The tragedy of our British cousins’ loss of liberty

We first learned about Graham Lineham’s arrest from Tom Woods. A detailed discussion of his ordeal on his return from the United States can be found at The Blaze.

He was met at Heathrow Airport on deplaning by five – get that, five British bobbies. Armed bobbies. Why? Because he posted three tweets on X (while in the States, not even in imperial or royal jurisdiction) that were critical of transexual activists.

As both Tom and The Blaze point out, this is just one of many cases in the United Kingdom where freedom of speech has been exercised and rewarded by arrest, charges, and in some cases trials, conviction and punishment. A recent example is a woman harassed and arrested for singing gospel songs outside a church building or church grounds, and apparently without “approval” from a church. No doubt, a licensed, registered church.

It isn’t just freedom of speech, but freedom of thought. A Brit veteran was convicted and fined 12,000 fines (“prosecution costs”) for praying silently near an abortion clinic. Thought crime does not yet receive the same “justice” as found in 1984, Brave New World, or Fahrenheit 451 but we need to ask how far off that is.

Just because the terror of 1984 is not clearly visible and (officially) delayed by more than forty years, does not mean it does not exist. It is clear that the United Kingdom is no long a free nation. Its subjects are denied fundamental, God-given human rights in the name of protecting the “rights” and feelings of people in a selected and protected class.

What truly disgusts us (and hopefully most Americans and most people in the British Commonwealth) is that the voters of England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland did this to themselves. They allowed the British Deep State to turn the United Kingdom into a police state. A “kinder” and “gentler” police state, perhaps (at least in 2025) but nonetheless, a state of tyranny in which more and more people are treated like peons. Like wards of the state. This is what a majority of Brits want – or are willing to accept in return for… for something.

Liberty – personal freedoms and economic freedoms – have always meant less to our British cousins than to we Americans. Many of whom are descended, in ancestry and/or culture, from Brits. But that is indeed part of the problem: the tyranny of the King’s men and the nobility and gentry drove many to flee Britain and Ireland for centuries to find freedom elsewhere. We can perhaps argue that the love of liberty is, in part, a matter of heredity: those willing to suffer under King, nobility, and Parliament (even the Commons) are the ancestors of modern Brits. The ancestors who did not migrate, and who did not die gloriously in wars, rebellions, and insurrections. It may be that liberty has been bred out of them.

British history is full of how government and its backers and minions have stolen liberty and lives of its people. In recent years, this has returned with a vengeance. With little pushback. To the point that they are now, for the most part, willing to submit to the most idiotic and humiliating treatment.

Sadly, it is not just the British that are suffering so. Ireland, too, has become a land of submissive and passive people who reject their own heritage. In large part because the wild geese departed from their shores and continue to do so. And all of Europe is looking more and more to be going the same way. There are few Germans, for example, that seem to have learned the lesson of having a quarter of their land and people under the boots of Soviet Communism for almost half a century.

We know that freedom lost can be regained. Liberty can be restored. But at what cost? And at what risk of instead losing even more? Indeed, something to think about.

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