UK Police Have Become the Trans-Activist Goon Squad

Labour has tried, unconvincingly, to echo the anxiety and disgust felt across the nation that Linehan’s arrest has provoked. UK prime minister Keir Starmer said policing social media should not be a ‘priority’ for the Metropolitan Police. Health secretary Wes Streeting was slightly more forthright, claiming that he wanted to see coppers ‘policing streets and not tweets’. Neither offered a robust defence of free speech.

It’s understandable that Labour is less than sure-footed on this subject. After all, the arrest of Linehan marks the culmination of a long decline in British policing, beginning nearly 20 years ago, at the fag-end of Gordon Brown’s premiership. Since then, police forces across the UK have effectively turned into the armed wing of the very organisation that Streeting used to work for: Stonewall, the LGBT lobby group.