- Crossing the line? - 3rd September 2025
- Breaking bad again… - 3rd September 2025
- Dirty dancing - 2nd September 2025
Free speech has always been massively important for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry as he pursued his long journalistic career, but this is a difficult area and it is highlighted today by the arrest of comedian Graham Linehan.
I have always liked to explain things in black and white.
Stories are best when it is simple and the choices are clear, but the honest truth is that there are some areas where it is NOT simple and the choices are NOT clear, and one in particular is emphasised today: free speech.
Free speech is, of course, vital for an investigative journalist (indeed any kind of journalist) like me, and I am a great believer in it.
I have written constantly about how the erosion of free speech worries me (another item is to be published on The Eye soon).
There are, however, limits (please don’t abuse me for this because I get enough online rubbish already, and I am extremely cautious about entering this minefield!), and it may be (although I can’t be certain) that Graham Linehan has gone beyond one.
He claimed in an online Substack that he had been detained by five officers at Heathrow Airport after flying in from the US.
Mr Linehan said that officials then became concerned for his health and took him to hospital. But the police have said his condition was not life-threatening and he was bailed pending further investigation.
In his Substack article, Mr Linehan said his arrest was related to three posts on X from April.
The first post, from his X feed, called it a “violent, abusive act” for a trans-identified male to be in a female-only space.
He suggested: “Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails punch him in the balls”.
Separately, Mr Linehan is also facing a separate charge of harassment – which he denies – and is due to appear in court on Thursday.
But the arrest prompted a massive backlash from figures such as author JK Rowling and opposition parties including the Conservatives, who branded the arrest an “absurd infringement of free speech”.
Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch was highly critical of the arrest, saying: “Sending five officers to arrest a man for a tweet isn’t policing, it’s politics”.
Yet they are not alone, and the UK government’s health secretary too has misgivings apparently. Wes Streeting has said ministers need to “look at” laws concerning online speech.
Mr Streeting said such laws had put “more expectation on police” and “diluted the focus and priorities of the public”, adding “that’s obviously something we need to look at”, and he said that ministers wanted the police to focus on street crime rather than posts on social media.
However the police are in an impossible position here, as they are only enforcing laws passed by the UK Parliament.
It seems that senior officers agree, because Metropolitan Police (Met) Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has said his officers should not be “policing toxic culture wars debates”, and has offered to provide suggestions to the Home Office (HO) about clarifying the law and policy.
He added that: “greater clarity and common sense would enable us to limit the resources we dedicate to tackling online statements to those cases creating real threats in the real world”, and that they will be more selective about what posts it should investigate in future.
Going further, the new Green Party leader Zack Polanski has said that the posts were “totally unacceptable” and the arrest seemed “proportionate”.
This is an extremely difficult area, and one that I am aware has caused a lot of ruckus (the ENTIRE governing committee of Welsh independence group Yes Cymru had to resign because of online abuse over it!).
Yet there are, I would suggest, TWO critical points in all this.
The first is that everyone should be aware of what is and what is not lawful (not least someone who is famous), and if there is any doubt then before a public comment is made a specialist lawyer should be consulted. As a journalist I know this only too well and a person who is in the public eye should as well.
The second is the social media platform Mr Linehan used to make the original comments.
Posts on X (formerly Twitter) have a wide dissemination but the site itself has a questionable reputation.
Previously all our stories were posted on X automatically, but now only Facebook (FB) is used. Of course, I am under no illusions that our stance is likely to make any difference whatsoever – X is still (even after leading firms pulled their advertising), a gigantic business. I know that The Eye not using X will almost certainly have no impact at all, but it seemed the right thing to do.
The platform’s owner, Elon Musk, used to have a central position in the administration of Donald Trump and told its biggest advertisers to “go fuck yourself”, with the company’s ad revenue falling by more than half that year.
He was to become co-leader of the US “Department of Government Efficiency”, and declared that federal spending could be cut by $2 trillion, or about a third, yet left in high dudgeon.
Another contentious comment by him on X that “civil war is inevitable”, highlighted what a problematic figure he is.
When Mr Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, he cut roughly 80 per cent of the company’s workforce, and it has faced a series of challenges since then. Figures have shown that at one point the monthly US ad revenue at X had declined at least 55 per cent year-on-year each month since he bought it.
Jamie Lee Curtis, The Guardian, and even Clifton Suspension Bridge joined swathes of people deserting the site.
Sky News reported this desertion beneath the headline: “The X exodus – could Bluesky spike spark end of Elon Musk’s social media platform?”.
In The Times, writer Janice Turner declared: “Elon Musk sits astride Twitter/X as the living embodiment of all that is screwed up and vile about his site…so now the question for users is why stay?”.
Mr Musk also shared a video of a person purportedly being arrested (as Mr Linehan has been) for offensive comments online, asking: “Is this Britain or the Soviet Union?”, and replied to a post criticising UK policing, suggesting the police’s response “does seem one-sided“.
He shared, too, a fake Daily Telegraph article claiming Sir Keir Starmer was considering sending far-right rioters to “emergency detainment camps” in the Falklands. Mr Musk deleted his post after about 30 minutes but a screenshot captured by Politics.co.uk suggests it had garnered nearly two million views before it was deleted.
In it, he shared an image posted by the co-leader of the far-right group Britain First, Ashlea Simon, which she captioned with, “we’re all being deported to the Falklands”. The fake piece, purportedly written by a senior news reporter for the Daily Telegraph and mocked up in the newspaper’s style, said camps in the Falklands “would be used to detain prisoners from the ongoing riots as the British prison system is already at capacity”.
Mr Musk seems to have unlikely backers too. For instance the extreme right wing activist Tommy Robinson appears to be a supporter of his.
Mr Robinson served four prison terms between 2005 and 2019, and in 2021 was found to have libelled a 15-year-old refugee at a school in Huddersfield. He was ordered to pay £100,000 plus legal costs, but after breaching an injunction about repeating the libel, Mr Robinson was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
A post by Mr Musk included a Family Guy meme featuring its main character in the electric chair, alongside the words: “In 2030 for making a Facebook comment that the UK government didn’t like”. Mr Robinson reposted it with the comment: “If it wasn’t for Elon Musk. The government and legacy media would’ve had me hung, drawn and quartered, without reply, over their failings”.
He has been described by his daughter as a ‘cruel and absent father’, and major firms boycotted his social media site after allegedly anti-Semitic remarks.
Mr Musk had supposedly agreed with a post on X that falsely claimed Jewish or other people were stoking hatred against white people.
He said that the user who referenced the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory was speaking “the actual truth”. The conspiracy theory holds that Jews or others are engineering the ethnic and cultural replacement of white populations that will lead to a “white genocide”. It has also been spouted during the riots, with Jews replaced by Muslims.
Major firms including Disney, Warner Bros and Sky News’ parent company Comcast pulled their advertising, and Lions Gate Entertainment as well as Paramount Global also said they were pausing advertising. It was reported that Apple was pulling ads too. IBM also halted its advertising on X after a report by Media Matters (MM), the US media watchdog, found that its ads were placed next to pro neo-Nazi content.
Mr Musk has always possessed a well-known propensity to turn to the law to resolve issues. Indeed it has been revealed that a not-for-profit organisation was forced to close, because it was presented with a lawsuit from Mr Musk.
It was claimed on X that the advertising group Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), illegally conspired to boycott advertising on his platform, but the statement had huge ramifications.
“GARM is a small, not-for-profit initiative, and recent allegations that unfortunately misconstrue its purpose and activities have caused a distraction and significantly drained its resources and finances”, the group said in a statement, adding: “GARM therefore is making the difficult decision to discontinue its activities”.
It has also emerged that Mr Musk has sued MM alleging it manufactured the report showing advertisers’ posts alongside neo-Nazi content. In a lawsuit filed in the US District Court in Texas, it was claimed that MM “knowingly and maliciously” portrayed ads next to hateful material “as if they were what typical X users experience on the platform”.
He has, though, always denied that he is against Jews, and has proclaimed: “To be super clear: I am pro free speech, but against anti-Semitism of any kind“.
However to Mr Musk’s critics this is pure humbug because he has described George Soros (a survivor of the Holocaust, and a frequent victim of anti-Semitic attacks), as ‘reminding him of Magneto’ (a Marvel comic villain who is also a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust).
Mr Musk has also engaged in a very public spat with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which is a high-profile organisation opposing anti-Semitism and racism. He has threatened the ADL with legal action, blaming it for a collapse in advertising revenue, when it could, in fact, be to do with the nervousness of companies associating with him.
So perhaps Mr Linehan should have been aware of all this before he posted on X that it was a “violent, abusive act” for a trans-identified male to be in a female-only space.
Just saying… (free speech).
The memories of Phil’s, decades long award-winning career in journalism (when controversial comments by celebrities, as well as high-profile arrests, were often reported) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disease Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
