In Oceania, thoughtcrime was punishable by death. In Starmer’s Britain, it merely requires five armed officers, a prison cell, and a court order banning you from social media. Graham Linehan discovered this week that George Orwell’s dystopian fiction has become democratic reality, complete with the kind of bureaucratic absurdity that would have made the author weep at his own prescience.
The comedy writer behind Father Ted found himself living through a scene from 1984 when five armed Thought Police intercepted him at Heathrow for the crime of posting three tweets about transgender issues. His arrest for “on suspicion of inciting violence” through words on a screen demonstrates how hate crime legislation has evolved into the perfect mechanism for criminalising wrongthink while maintaining democratic facades.
The Metropolitan Police’s charge of “inciting violence” for social media posts represents classic Newspeak, language deliberately designed to obscure meaning rather than communicate it. When criticising someone’s presence in a “female-only space” becomes incitement to violence, when expressing unfashionable opinions transforms into criminal conspiracy, we witness the destruction of language that Orwell warned would precede the destruction of thought itself.
The tweet itself trades on a dark irony: the spectacle of a man self-identifying as a woman while still possessing testicles. It’s gallows humour, a satirical jab at the clash between self-identification and material reality, the very contradiction that hate crime laws now decree must not be laughed at.
Continue @ Labour Heartlands.
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