke enemy number one - "It is important to remember that Graham Linehan doesn’t even live in the UK any more. So fed up was the creator of Father Ted and The IT Crowd with what he saw as the hostile censoriousness of British show business, after years of being an outspoken opponent of transgender activism, he recently moved to America to try to resurrect his career... Linehan has been one of the most high-profile, and total, victims of cancel culture in recent years. For the best part of a decade he has been unable to work in comedy – a field in which he was once at the top – as producers, actors and former friends all fled from his side in the wake of controversies he stirred up online. Linehan’s marriage broke down and he was left scrabbling for any kind of income... This is the story of how a comedy genius rose from inauspicious beginnings to reach the very top of his chosen art form, only to crash back down to earth and face the wrath of the law because of how he expresses his deeply held beliefs... It was while being treated for testicular cancer, in 2018, that Linehan started to engage with the growing discourse about transgender activism. While still high on morphine, he sent out a now lost tweet – he would later say he could not remember exactly what it said – about trans people that quickly made things toxic. One of the first replies he received was: “I wish the cancer had won.”... Linehan lost almost all of his income as a result of being, in effect, blackballed by the mainstream show business world... One of the most galling things for Linehan has been the fact that Mathews and Hannon have failed to come out and publicly defend him. It has also meant that there is little prospect of the Father Ted musical he has co-written seeing the light of day any time soon. He has been offered cash to step away from the project – which he thought would serve as his pension – but refused on a point of principle... Some tried to retrospectively cancel Linehan’s work in the light of his new-found activism. Channel 4, for instance, removed an episode of The IT Crowd from its streaming service in 2020 after it was criticised for a storyline in which Matt Berry’s character unwittingly dates a transgender woman and gets into a physical altercation when he learns the truth... Some of Linehan’s attempted comebacks have not worked. He was due to take part in a gig at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, but it was cancelled by the venue, Leith Arches, because his views on the trans debate did not “align with our overall values”. After a number of other venues turned him down, he ended up performing outside the Scottish Parliament building at Holyrood. Linehan has also claimed that he was offered the chance to direct Only Murders in the Building, the hit Disney+ comedy starring Steve Martin, but that was revoked because of his outspokenness... It is notable how few people in show business have put their heads above the parapet to come to Linehan’s defence. “I thought this would be over in a few months and someone would step in. I really did think as soon as people heard what’s been happening to children, all my friends, satirists, comedians, progressives, people who marched against the Iraq war, lesbians, gay men, they’d all come rushing to my aid,” he once said. “And no one turned up. Just no one turned up. All I got was dirty looks, people ghosting me. I joke that I used to know no one from real life, only people from the media. Now I know no one in the media and I’m friends with social workers and doctors and the Tavistock whistleblowers.”... Despite Linehan’s many woes, he is in the process of mounting something of a TV comeback. He has moved to Phoenix, Arizona and written a new series, Tenure, that is being produced in partnership with Andrew Doyle, the comic and GB News host, and Saturday Night Live alumnus Rob Schneider."
The failures that show the Metropolitan Police has its priorities all wrong - "Scotland Yard has the highest knife crime in the country, with 182 offences involving a knife or sharp instrument per 100,000 population over the year to March 2025, Ministry of Justice figures show... The Met recorded a record-high 26,602 sexual offences over the year to March 2025, up 10.2 per cent on the previous year and 80.6 per cent up on the 14,729 logged over the year to March 2015... Police data show the Met clocked a record 102,466 personal thefts, like bag or phone snatching, over the year to March 2025 – equivalent to almost one every five minutes of every day. Despite this, the Met charged just 459 of such offenders over 2024-25. That’s a record-low charge rate of 0.4 per cent, equating to just one in 223 of the perpetrators. Some 93,123 investigations were closed without a suspect being identified over the year, more than ever before... Labour told shopkeepers not to place “high value” items close to store entrances, to try to combat shoplifting, despite official figures showing nearly 800 reported offences going unsolved each day. In London, the Met has seen the number of offences rise at a faster rate than any other force outside London, other than Durham, over the past 10 years. The force has struggled to adapt to its increased workload, with just 5.9 per cent of offences resulting in a charge over the 12 months, in what is the lowest rate in the country. In contrast, the Met is leading the way in prosecutions like that of Linehan. Of last year’s 28 cases where an individual was charged for “using words intended to stir up religious or sexual orientation hatred”, the Met brought forward seven of them... The force has been heavily criticised for the different approaches policing social media to “physical crime”... Mr Miller, who won a free speech High Court battle following a visit from his local force after he tweeted about transgender rights, added: “They have got their priorities entirely wrong. “And it comes from the top. This comes from the College of Policing, chief constables and a succession of home secretaries. “We are now living in a Britain where law is secondary to the enforcement of a political ideology.” Susan Hall, leader of the London Assembly Conservatives, said the arrest over “hurty words” was “utterly ludicrous”. “I’m sick to death of people checking our words as opposed to our deeds,” she said. “We are being told that the Met is £260m short in funding. I would suggest they spend this dealing with people who have committed physical crimes.” She continued: “Writing things that may offend people are a completely different category to gang wars and shoplifting.”"
In the year 2000, one man foresaw today’s woke tyranny. If only we’d all listened - "In an essay published all of 25 years ago, long before the term “woke” entered everyday usage, the great conservative writer Theodore Dalrymple supplied a succinct analysis of what was then known as political correctness. PC, he explained, works by “forcing [people] to say or imply what they do not believe but must not question… Without an external despot to explain our pusillanimity, we have willingly adopted the mental habits of people who live under a totalitarian dictatorship.” As must now be obvious to all but the most blinkered of liberals, the age of woke is far more tyrannical than the age of PC. Yet the above words ring truer today than ever. The main reason that woke propaganda exerts such influence over our society is that, even though most people know it’s nonsense, all too many of them go along with it, because they’re scared of what might happen to them if they don’t. So, instead of saying what they think, they say what they think they should think... This, coupled with the arrest of Mr Linehan, makes the Left’s hysteria about Donald Trump look all the more pathetic. In May, the Left-wing British comedian Stewart Lee said he wouldn’t play any gigs in Trump’s terrifyingly authoritarian America because he feared that he’d be “locked up”. Four months on, I’ve still to hear of any comedians being arrested in the US for having Left-wing opinions. Only in Britain, for not having them."
Graham Linehan’s arrest has proved JD Vance right: Britain has a free speech problem - "Lord Young – founder and general secretary of the Free Speech Union – is quite right to say it “beggars belief” that Linehan was “held for 16 hours for making inappropriate jokes on social media”. That the Prime Minister felt free to maintain this is a nation with free speech under these circumstances also beggars belief. Perhaps, as Lord Young suggests, “the police should now arrest Sir Keir Starmer for knowingly spreading false information when he told JD Vance we don’t have a problem with free speech in the UK”."
Graham Linehan’s arrest is a humiliating new low - "The result is a system that pours completely disproportionate effort into investigating behaviour which many believe should not be criminal at all, with 30 arrests made each day for offensive online messages. At the same time, police forces have failed to solve a single burglary, personal theft or recover a stolen bike in 30 per cent of neighbourhoods in England and Wales. Sir Keir appears to share this view, with his spokesman saying the police should concentrate on issues that “matter most to their communities”. The question now is whether he intends to do something about it."
Retired police officer questioned after using trans woman’s male name - "A retired police officer was visited by her former force over social media posts “deadnaming” a transgender activist, The Telegraph can reveal. Cathy Larkman, who served with South Wales Police for more than three decades, was shocked when former colleagues turned up at her door near Port Talbot on Sept 4. The former superintendent said police informed her that the home visit was related to a handful of social media posts about a transgender activist named Freda Wallace. Ms Larkam had called the activist Fred, using the “dead” male name of the now transgender woman, and this act had been reported to the police... It is believed that Ms Larkman was reported by a disgraced transgender police officer named Lynsay Watson – a figure with a history of urging the authorities to pursue criminal investigations of people who are critical of gender ideology... Ms Larkman has raised concerns that police forces have become “ideologically captured” and too “weak and willing” to do the bidding of activists. Darren Millar, the leader of the Welsh Conservatives, said on Saturday that gender-critical views were the norm across most of the country and that they should not be the subject of police scrutiny."
Meme - Natalie B @Nat_freespeech: "Do you not think that two years is long enough? Shouldn't there now be a fresh voice on federal board?"
Ian Bristow @IanRBristow: *Cartoon: 'Shut the Fuck Up TERF' *blue haired 'girl' pointing pistol*
Camilla Tominey @CamillaTominey: "Just to confirm the person who tweeted this is a Lib Dem councillor in leafy Berkhamsted. Again: these people aren't progressives. Like the Greens they are the least tolerant people in the UK right now"
TezzAlap @TezzaLap: "Also, five armed police haven't turned up at his office to arrest him for incitement to violence. Funny that, isn't it?"
It's only incitement to violence if you're "punching down"
Liberal Democrat councillor suspended over ‘violent’ pro-trans tweet - "A spokeswoman for the campaign group Liberal Voice for Women said: “This misogynistic and threatening post is symptomatic of a wider culture within the party where this kind of abuse is normalised if it is done in the name of ‘trans rights’. “This has been going on since 2018 and party leaders have done nothing about it despite us drawing their attention to it on many occasions. “Until there is a change in attitude from those at the top of the party, young activists will continue to do and say things like this and continue to bring the party into disrepute.”"
Will I be arrested next, after Graham Linehan? - "If the Met is stalking airports for anyone who’s published a discouraging word about the, to me, deeply disturbing social obsession with transgenderism – even former UK residents who’ve fled Britain’s accelerating illiberalism, as both Linehan and I have – then I am at risk of arrest and detention if not imprisonment should I dare to hop another flight to Heathrow from my new home in Portugal... Rudely, I dare to misgender – meaning that I accurately identify the sex of – both the spiteful nutjob in Minneapolis and another trans murderer in Britain, who stabbed his husband with a samurai sword 50 times. (I still hew to the dated notion that journalists’ first loyalty is to factual truth.) This ‘mis’ identification alone could bring the cops to the end of my jetway in Terminal 5... Oh, no! Someone out there might find that view offensive! Which is all it takes to be prosecuted for ‘hate speech’: one person who says he or she is hurt. (This sense of injury is reliably a pose. Feigned trauma is a weapon. For lefty activists, the real experience of seizing on a sentence that can be wielded to devastate an opponent is one of glee.)... I won’t be the only American who reads about Linehan’s arrest and thinks twice about ever again setting foot in the UK. Is this what the British state wants? For even tourists who’ve ever ventured an online opinion outside the Overton window’s slit of progressive orthodoxy to decide they can’t afford the risk of visiting a country that arrests and imprisons people for their opinions? Does Britain really wish to court a reputation as an oppressive pariah in what was once traditionally designated ‘the free world’? Though isn’t it interesting how that expression has fallen out of fashion. The British state is not only policing what views we may express – it has also advanced to policing our feelings. Isn’t the criminalisation of ‘hate speech’ really aimed at the hatred itself? The state regards our very emotions as its business. We’re only allowed to feel nice things. We can only express warm and cuddly, fuzzy-wuzzy emotions like perfectly unearned ‘respect’. Perhaps more controversially than the tweet that recommended, with obvious comedic intent, punching men who invade women’s single-sex territories ‘in the balls’, Linehan wrote of trans activists on X: ‘I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. Fuck em.’ He said the H-word. Is it illegal to hate a political faction? Is it illegal to hate anyone personally who has one or more ‘protected characteristics’, the very statutory existence of which violates the bedrock democratic principle of equality under the law? Is hatred itself now an arrestable offence? I am not a ‘transphobe’ per se, because I am not afraid of these people, which is literally what the word means. But I do fear, and hate, the trans contagion, which has maddened the Western world and demanded its citizenries humour their compatriots’ delusions – thereby cultivating a mental universe that departs from factual reality, the textbook definition of insanity. We have institutionalised insanity. I hate that, too. I hate that we are being bullied and blackmailed by a small number of malicious crossdressing men – who do not represent all of their so-called community – into elaborate social and linguistic contortions to indulge what is commonly a sexual fetish. If these same people had contributed to the end of my marriage, made me veritably unemployable after I’d occupied the heights of my profession, and intimidated my colleagues into dropping a West End Father Ted musical that would have been a lucrative tribute to perhaps the most hilarious television series ever made about Ireland, I think I would, yes, hate these people as a collective. Were any of them known to me, and known to be personally responsible for some of this destruction of everything that I held dear about my life, I think I would probably hate them as individuals. We have the word ‘hate’ for a reason. It is a normal human emotion – fierce, difficult to control, not always rational or attractive, and taking a host of forms. Brief bursts of loathing can be preceded by repentant sheepishness; a simmering, backburner antipathy can last for years. But sometimes hatred can be directed righteously towards people who deserve it. There, have I done it now? Tempted the Met? Should I send them my itinerary with BA in December? I wonder if everyone on social media in Britain were to post ‘I hate anyone with protected characteristics’ all together on the same day, we might send the coppers into a frenzy that ends in meltdown, the way tigers turn to butter."
Graham Linehan's arrest is a turning point | The Spectator - "The hoo-ha over free speech being trampled on has always seemed exaggerated... But there are moments when the penny drops and you realise you are wrong. Today has provided one of those moments... Criminality is evolving every day in this sphere. Increasingly, giving offence is being taken by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service as prima facie evidence of criminality. The other side of this coin is that taking offence is seen as legitimate grounds for a complaint... Trust in the police is at an all-time low. In October 2024, 52 per cent of adults told YouGov that they had no confidence in the police to tackle crime, compared to 39 per cent in October 2019. What the police don’t now do – tackle crime – is just one aspect of the collapse in trust. Allied to that is what the police do now do – such as arresting people over social media posts which merely give offence to someone. It’s of a piece with what is seen on the regular hate marches, where they stand and watch when there are calls for the murder of Jews (such as the widespread ‘globalise the intifada’), but only spring into action when a counter-demonstrator turns up, saying that they are likely to provoke a breach of the peace. What we are seeing is the congruence of two dangerous developments. First, is the idea that giving offence is something which should be banned. The government’s current move towards adopting a definition of Islamophobia is part of this, and has rightly been labelled by Fiyaz Mughal, the founder of Muslim anti-prejudice group TellMAMA, as introducing a blasphemy law by the back door. Similarly, the onward march of the trans ideologues may have been stopped in its tracks by the Supreme Court’s ruling on the definition of ‘woman’, but the ideology has already taken hold of many institutions and spaces. Which leads to the second development – the police’s capture by this and other ‘woke’ ideologies. Linehan describes how in his police interview a police officer mentioned trans people: “I asked him what he meant by the phrase. ‘People who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth.’ I said: ‘Assigned at birth? Our sex isn’t assigned.’ He called it semantics, I told him he was using activist language.’ This is the nub of it. The police, supposed guardians of the law, have become players in the activists’ capture of the institutions. It is not that they are no longer concerned with crime, but that they are redefining what crime is. It is terrible that Linehan should have had to go through this. But if it wakes more of us up to what is happening in Britain, his arrest will have served our country well."
Police chiefs tell Home Secretary: change law so we can stop policing tweets - "The Home Secretary must change the law to stop officers unnecessarily policing tweets, three of Britain’s top police chiefs have urged. The senior officers have written to Shabana Mahmood claiming that public order laws set the criminal bar so low that online comments are being recorded and investigated – and it should not be their responsibility. They are also understood to be backing calls by Sir Andy Cooke, the HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary, to scrap non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) in order to protect free speech. The plea has been made by Sir Mark Rowley, the Met Police Commissioner, Gavin Stephens, chairman of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), and Sir Andy Marsh, the head of the College of Policing, which sets standards on police practice and behaviour. It comes amid growing anger at police intervention in social media spats. Scotland Yard came under fire last week after sending five armed officers to arrest Graham Linehan, the comedy writer, over comments he posted on X... An NCHI is defined as an incident that falls short of being criminal but which is perceived to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards a person with a particular characteristic. They were introduced in 2014, some 15 years after the Macpherson report – prompted by the racist killing of Stephen Lawrence – recommended them."
Meme - J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling: "Context: this trans-identified man and public fetishist has been illegally entering women's single-sex spaces, gleefully posting pictures of himself doing it and remains untroubled by police visits."
Sophie Molly @SophieMolly_OFF: "I have known about the plan to get Graham arrested for a while. It's great when a plan comes together. Thanks to my friends in the Underground Trans Mafia."
At the risk of being arrested, I suggest Met chief Mark Rowley is a total muppet - "A rattled Sir Mark has hit back saying he wants Shabana Mahmood, the new Home Secretary, to change the law so police are not obliged to record or investigate complaints when there is no evidence that the suspect intended to cause real-world harm. Officers, he says, should be given more discretion to “use common sense”. At the risk of being handcuffed for causing “distress”, “alarm” or “anxiety”, I say: “Sir Mark, you disingenuous muppet, you!” It’s perfectly clear that the police have discretion to ignore complaints, even crimes, if they want to. Let’s see now:
Phone theft – ignored.
Shoplifting – essentially legal.
Carjacking – we’ll send you a crime number.
Burglaries – help yourself, lads!
Sexual harassment, child gang rape – er, sorry, cultural sensitivities.
For Sir Mark to claim that his officers were unable to use their common sense and ignore a complaint from a notorious trans activist about the Father Ted creator is to insult the public’s intelligence. Baroness Emma Nicholson nailed this weaselly dissimulation in a delicious letter to Sir Mark in which she unpicked the Commissioner’s logic with a glittering bodkin so lethal it could have been wielded by Jane Austen. She disputes that Linehan’s “F--- ’em” tweet was an incitement to sexual activity nor that “Punch them in the balls” (advice given by every mother to a daughter encountering a male predator) was to be taken literally. “If your officers can identify one phrase as not meant literally,” she wrote, “surely they ought to be able to do that with the other and dismiss the complaint.” You could cut your hand on the Baroness’s scorn. She goes on to accuse the Met of allowing itself, to all appearances, to be “exploited as tools” by former police constable Lynsay Watson, a long-time Linehan trans antagonist. Dismissed for gross misconduct by Leicestershire Police, Watson is a serial litigant against several forces and institutions. “Were your colleagues wary of being added to the list? Were they simply ignorant? Or are they, as you assert, mere automatons impelled to act unthinkingly once their buttons are pushed?” Baroness Nicholson enquired innocently. Her closing salvo has entered the annals of political satire: “Instead of blaming Parliament for your officers’ inability to think for themselves intelligently, perhaps you might firmly tell them, please, to stop being stupid.”... Alas, humour, although still legal at the time of writing, offers very little protection against the prevailing Orwellian madness. Mock the police as much as you like, for ridicule is the least the dolts deserve, but they continue to arrest 30 people every day for offensive online messages... Look at the video, currently doing the rounds on social media, of an officer and his three colleagues apparently arresting a man for calling someone a “muppet”, commonly an expression of playful exasperation... The pattern is always the same. When the police want to behave like social-justice activists they demand “operational independence”. When they get found out suddenly they want “guidance”. None of this is by accident. The stretching or misinterpreting of legislation that was intended for genuinely threatening scenarios to intimidate or criminalise people for expressing legitimate opinions is deliberate policy. It is presided over by one of the worst, most un-British bodies in Britain: the College of Policing... According to one senior officer, the College sees its role as promoting and supporting equality and diversity, and “supporting difference”. Entirely captured by transgender activists, the College brainwashes police officers to spout slogans like Maoist cultural revolutionaries – “Hateful and offensive! Hateful and offensive!” Anyone who hopes to climb the career ladder must be able to demonstrate their fidelity to progressive, Left-wing ideas, no matter how bonkers they may be. Only last month, the College issued guidance on female genital mutilation (FGM) which stated that “transwomen, with or without a gender recognition certificate” are just as threatened by FGM in the UK as “women and girls”... It was the College of Policing that came up with the Kafkaesque non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) which supposedly allowed police to collect information on “hate crimes” that could escalate into more serious offences. In practice, they have been a mallet to free speech. The police have not been afraid to weigh in on petty grievances and private matters of morality. Not afraid and not qualified. But online thought crime is one of the police’s few growth areas, a way of ushering in a progressive utopia, so why bother asking complainants about their motives? “The police now think their main purpose is not to uphold law and order but to protect certain identity groups who have been designated victims of historical injustice by the wokerati,” says Lord (Toby) Young, founder and general secretary of the Free Speech Union. “And not just protect them from ‘hate crime’ but from hurty words too.” While Young accepts that the original intention may have been benign, “police have allowed themselves to be turned into the paramilitary wing of the radical progressive movement”... I took a look at the statutory code of practice for the recording of NCHIs which became law in June 2023 under sections 60 and 61 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. As well as stipulating a proportionate, common-sense police response, it states that the terms “subject” and “complainant” should be used, not “suspect” and “victim”. Funny, then, that the two policemen who came to my door last Remembrance Sunday told me, when I asked who my accuser was, that they were to be known as “the victim”... “There is no doubt in my mind that they wanted to make an example of you, Allison,” says my senior source in that wokest of forces. Because, like Graham Linehan and the thousands of others they hound and arrest, often over the sum total of nothing, our two-tier police targets people like me who apparently have the “wrong” views, while anti-Semitic posts are excused as “in the heat of the moment”."
