The Right to Say the Wrong Thing

There’s a thought experiment I keep returning to, and it goes something like this: if a law can be used to silence people you despise, it can also be used to silence people you admire. That’s not a radical idea. It’s barely even a controversial one. And yet, somehow, the United Kingdom seems to have forgotten it entirely.

Let me give you two cases. Side by side. And I want you to sit with the discomfort, because the discomfort is exactly the point.

Case One: The Man with Five Armed Officers Waiting for Him

On 1st September 2025, Graham Linehan… the bloke who wrote Father Ted, The IT Crowd, and Black Books… stepped off a plane at Heathrow Airport after flying in from Arizona. He was tired, presumably. Possibly wanting a cup of tea and a lie-down.

What he got instead was five armed police officers.

Five. Armed. Officers.

They escorted him to a private area and told him he was under arrest for three tweets. Not a bomb threat. Not a credible plot against a public figure. Three posts on X, written months earlier, in April.

One of them 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 balls.”

Now. I want to be precise here, because precision matters in these conversations and everyone seems allergic to it. Is that post-inflammatory? Yes. Is it the kind of thing that makes people wince? Certainly. Does it advocate for physical violence in specific circumstances? It does, arguably, though Linehan himself described it as a bad joke. Is it the sort of thing that warrants five armed officers at an international airport and a night in a cell at Heathrow police station?

I’ll let you answer that one.

A van took him from the tarmac to the Heathrow police station, where his belt, bag and devices were confiscated. Then he was locked in a small prison cell. He later said he kept waking up wondering if it was all actually happening.

The charges? Suspicion of inciting violence. The Metropolitan Police confirmed the arrest without naming him. The case sparked international coverage, the predictable outrage from J.K. Rowling, and a free speech row that bounced around newsrooms for weeks.

And then? The Crown Prosecution Service dropped the case. After a successful hearing to get his bail conditions lifted… the CPS dropped the case. The police officer in charge of the case didn’t even bother to show up to the hearing. Which rather tells you everything you need to know about how seriously they believed their own arrest was.

The Met subsequently apologised.

So what we have is this: a man arrested by five armed officers, detained, bailed with conditions preventing him from using social media, and then… nothing. Case dropped. Apology issued. Carry on.

This is not justice. This is intimidation dressed up in a high-visibility jacket.

Case Two: The Childminder and the Burning Hotels

Now here’s where it gets complicated. Here’s where I’m going to ask you to hold two things in your head at once.

On 29th July 2024, Lucy Connolly… a childminder from Northampton, married to a Conservative councillor… posted on X in the wake of the Southport murders. Three little girls had been stabbed to death at a dance class. The country was reeling. False information was spreading like wildfire online, claiming the killer was a Muslim asylum seeker who’d arrived by boat. He wasn’t. But in that moment, the lie had already done its work.

Connolly’s post called for mass deportations and to set fire to hotels full of asylum seekers, adding: “if that makes me racist, so be it.”

The post was viewed 310,000 times in three and a half hours before she deleted it.

She pleaded guilty. She was sentenced to 31 months in prison in October 2024, and released in August 2025 after serving 40% of her term.

Now. The people who rallied behind Linehan as a free speech martyr were often conspicuously quiet about Connolly, or vice versa. The Linehan crowd tended to think Lucy was a bit much. The Connolly crowd tended to think Linehan was asking for it. And the mainstream commentariat, frankly, couldn’t be trusted to apply the same standard to both without their heads exploding.

But here’s the thing: her post came during a national emergency, when police and community leaders were actively urging calm. Far-right agitators were already weaponising false rumours about the Southport suspect’s identity. Her words, seen hundreds of thousands of times, were not only hateful but actionable.

And yet… 31 months? For a tweet she deleted within hours, in a moment of rage, during a period of national grief?

There were private messages that came out during the case, too. In one, she acknowledged that her “raging tweet about burning down hotels has bit me on the arse.” In another, she said that if enquiries were made, she would deny being responsible, and if arrested, she would “play the mental health card.” That’s not endearing. It’s actually quite damning. It suggests she knew exactly what she was doing and wasn’t particularly troubled by it until the consequences arrived.

And yet. And yet. Tyler Kay, a 26-year-old father of three who shared Connolly’s post, was sentenced to 38 months… longer than she received… for republishing someone else’s words. Think about that for a moment.

The Part Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

Here is the uncomfortable truth that cuts through both of these cases: we do not have a coherent approach to speech law in this country, and the people charged with enforcing it don’t seem to know what they’re doing.

In Linehan’s case, the police deployed five armed officers to arrest a middle-aged comedy writer over tweets that had been online for months… waited… bailed him… and then dropped the case entirely when the CPS apparently looked at the file and thought, “actually, no.” That’s not a justice system at work. That’s a bureaucracy having a panic.

In Connolly’s case, a woman in genuine emotional distress, reacting to a tragedy fuelled by misinformation, typed something vile into a phone and pressed send. She deleted it. She pleaded guilty. She served time. And now she’s out on licence, reportedly being warned about subsequent posts, including a reposted joke about Donald Trump capturing Keir Starmer in a Venezuela-style operation… which she insists was tongue-in-cheek, and which apparently prompted a call to her probation officer from someone who was “very offended.”

We are living in a country where a woman on licence can be threatened with recall to prison for sharing a political joke. That should terrify everyone. Left, right, and centre. Trans rights advocate or gender-critical campaigner. Pro-immigration or anti-. It doesn’t matter.

Because the next person the system decides to make an example of might be someone whose views you share entirely.

Where I Actually Land on This

I’m not going to pretend these two cases are identical, because they’re not.

Linehan’s posts were unpleasant and arguably reckless, but they came from a man who has been publicly airing views on gender for years, in a context that was clearly ideological rather than operational. Nobody was mobilising because of his tweets. The case against him was, frankly, embarrassing, and the police apology confirmed as much.

Connolly’s post landed in a tinderbox. Riots were already beginning. Mosques were being attacked. Asylum seeker hotels were being targeted. Her words had reach… 310,000 views in three and a half hours… and they went in the direction of the flame rather than away from it. She pleaded guilty. A court found the threshold of incitement had been met.

But 31 months? For someone with no prior record? While the people who actually showed up to riot, who threw bricks, who attacked buildings… many received lighter sentences or none at all? That doesn’t smell like justice. It smells like the system making an example of someone who was easier to prosecute than to confront.

The Bit That Should Keep You Up at Night

Free speech… real free speech, not the sanitised version where everyone agrees on what’s acceptable before they open their mouths… has always been uncomfortable. It was designed to be. The whole point of protecting speech is to protect the speech you hate, because the speech you love doesn’t need protecting.

When the state decides it has the authority to arrest a man at an airport over tweets it later drops charges on, and to jail a woman for 31 months for a deleted post while rioters walk free, and to place a released prisoner on licence conditions so tight she’s being warned about reposting political satire…

…you don’t have a free speech problem. You have a governance problem. You have a consistency problem. You have a “who decides what crosses the line” problem that nobody in authority seems remotely interested in answering.

Graham Linehan is, depending on your view, a brave defender of women’s rights or a man who crossed into harassment. Possibly both. Lucy Connolly is, depending on your view, a racist who got what she deserved or an ordinary woman who made a catastrophic mistake in a moment of grief and misinformation. Possibly both.

But neither of those nuances changes the central question: should the British state be in the business of arresting people for social media posts, selectively, inconsistently, and apparently without a clear legal framework that means what it says?

I don’t think it should.

And I suspect, if you’re honest with yourself, neither do you.

The right to say the wrong thing is not a gift the state grants us. It’s a boundary we draw around the state. And right now, that boundary is looking very, very porous.

Until Next Time