The Met Police Really Screwed Up!

So the Met Police have really screwed it up this time.Five armed police officers, one aeroplane and a man stepping off a flight from Arizona expecting to go home and instead getting arrested at Heathrow.His crime, you ask?Three posts on X. Now, 11 months later, the Met Police have just handed a payment of £25 ,000 and a very public apology for the second time.This is the story of Graeme Linehan and reported by Free Speech Union.If you're not a member, I strongly suggest you join.

I am a Gold member.This is not a sponsored video.They've not asked me to do so, but I will link them below.If you value your free speech and freedom, then I strongly suggest that you join as a member.It helps in cases like this for us to retain our rights.And of course, you can subscribe to the channel if you'd like to support me in that way as well.

So, As a barrister, I have to tell you this isn't just embarrassing for the Met Police, it is a blueprint masterclass of exactly how not to police free speech in this country.Because it goes very badly wrong and it is quite embarrassing, especially when we have our Prime Minister going around the world telling people that we have free speech and we'll defend it for a long time.So, let's set out precisely what happened.So, Graham Linehan, the co -creator of Father Ted and the IT crowd, and a proper British comedy legend, by all accounts, now lives in Arizona.In September last year, he flew back to the UK, but the moment that his plane touched down at Heathrow, he wasn't greeted by the usual board of staff, but instead by five armed police officers.Now, make no mistake, this was a comedian who had posted something that someone found offensive on X apparently.

Not a terrorist, not anyone on any kind of serious watch list,and yet he was met with five armed Met Police officers and arrested on suspicion of inciting hatred under the Public Order Act.He was detained, questioned for hours.His blood pressure spiked dangerously during this whole ordeal, so he had to be rushed to hospital.You probably remember the photographs that were published online in the media, where he was taken to hospital as a result of this incident.Now, police at the time commented that his condition wasn't life -threatening, as though that was supposed to make everything okay.

But being honest about it, anyone being arrested is a bit of a traumatic event.Especially for someone 57 years old that puts them in hospital, this is not a minor thing.This is a fairly serious thing.When he was eventually released, he wasn't just let go with a caution.He wasn't just, you know, given some words of wisdom about what he decides to post online.Instead, you'll remember that he was placed on bail conditions, including, initially at least, a ban on posting anything on X. Think about that for a moment.

A British citizen told by the state that he's not allowed to use social media over posts that he was expressing an opinion.So, what were these posts that supposedly justified five armed officers meeting him virtually at the plane over three tweets?So, one said that if a trans -identified male entered female -only spaces and behaves abusively, women should call the police.Another was a comment about a protest photo.The third expressing anger, in fairly blunt language, at people he considered misogynists and homophobes.Now, whatever you think of those posts and the tone of those posts, which I'll come to in a minute, this was

at most, spicy opinion.Not incitement of violence.Not a threat of any kind.Just an opinion.just a post which was obviously going to split the room somewhat.That is the very definition of freedom of expression.

Now let's turn to the law for a moment on some of these posts, which has been discussed and debated for the last year or two quite fiercely, but discussed and debated nonetheless.Gender -critical beliefs, which is the view that biological sex is real, is immutable, and is a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act, And that is not just my opinion, that is now settled law post the Forstater case and the Supreme Court ruling confirming what the Equality Act says about sex and so on.All of that together means that you cannot lawfully discriminate against someone or punish them purely for holding or even expressing those beliefs.And then you'll recall the Supreme Court went even further in the landmark case of For Women Scotland and confirmed that sex under the Equality Act means biological sex, not gender identity.Not how someone identifies, not how they express themselves.And this is not to be disrespectful to anybody.

I have lots of trans people watch my channel here and they write to me and they are complimentary of my content and my channel and I have full respect for them and this is a mutual respect thing.This is just about what the law says, but the Supreme Court was about as clear and as authoritative as any statement of the law could possibly get.It came from five justices at the very top of our legal system.Combined with the forced attorney case and everything else, we come back to the tweets and the posts by Graham Linehan.So by the time he landed at Heathrow,the law was not in any way unclear.

Gender -critical beliefs and expression of those protected beliefs, so long as it doesn't amount to direct harassment and things of that nature, which would have to be very extreme.The definition of sex had been confirmed by the Supreme Court, and yet the Met still thought it appropriate to send armed officers to arrest a man for expressing exactly those beliefs on social media.As ever in my videos, I don't encourage people to say anything that would upset somebody else deliberately, but if someone is offended by something you say whilst exercising your right to express those things, that doesn't make it a crime.It does not justify five armed police officers turning up and arresting somebody.Now, to be fair to the Met Police here, and I always try to be fair when I can, even when they've clearly got the law wrong, The offence being investigated wasn't specifically about his belief.It was a public order allegation about inciting hatred.

But here's the thing.The police themselves ultimately recorded this as a non -crime hate incident, rather than pursuing any criminal charge, which tells you everything.If it was serious enough to justify an armed arrest at an airport, now, There's a point about being armed at an airport.Most police are armed at an airport, so that's a little bit of an aside.But nonetheless, they send armed officers.If it was serious enough to justify an armed arrest at an airport, it should have been serious enough to end up in a charge.

I'm not saying it should have, but it should have been if they decided to arrest on that basis.But it wasn't, because it wasn't a crime.And a month after the arrest, the Met police itselfthat it would stop investigating non -crime hate incidents altogether, so officers could focus on matters that meet the threshold for proper criminal investigation.And that's absolutely right that they said so.So in other words, even the Met, after the fact, effectively admitted that the entire category of policing was a waste of time, a waste of resources, and that Graham Linehan was one of the last people caught up in this nonsense, for want of a better word, in a practice overall that the police themselves have now decided to scrap.

So where did all this end up?So as I mentioned, no charges were ever brought.In May this year, the Met gave Graham a full and unreserved apology.And now, in July, they've had to go even further.They've paid him £25 ,000 in compensation alongside a second apology after accepting that they were, in their own words, shortcomings in the investigation, the arrest and the imposition of bio -conditions.A Met spokesperson said that they recognise the considerable distress that they've caused Mr Linehan.

And that's a fairly significant admission.This wasn't simply a case of officers making a defensible judgment call that later looked wrong in hindsight.The force itself has now formally accepted that the whole process was flawed, from the decision to arrest through to the bail conditions imposed afterwards.And as I've mentioned, this is why this should really worry you, because this wasn't and this isn't an isolated case.Lord Young of Free Speech Union, who backed Graham Linehan's legal claim here, said that this is the third case that Free Speech Union has helped to settle, in which police have arrested someone for a tweet, then took no further action, and then had to pay out some money.compensation for wrongful arrest and in simple terms the way that that works is if the police have arrested you for something and given you bail conditions and various other things and then later realized actually that wasn't just as I said a defensible judgment that they later decided in hindsight was wrong but instead decided the whole thing was flawed and they shouldn't have done that in the first place, that amounts to wrongful arrest and wrongful detention and, you know, potential conversion if they've seized property and all these sorts of things.

And this, the third time, Free Speech Union says, with the same pattern, the same thing, they arrest first, they think later, and ultimately have to pay up in compensation.Now Lord Young's line on this point, which I think deserves repeating and should be taught on every police training course, it should be one of the first things that they are taught along with, as I've mentioned recently, everything that the police do, they must find a power with which they can do so.that supports their action before they get to anything else, they should be taught this, which is police our streets, not our tweets.It is a blunt and fairly correct encapsulating phrase that the police should really put at the heart of everything they do.Because the real scandal here is that this is not just one isolated case.It is one of a number of cases in which a whole chunk of police time and public money is spent and wasted chasing and policing opinions on social media.

Whereas, Lord Young put it, so many crimes are going unsolved.How many countless emails we've received at our firm here of someone's car that is stolen and the police aren't interested, a phone is stolen in the street and the police aren't interested.And when I say not interested, I should qualify.They say that they cannot go and get a warrant to search the premises even though the vehicle's been tracked to a specific location or a phone's been tracked to a specific location.Or there's some real abuse happening and the police say, well, it's too late because they've left already.Or a burglary has taken place and they say, we don't have the resources to come and, you know, send SOCO, scenes of crimes officers, to come and investigate the scene and, you know, try to find out who did it and things like this.

Instead, they are spending time policing tweets and social media for comments where somebody might be offended by something and therefore they might come and question and arrest and so on.I was looking at another one of my videos this morning where the police had gone out, not even to arrest, not even to record a non -crime hate incident, not even that.He'd gone out just to inquire as to why somebody was at a certain area.So why are you here?

So just to confirm, you were there, so what was your intention there?

Well, because I just wanted to see what was going on there.

Okay.Any particular reason?

Because I wanted to see what was going on.

Right, okay.

So why are you here?Can you explain to me why you're here?

Okay, so I'm not here investigating a crime, I'm here investigating you.

Yep.

And I just want to work out what your purpose was there today.If you recall, it was the one where a guy had taken his daughter to a certain hotel to say, you know, try to steer clear of this hotel for reasons I won't go into in this video.You might recall that one.And they sent a police officer around to question why he was there, which was all a bit weird.and a complete waste of police time because there was no crime there was there was nothing at all that the police should have taken any interest in whatsoever so as usual people very often ask my opinion on all this andso I've got two opinions that I usually give out.

One is as a barrister, which is an opinion on the law, which I'm allowed to give.It's not legal advice.And another as an individual, which, again, I'm entitled to hold and I'm entitled to express, particularly when it overlaps with politics and policy.And so here's my honest opinion as someone who works in law.So I'll try to mould my two opinions together here.Now, I'm not going to pretend that these tweets were tame or gentle or anything else and, you know, not in any way unobjectionable.

Some people might object to that.Some of the language was quite blunt, even harsh you might say, but that doesn't really necessarily matter.You don't have to like what he said or even how he said it but liking or disliking something or someone's tone is not the legal test.The test is whether the speech or the phrase or the comment or anything else crosses genuinely into the criminal sphere, crosses a criminal threshold and becomes genuine incitement of violence or genuine incitement of hatred And on the facts here, it quite plainly didn't.And many of these cases, it simply comes nowhere near this level of incitement or criminal threshold.So the police investigated it as a non -crime hate incident, which is by definition and acceptance that no crimes occurred here.

But what should worry you here is the chilling effect on free speech when armed officers meet you at a plane over a social media post.The message that it sends to everyone in the country who holds any kind of view, whether it's a gender -critical view or otherwise, or strongly held contested belief on a certain issue, andyou know, it tells them to not post that thing, not post your opinion.We've already got the government saying they want to control what you say, particularly at election time.They want to police you in the same way they do journalists and news channels, where they have to provide balanced views.And you may not even agree with that.

You might think that if you're watching a particular news channel, that they should be entitled to give you certain views.And it is expected that if a news channel leans left, that they do give you a leaning left view, but then they do balance it with something else.And I suppose that is fair.If it's supposed to be a trusted news source, I suppose that it's fair that Ofcom says they need to provide a countering opinion.But that's not always the case.Even with the BBC, in my opinion, for legal reasons, it's not always the case.

Sometimes you do get a very partisan, one -sided view, in my opinion, from some of these news companies.And I don't think that's right either.you shouldn't be held to those standards as an individual.This is quite ridiculous.But there we are.That's what's happened in the update with Graeme Linnan, in case you were wondering.

So again, not a sponsored video, but if you want to join Free Speech Union, I will link them below.And ultimately, at the bottom line is credit where it's due.The Met Police has now apologised twice, paid compensation.The system ultimately, eventually is working.but it's cost the taxpayer £25 ,000.And I'm not saying that that's wrong that Graham Linehan has received the compensation because, after all, if you're wrongfully arrested and detained and it's caused you unnecessary and unlawful upset and stress and distress, then it is right that that compensation

is paid.It was unnecessary.It shouldn't have happened in the first place.But Free Speech Union was correct to push it, to challenge it, and right to welcome the apology whilst still saying clearly that this should never have happened in the first place.Both things can be true.So let me know your thoughts and comments in the box below.

And as always, thank you for watching.