Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the UK is an Orwellian police state.
What’s that? You have heard that one before?
OK, how about this one: the UK is actually worse than Orwellian.
Take the case of Joanne May of Suffolk, England. Just last week, two constables on patrol showed up at May’s door to deliver an official police caution about an online post that she didn’t even make. The video of the incident is online, and you can read about the interaction at Reclaim The Net.
Or take the case of Graham Linehan. He’s the famed Irish comedy writer behind such hit British television shows as Father Ted and The IT Crowd. In September 2025, Linehan was arrested at Heathrow Airport for having made “transphobic” tweets six months earlier. So egregious was this tyrannical crackdown on free speech that Linehan later received an official apology from the Metropolitan Police and £25,000 in compensation. Now, even the Met’s own watchdog is criticizing the police’s actions in this case.
Sadly, stories like these will come as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to the assault on free speech in Britain of late.
The latest Big Brother Watch Report, “Britain’s Free Speech Problem,” quantifies this assault. It notes that British police have arrested an astounding 62,199 people for “communications offenses” over the last five years. For the record, that’s more speech-related arrests than in China, Russia or any of the other countries we’re constantly told are the “enemies of human rights and Western democratic values.”
But what you may not know about this sorry state of affairs is that the UK police state did not spring up overnight and it is not the result of the capricious whims of this or that police officer. It is actually a part of a vast bureaucratic infrastructure for speech policing that has been carefully erected over the past two decades. This infrastructure includes a deliberately bewildering array of investigative units, task forces, directorates and government ministries whose existence has been largely concealed from the public and whose operations are shrouded in secrecy.
Ignorance of this bureaucracy cannot be allowed to continue. If you’re British, you should know about these threats to your speech. And if you’re not in Britain, this editorial should prompt you to investigate how many similar agencies, police units and task forces exist in your own local area.
As a rule of thumb from my observations, you can’t be all bad as a person if you like Monty Python. Come and see the violence inherent in the system!