Met Commissioner: Police Shouldn’t Be Enforcing the Left’s Culture War Demands

Yesterday both Beege and David wrote about the arrest of a British comedian named Graham Linehan. Linehan was arrested at the airport by a group of 5 armed officers after flying to Britain from the US where he now lives. His crime? He had published three tweets about trans women on X. At first Linehan himself laughed at the idea that trans activists had sent the police after him, but that’s effectively what had happened.

When I first saw the cops, I actually laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “Don’t tell me! You’ve been sent by trans activists,” I said. The officers didn’t react.

This was the theme throughout most of the day. Among the rank and file of the police, there was a sort of polite bafflement. They were entirely professional and even kind, but most had absolutely no idea what any of this was about.

Once the officers began reading me my rights, and I realized what was happening, the red mist descended. The officers saw how upset I was and treated me gently after that. They even arranged for a van to meet me on the tarmac so I didn’t have to be perp-walked through the airport like a terrorist. Small mercies.

His interview with the police was different though. Suddenly the mood was very serious.

The officer mentioned the term trans people. I asked him what he meant by the phrase. “People who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth,” he said.

“Assigned at birth?” I responded. “Our sex isn’t assigned.” He called it semantics. I told him he was using activist language.

Linehan wound up in the hospital after his blood pressure spiked. A nurse said it was stress but Linehan connected it more broadly to a trans activist campaign against him.

The doctors suggested the high blood pressure was stress-related, combined with long-haul travel and lack of movement. I feel a contributing factor might have been that I’ve now spent eight years being targeted by trans activists working in tandem with police in a dedicated, persistent harassment campaign, all because I refuse to believe that men can become women.

Not surprisingly, conservative politicians have called this out for what it is, an attempt to chill speech using the police to enforce leftist dogma.

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch said “sending five officers to arrest a man for a tweet isn’t policing, it’s politics”.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage gave evidence to a Congressional committee hearing on free speech in Washington DC on Wednesday, in which he raised Linehan’s arrest, saying: “At what point did we become North Korea?

“I think the Irish comedy writer found that out two days ago at Heathrow Airport.”

The whole thing was such an embarrassing spectacle that even Labour politicians seem eager to distance themselves from it.

Free speech laws must change after Graham Linehan’s arrest, Wes Streeting has said.

Mr Streeting, the Health Secretary, suggested that existing legislation was not fit for purpose after the Father Ted creator was arrested by five armed officers at Heathrow airport as he got off a flight from the US…

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “If Parliament has layered more and more expectations on the police, diluted the focus and priorities of the public, that is something that we need to look at.

Even Keir Starmer knows this is bad, though he through the police under the bus via a spokesperson.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Prime Minister’s spokesman suggested police should be concentrating on issues that “matter most to their communities”.

He said: “This is an operational matter for the police, but the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary have been clear about what their priorities on crime and policing are – that’s tackling anti-social behaviour, shoplifting and street crime, as well as reducing serious violent crime such as knife crime and violence against women…

Sir Keir’s spokesman said: “The Prime Minister has spoken previously about how he is strongly in favour of free speech and the long, proud history of free speech in this country, and he will continue to do so.”

Now even the Chief of the Metropolitan Police agrees the laws on speech need an overhaul, though he refused to blame the officers who he said were just following the rules set up by lawmakers. Still, his bottom line was that maybe it’s not a good idea to have police enforcing leftist speech codes.

The head of the Metropolitan Police has called on the government to “change or clarify” the law following the arrest of comedian Graham Linehan over posts he made online…

On Wednesday, Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley defended the officers involved, but said he recognised “concern caused by such incidents given differing perspectives on the balance between free speech and the risks of inciting violence in the real world”…

Sir Mark said his officers “had reasonable grounds to believe an offence had been committed,” but that police more broadly had “been left between a rock and a hard place” when investigating online speech.

He continued: “I don’t believe we should be policing toxic culture wars debates and officers are currently in an impossible position.”

J.K. Rowling had the best response to his claim that this is a “toxic culture war.”

What Sir Mark Rowley calls a ‘toxic culture war,’ I call a mass campaign of intimidation against women for standing up for their rights, and police turning a blind eye to the men publicly calling for women to be beaten, raped, hanged and decapitated.https://t.co/ArpZNV9Lfj

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) September 3, 2025

What’s toxic here, as always, is the left’s insistence on silencing, canceling and punishing their enemies using whatever power they have at hand. Wesley Yang gets the last word:

The transgender movement is global and unitary and seeks the same things everywhere it obtains the power to impose them. Its ultimate aim is to deploy state power to make it illegal to deny the movement’s dogmas. It is an assault on the freedoms of speech, conscience, religion,… https://t.co/po7VLGrGY5

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) September 2, 2025

The transgender movement is global and unitary and seeks the same things everywhere it obtains the power to impose them. Its ultimate aim is to deploy state power to make it illegal to deny the movement’s dogmas. It is an assault on the freedoms of speech, conscience, religion, and association that will imprison people for saying that men aren’t women, that human beings cannot change sex, that there has never been an evidence base for transgender medicine, that children are never born in the wrong body, that women need their own private spaces from which men are excluded, that letting men compete against women in sports is deeply unfair because trans women are men, that sex is binary and immutable, that Rachel Levine is a deeply corrupt man who abused his power to advance the aims of a cult of medicalized self-harm that brainwashes quirky kids to yearn to be chemically castrated and dismembered, and that all of it is in the service of a mad imperative to make a false claim true.

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