How the police became the goon squad of trans activists

The arrest of Graham Linehan for the crime of tweeting has rightly provoked near-universal outrage. On Monday, the Father Ted writer was detained by five armed police officers as soon as he stepped on to the tarmac at Heathrow Airport, where he had arrived from Arizona. He was told that three gender-critical tweets from April were being investigated on suspicion of ‘inciting violence’.

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.

The ideological capture began in 2008, with the publication of a Stonewall report on ‘Homophobic Hate Crime: the Gay British Crime Survey’. Funded by the Home Office, the report was a trademark product of a lucrative circle-jerk invented by New Labour, where taxpayer money is funnelled into activist lobby groups, who in turn demand policies from their buddies in parliament.

The report presented a very bleak picture. The UK, it said, was in the throes of a tidal wave of homophobic violence and abuse. It was a conclusion almost impossible to square for anyone who lived in or visited the UK at the time – not least because you could hardly move without bumping into an openly gay national treasure, like Russell T Davies, Graham Norton, Stephen Fry, Sandi Toksvig, George Michael and countless others. I also distinctly remember London hosting the biggest Pride event in Europe that year. In short, Britain was hardly rife with ‘homophobic hate crime’ – in fact, the opposite was true.

In many ways, the report was an early sign of the deeply subjective and invasive mindset that has come to characterise policing in this country. It recommended that officers spot ‘homophobic hate incidents’ even if the ‘victim has not identified them’. This was a brilliant ruse, as it provided a surefire way to magnify the scale of hate crime. It is little surprise, then, that we are repeatedly told that crimes against the gay community are constantly at crisis levels in the UK, despite public attitudes towards homosexuality reaching a point of near complete indifference.

Stonewall had another trick up its sleeve to bring about its aim of a police force almost solely focussed on gay hate crime. In terms of chutzpah, this one takes the biscuit: it recommended that police forces in the UK ‘join Stonewall’s Diversity Champions scheme to access advice and support on becoming a gay-friendly employer’. Nice business, if you can get it. And, of course, Stonewall did. As of 2021, the overwhelming majority of British police officers were paid-up members of the ‘Diversity Champions’ scheme.

When Stonewall’s next ‘Homophobic Hate Crime’ report was published in 2013, it was clear how deeply embedded it had become in the policing establishment. The foreword was written by Alex Marshall, the then chief executive of the College of Policing, who promised to ‘review and improve how police respond to homophobic hate crime’. He also revelled in the fact he had been designated a ‘Stonewall senior champion’. What are the chances?

Having a senior member of the police force boasting about his own indoctrination makes for hard reading. But his foreword contained a far more disturbing revelation. While the report was still ostensibly about anti-gay crime, the word gay had been dropped. It had been replaced with ‘LGBT’, as though the acronym meant the same thing as same-sex attraction. Marshall, knowingly or not, was adopting the language of trans activism, which became the raison d’être of Stonewall under its next chief executive, Ruth Hunt.

As a result of the hand-in-glove relationship between Stonewall and the College of Policing, every officer that has graduated in the past decade has been told that it is their duty to fight an alleged epidemic of transphobic hate crime. They’ve sat in classes lectured by trans activists, who’ve told them heart-wrenching tales of their personal suffering. Myths peddled by the trans lobby are presented as facts – such as that trans people, particularly children, are being driven to suicide by an atmosphere of bigotry.

Linehan’s arrest comes after more than a decade of trans activism being promoted at the heart of British policing. As shocking as his arrest may have been, it should hardly have been a surprise. The police are only following orders. Stonewall’s orders, of course.

Malcolm Clark was LGB Alliance’s head of research from 2019 to 2022. Visit his Substack, The Secret Gender Files, here.