We don’t have much to crow about in Blighty, compared to the USA. The country seems suspended in a twilight zone, hopeless and helpless in a way I’ve never known in my lifetime

Our heritage political parties are so mistrusted that if there were a national election tomorrow, Reform — a party with no experience of running things aside from having a few local councillors — would stroll it. Our cultural life has been wrecked by Wokeness; our books castrated by the moribund hovering of the “sensitivity reader.”

We can’t even make decent pop music any more; last year, no British act figured in the world’s top 10 singles or albums for the first time since 2003. A BBC report pointed out: “After years of global domination by stars such as Ed Sheeran and Adele, British music artists have failed to make it into the worldwide annual charts. Previously, UK acts have appeared in one, or both, of the top ten lists every year since at least 2003.” 

Billboard’s U.K. editor, Thomas Smith, commented: “In terms of where the U.K. is at, I wouldn’t say it’s an existential threat just yet — but we’re probably not far off.”

One thing we like about us compared to the Yanks is that our police don’t carry guns. Except when there are five of them arresting a comedian who just got off a plane from his new home in the USA for something he said on social media about transvestites. Yes, I know that airport police are routinely armed, but when it came to the crucial business of thought-policing, could they not have alerted some unarmed cops on the outside and nicked him there?

Then, perhaps, Graham Linehan would not have physically responded to the subsequent questioning in a police cell for 16 hours by having his blood pressure rise to over 200 — stroke territory — before he was rushed to the emergency room at the nearest hospital and kept under observation before being released on bail.

Mr. Linehan’s story is perhaps the saddest and most dramatic of the scuffles to take place in the Woke Wars. A brilliantly talented Irishman, he rose to fame as a writer and performer on British television — “Black Books,” “Father Ted,” and “The IT Crowd,” which won an Emmy — before deciding in 2018 that there were more important things than entertainment: what he described as “the all-out assault on woman’s rights.”

With the first Tweet (as they were then), “My ordeal had begun…cast adrift, I was about to lose everything – my career, my marriage, my reputation.” His previous collaborators shunned him, and he became literally unable to work for the BBC, the state broadcasting company that has totally signed up to the transgender lie and that controls so much of the comedy output in this country.

As Mr. Linehan said, “Every comedian at the moment is living under a state of permanent blackmail…there’s a few hot-button issues where you have to follow a certain line, and if you don’t, you’ll be destroyed.”

So earlier this year, Mr. Linehan took himself off to Arizona, where with another great canceled comedian from these isles, Andrew Doyle, and the American comic Rob Schneider, he is planning a sit-com to be broadcast next year. Interviewed by Jordan Peterson for an episode of his show entitled “Europe Imploding,” Mr. Doyle comments, “We never expected to be here … it sounds histrionic but I don’t think we could have this kind of artistic freedom in the U.K.”

As Mr. Linehan told the Times, “What happened to me [at the airport] was almost the perfect finale to my time in the U.K. I decided to leave Britain because it was impossible for me to stay — I just don’t have freedom of speech in this country. I am so happy in America … I don’t think I’ll ever come back to Britain.”

In Noah Rothman’s book ”The Rise of the New Puritans,” he cites the urge to police people’s fun as a feature of every puritanical movement: “Perhaps nothing is as important to the promotion of a virtuous society as what you’re allowed to laugh at.” Great humor starts with taking a scalpel to oneself, as every decent comic understood.

The modern left, though, is incapable of doing this because, as a wise man said, the right thinks the left is wrong but the left thinks the right is evil. Such unhinged black-and-white thinking is not a spur to comic creativity; this being the case, it seems likely that the likes of Messrs. Linehan and Doyle will not be the last of our comedians coming America’s way.

According to the audio during Mr. Linehan’s holding in the police cell, he shouted, “You know what this country looks like from America?” Fan though I am of the USA, I do consider it an unfair exchange that you’ve recently gifted us with Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O’Donnell. To mis-quote the old vaudeville joke: we laughed when liberal American comics said they were emigrating to the U.K.

We’re not laughing now.