Britain, land of the unfree

When the Irish comedian Graham Linehan arrived at London Heathrow Airport this past weekend, he was greeted by five armed British police officers who arrested him for — get this — three rude tweets. Or, as Linehan wrote on his Substack, "I was arrested at an airport like a terrorist, locked in a cell like a criminal, taken to hospital because the stress nearly killed me, and banned from speaking online — all because I made jokes that upset some psychotic crossdressers." Whether or not you find his words offensive, it's hard to disagree with Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling, who tweeted, "This is totalitarianism. Utterly deplorable." Surely, many Americans reading this must be thinking this was some terrible mistake. A one-off, as the British might say. Actually not. It's more like standard operating procedure. The British writer Ed West has compiled an illuminating list of Britons prosecuted for tweets deemed offensive, noting that "the vast majority of these cases seem to involve people who have offended progressive norms, or who are seen as being enemies of the progressive alliance." American commentator Mike Benz, citing The Times of London, claims that there are more than 30 arrests per day, 12,000 over the course of a year, typically on vague charges of inciting violence, for offensive messages and jokes in tweets or WhatsApp chats. Unsurprisingly, some tweets are deemed more offensive than others. The same judge who threw the book at former cops' WhatsApp messages found a paroled transgender woman (born a man) not guilty for a tweet calling for punching women in the face, West points out. It helps explain how British justice can give a Muslim defendant 180 days for raping two 9-year-old girls while giving a white English woman 270 days for uttering the N-word on a playground. What is the common principle behind this disparate treatment? The idea that government and law enforcement should bend over backward to protect the feelings and reputations of supposedly oppressed groups — transgender persons, Muslim immigrants -- while responding with self-righteous vigor against any speck of rudeness by the oppressive native population. This seems to be the animating purpose of what The New York Times' Ross Douthat calls the "managerial multiculturalism" of law enforcement and civil service, especially in Britain, but also in much of Europe as well. Case in point: the official response to displays all over England of the red-on-white perpendicular St. George's Cross flag — one of the three crosses that joined together form the United Kingdom's familiar Union Jack. People have also been painting the St. George's Cross on roundabouts and sewer covers — and local officials have been painting them over and removing flags from lamp posts. These are obviously protests against the heavy immigration that has increased the UK's foreign-born population from 6% in 1990 to 17% in 2024. This process was encouraged surreptitiously by Tony Blair's New Labour government (1997-2007) and when both local authorities and national media downplayed the revelations, by a local Labour MP in 2003 and an investigating academic in 2014, of Pakistani-immigrant grooming gangs making sex slaves of teenage girls in working-class Yorkshire towns. The obvious motive of this widespread coverup was fear of anti-Asian prejudice. Gaining control over immigration was one reason for the unexpected success of the Brexit referendum to leave the European Union in 2016. But the Conservative party's post-Brexit immigration law was poorly drafted and resulted in raising net immigration, mostly from South Asia and Africa, from under 400,000 to over 800,000. The Labour government, elected in December 2024, makes the point that the current immigration level was "a political choice that was never put before the British people." Yet it hasn't submitted new legislation and has made statements suggesting it regards immigration critics as bigots. In response to the raising of St. George's Cross flags over much of Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer tweeted, "I'm proud of our flag as a patriotic symbol of our nation, like lots of people I've proudly got one up at home." But he felt obliged to add another sentence: "Using our flag to divide devalues it." The result has been a rejection of Britain's two major parties, which date back more than a century: the Conservatives to 1846, Labour to 1900. Starmer's government's job approval hovers around 11%, and current polling puts the recently former Reform party, headed by immigration critic Nigel Farage, on course to win 368 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons. Similarly, in Europe, so-called populist parties lead in polls — or are already, as in Italy, Netherlands and Finland, in government. Despite a court decree ordering its leader, Marine Le Pen, off the ballot, the Rally National leads in France. In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has edged ahead of the governing Christian Democrats. Established parties have not allowed Reform, RN or AfD in their coalitions. In cooperation with the established press, they have suppressed news of crimes and terrorist attacks by Muslim immigrants. In Germany's regional election, non-AfD parties have agreed to say nothing disparaging about immigrants and "negative social developments such as unemployment or threats to domestic security." They act as if there's reason to believe that populist parties are equivalent to Hitler's Nazis. But limiting immigration of people with far different cultural traditions, which in some cases reject cultural tolerance and the rule of law, does not weigh the same in moral scales as rounding up and murdering 6 million Jews. Banning biological men from competing in women's sports is not akin to rounding up and murdering hundreds of thousands of homosexuals and Roma. "I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people," Vice President JD Vance told a shocked audience at the Munich Security Conference last February. "You cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail -- whether that's the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news," Vance continued. Or, as he might have added if gifted with foresight, an Irish comedian given to firing off rude tweets.