Ever-alert Wings readers will be aware that for the past three and a half years or so I’ve been the target of a campaign by disgraced former policeman Lynsay Watson, who has tirelessly attempted to get me arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned for knowing – and saying – that human beings can’t change sex.

(As we’ll learn over this article, I am far from unique in that regard.)

Watson has made numerous ludicrous, vexatious complaints to various police forces about me – a particularly memorable one being when he reported me last September for “perverting the course of justice” because I’d tweeted a link to a fundraiser for someone being persecuted by another transactivist – as well as trying to extort tens of thousands of pounds from me with threats.

Yesterday, though, he finally found some police officers gullible enough to listen.

The first I heard of it was in mid-April this year, when I was away catsitting and got a phonecall one morning from a woman claiming to be an officer of “Bath Police”, which immediately made me suspicious because the local force is called Avon & Somerset. The woman explained that she was investigating a complaint of harassment against me and wanted me to come in for a voluntary interview, although she said that if I declined I’d be arrested.

I said I’d need to verify who she was first, so asked her to send details by email or text so I could be sure she was the police and arrange things with my solicitor. She agreed, but then hours turned into days turned into weeks and I heard nothing, so I assumed it had been some sort of twisted “prank” by Watson or one of his associates like “Sophia” Brooks or “Freda” Wallace, who notoriously love to troll gender-critical people.

Then in the middle of last month I got another phonecall from an unfamiliar number, this time at 1.30am. It was someone else claiming to be a police officer – this time a male – demanding that I submit to being arrested and hauled off to Keynsham Police Centre about 10 miles away, right there and then, in the middle of the night. He was most insistent that it couldn’t wait for a less absurd time.

Once again I said I’d have to verify his identity first, and a short while later sent me an email. I was still in the process of checking it when people started ringing and battering on my door (I didn’t know who, you can’t see who’s at the front door from inside my house), at what was by now 2.15am.

Fortunately a couple of fellow Watson targets were still up at this unsociable hour, some of whom were lawyers and former police officers, and by happy chance so was my crime-fighting associate Roddy Dunlop KC, as he happened to be several time-zones away that week, where it was still a civilised hour.

Fortified by wise counsel from such experts, I ignored the hammering on the door until it went away, and immediately contacted the Free Speech Union (pretty much the last bastion of civil liberties in the UK – please join up if you can, you never know when you might need them), who by later that day had set me up with a solicitor, Daniel Berke, with extensive experience of dealing with malicious transactivists.

Daniel got in touch with the male officer, secured an apology for what he admitted had been “inappropriate” and “not ideal” behaviour the previous evening, and set about arranging a voluntary interview – though not before the officer lied to him that I’d “misled” him about previously refusing one, which I hadn’t done, and which they’d been using as justification for arrest and seizing all my internet devices.

(By doing a voluntary interview, and admitting that I was the editor of Wings, we were able to forego device seizure. The last time I was arrested on the basis of an utterly ridiculous complaint from someone opposed to my political views the Metropolitan Police had taken every desktop PC, laptop, tablet and phone from my house, kept them for three months before deciding there was no case to answer, and then refused to bring them back. I had to spend over £5,000 replacing them all in order to keep doing my job in the meantime.

Transactivists know this is police procedure, and deliberately make malevolent reports in the hopes of causing victims huge amounts of trouble and expense even if they’re not charged. And it works – to all intents and purposes I’d been “fined” five grand, not to mention months of living in absolute dread, even though I’d done nothing wrong. It was years before I’d answer the doorbell again if I wasn’t expecting someone.)

So at 3pm yesterday I met Daniel, not outside the only “police station” in Bath I knew about (actually a small unit inside some council buildings), but in Redbridge Business Centre, a rundown unmarked office building round the back of a Ford and Kia dealership on the outskirts of town, shared with a community salvage organisation, which I’ve walked past a hundred times without the slightest inkling it was Bath’s central law-enforcement hub.

Single-sex toilets, though, so that’s something.

An officer came out to meet us, who turned out to be the one who’d called me in April – a slightly-built, bespectacled young woman of maybe 24-25. We went in and I waited in the grubby hallway outside the Share & Repair office, with a small library of books and jigsaw puzzles to pass the time, while Daniel went through “disclosure”, which is when the police tell your solicitor what you’re going to be questioned about, at which point Daniel appears to have read her the Riot Act, for reasons we’ll get to in a moment.

Then I was called in, we went through all the preliminaries, and the officer brought me some water in a cute Cadbury’s Mini Eggs mug (“We don’t have any glasses, sorry”). She read me the standard caution, which now comes with an interactive questionnaire whereby they read you the caution, explain what the caution means, and ask you three questions to see if you’ve understood it.

OFFICER: “Do you have to say anything in this interview?”

YOU: “Um, no?”

OFFICER: “Correct.”

(I swear I’m not making that up. I was so weirded out by the question I had to actually think for a couple of seconds before answering.)

Then it was time to get down to business. She told me the complaint was that I’d published a number of “false and demeaning” articles about Watson, and that I’d “repeatedly misgendered” him.

At this point Daniel interjected to get on tape the fact that I was attending the interview under protest – having been told that I would definitely be arrested otherwise – that misgendering someone was not an offence and was in fact a legally protected right, that reading articles about yourself that upset you did not make those articles criminal, and that if you felt someone had written something about you that was untrue the correct remedy was a civil claim for defamation, not calling the police.

He said that nothing he’d been shown in disclosure came even remotely close to the threshold of a crime, and that any attempt to charge me would result in a lawsuit. Daniel is quite fierce.

Nevertheless the officer then began her questioning, asking me how I’d come to be aware of Watson. I gave her the highlights of his life story, starting with reading about his sacking for gross misconduct in 2023 (on my birthday, trivia fans) and then learning that by that point, unbeknownst to me and while still a serving police officer, he’d already been trying to get me arrested for six months.

As I then ran through his extensive track record of dodging harassment complaints, filing baseless crime reports, frequently calling for the murder of gender-critical figures, repeated doxxing of JK Rowling, social media bannings, arrests and all the other unpleasantries Watson fills his tragic life with – and I must confess I went on at some length – I could see her facial expression slowly imploding. It seemed very clear to me that she knew absolutely nothing about Lynsay Watson before yesterday.

(She visibly winced when near the end I noted that Watson had made at least 300 police complaints and the only one that had resulted in anyone being taken in for questioning before me was the one he made against Graham Linehan – the outcome of which, just last month, was the Metropolitan Police issuing Graham a grovelling apology accompanied by a cheque for £25,000.)

She asked a few questions to clarify some of the stuff I’d said, and then said she was going to show me some things I’d published online and ask me about them. I’d expected to be quizzed on some of the extensive articles we’ve published about Watson, and had detailed and comprehensive responses ready for anything I thought the police might even remotely be able to consider in some way objectionable. (Though of course all of it was in fact wholly legitimate journalism about significant news events.)

But hold onto your bunnets, readers, because that wasn’t how it went.

She started off by showing me this tweet.

What was its purpose, she enquired. “It’s a joke”, I said, explaining that one of the excuses police had used for their being unable to locate Watson when people made harassment complaints about him and he was evading arrest was that the police thought he was living in a caravan or campervan somewhere.

Oddly, she seemed a lot less concerned with a fugitive repeatedly evading the police on serious allegations than with someone making a joke about it.

(I pointed out that my Twitter bio does contain a “possible humour” warning.)

Then she asked about this one:

which is fairly plainly the same joke again, but using a satirically-edited version of the image that someone had tweeted or sent me in response to the first one. (The “AC-DC PC” line is taken from an old Daily Record headline about Watson being sacked from another police force in 1997.)

She then showed me this tweet, which I’ve censored very heavily partly out of sensitivity but also because I don’t want to identify the person who posted it and have transactivists send over-excited constables to hammer on their door in the early hours.

It’s an AI-edited version of one of the pics taken on the day of Watson’s arrest in February over harassment allegations from at least two people (one of whom was me), made to look like Watson had turned up at Manchester Civil Justice Centre wearing only a filthy nappy.

It’s pretty horrible, but humour is subjective, it doesn’t break any laws that I know of and more to the point, it wasn’t posted by me, it wasn’t retweeted or quote-tweeted or linked to in any way by me, it wasn’t a reply to any tweet of mine and I have no idea who the person who posted it is.

I duly explained that to the officer, who offered no explanation whatsoever as to why she’d apparently thought the tweet was anything to do with me (presumably the answer was simply that Watson had said so), and… the interview was over.

She told us she had no more questions, and Daniel and I looked at each other with “What?” expressions on our faces. Avon & Somerset Police had apparently just spent 10 months – Watson had complained at the end of September, in revenge for my complaint against him – investigating two innocuous, near-identical jokes about a caravan, and a completely unconnected tweet by someone else entirely.

The only possible explanation for the inclusion of the third tweet that makes ANY sort of sense is as a tool to extend the deadline for a harassment case. Ordinarily those have to reach a charging decision within six months, but that period can be extended if the “course of conduct” continues after the initial complaint.

(“An information” there means “presenting the charge to a magistrate or JP”.)

The caravan tweets were made on 3 October 2025, which means the six-month limit expired on 2 April 2026, days before even the initial mid-April phonecall from the female officer, let along the July one from the male officer. Including the February tweet from someone else altogether would give them – by whatever twisted logic they were using to connect it to me – up to next Friday to charge me.

(I haven’t yet been notified of any official decision.)

Readers may have noticed the somewhat stark contrast in the way that numerous police forces have adopted a “can’t-be-arsed” approach to at least six legitimate complaints from different people against Lynsay Watson, and yet – and despite his astonishing track record of literally hundreds of obviously malicious and baseless complaints BY him – still leap to act as his personal goon squad to terrorise innocent people for entirely lawful beliefs and comments.

Is it misplaced all-cops-together solidarity/empathy for a former colleague? Is it merely staggering incompetence and jaw-dropping ignorance of the law? Is it professional indoctrination? (It may be pertinent that Avon & Somerset has a particularly woke imbecile for a Chief Constable whose main driving focuses appear to be diversity and inclusion rather than, y’know, fighting crime.)

We don’t know. What we CAN be sure of is that Lynsay Watson will continue to spend every waking moment of his life spewing out hopeless malign complaints in the hope that once in every few hundred attempts he’ll get lucky and find a gullible cop who’ll bang on someone’s door in the middle of the night and terrify the bejesus out of them.

It is absurdly overdue that someone in a position of authority sits down and examines the simply astounding amount of taxpayers’ money and police time he’s wasted on his vicious, demented vendetta against everyone who knows what biology is, and his long string of incitements to murder, and either labels him a vexatious litigant, puts him in the dock, or preferably both.

In a country where Lucy Connolly, a mother who’d never been in trouble with the police in her life, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for a single intemperate tweet that was visible for less than four hours, Lynsay Watson is allowed to explicitly incite murder and violence for political reasons over and over again, and to lodge endless harassment complaints against people he himself has been arrested for harassing, while he’s still on bail for harassing other people, after he was sacked by the police for harassment.

And if his victims (or as he calls them, “key propagandists” and “Nazis”) talk about it, the police will go out to arrest them.

As Daniel and I left the police station, we struggled to find words for the absurdity of what had just happened (and as an experienced solicitor, Daniel’s been party to some pretty damn absurd cases). When I tell lawyers and cops and legal types about it and show them what got my door battered on at 2.15am, most of them struggle to manage more than “WTF? FFS!”

Even as we speak, though, you can be certain that Watson is simply doubling, tripling and quadrupling down, making more spurious complaints, filing more doomed judicial review applications, and whipping up more hatred and death threats. Like a rampaging bull in a china shop, his blind, hateful, furious thrashing and bellowing results in a trail of civic destruction, loss of faith in the forces of law and order, public expense and damaged lives, and he proudly boasts that he’ll “never, ever stop”.

Despite the events of this week, Wings will continue to report on his activities until hopefully, one day, the relevant authorities finally tire of his ruinous, uncontrollable rage and do something to give innocent people some peace.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham speaks with John Craig, Interim Chief Coastguard, and Duncan Capps, Border Security Commander, near a recovered small boat, August 2, 2026 (PA Images / Alamy)

4 min read9 min

With little said so far on immigration, and Shabana Mahmood returning as Home Secretary, it would be easy to assume that there will be continuity in this policy area. But there are welcome clues that he may try to walk a different line.

Here are three ways a Burnham government could do things differently on immigration. 

1. Put care of people first

Our new Prime Minister is often described as an instinctive politician, visibly empathising with people’s concerns and experiences. His willingness to listen to voters’ anxieties over the current immigration system, without engaging in an arms race on rhetoric or dehumanising those at the centre of the debate, has been a breath of fresh air to many.

While Burnham agrees that the current system of permanent settlement in the UK needs root and branch reform, he has also shown concern about forcing people to wait many years without the ability to settle. This may mean the Starmer government’s contentious reforms to settlement are liable to change. These proposals not only extend the wait for a route to permanent residency for most migrants; they could lead to hundreds of thousands becoming ineligible entirely, risking unsettlement and indefinite insecurity.

The Home Office is reportedly preparing to amend its proposals. A Burnham government should ensure this happens, scrapping plans to make status temporary for as long as 15 or even 20 years for care workers and recognised refugees, and choosing not to change the rules retrospectively for those people who are already here. 

 2. Hand power back to communities

By now, those listening closely will know Burnham’s central diagnosis: in the 1980s, Britain took some wrong turns, with political power centralised and economic power privatised.

Asylum dispersal is a good example of this. Since Labour was last in power, asylum accommodation and support has been centralised and outsourced, creating a system that houses asylum seekers in the greatest numbers in some of the UK’s poorest postcodes, while making billionaires out of the owners of the private companies.

Burnham has previously said he wants to rip up these contracts and hand power back to local government. He could also clear hotels far earlier than the planned 2029 deadline by switching the money spent on hotels into a capital fund that allows councils to invest in social housing for all – another priority for the Prime Minister.

Another way he can hand communities greater control is through the government’s new ‘named community sponsorship’ scheme. Announced with little fanfare last month, the scheme allows community groups to identify refugees they wish to sponsor to be resettled in the UK, if they meet basic criteria. Similar to ‘Homes for Ukraine’, this is a real opportunity to put communities in the driving seat if it is prioritised.

3. Get Britain believing in itself again

Burnham has promised to “bring back hope” and get Britain believing in itself again. Creating a progressive immigration system that works and commands public support will be integral to this.

The Prime Minister should start by addressing irregular Channel crossings. If the government acts fast, there could be scope to bring other European countries into an expanded version of the UK-France deal, allowing Britain to return far more people arriving by small boat in exchange for offering a safe passage to those in need of asylum from Europe. Expanding the deal could allow Burnham make real progress on a key voter concern while delivering an asylum system that is both principled and orderly.

Of course, other aspects of the system urgently need reform too. It is visibly and badly broken; delivering poorly for local communities, refugees and migrants alike. But there is scope through reforms like these to begin to rebuild it, and in doing so, project a vision of a confident, multiracial Britain that can believe in its future again.

Beth Gardiner-Smith is senior policy associate at the Future Governance Forum

Chi Onwurah following a reverse select committee Credit: Sense About Science

4 min read6 min

Again and again we hear the public complain that MPs are out of touch, that they don’t represent the public interest, that Parliament is just a game for careerists. It’s not only the public making these claims, of course: we hear colleagues making similar statements to crowd-pleasing effect. The fact that such claims please the crowd should give us all cause to pause.

However, while those claims might be true of individuals, they’re certainly not my experience of Parliament. As Chair of the Defence Select Committee, I can see for myself how much time and attention not only goes into formulating policy in all areas, but also into scrutinising it. Nobody does this work on a whim, as the naysayers might have us believe, or because it lines their pockets: they’re putting the hours in to make our country a better, stronger, safer place to live and work.

Nonetheless, while we Parliamentarians enjoy the benefit of seeing all the work that goes on behind the scenes – the weeks and months of effort before the headlines land – that same privilege is rarely afforded to the public.

To be sure, the government rightly insists on transparency. “There should be no power without accountability, and true accountability requires transparency,” wrote former Prime Minister Keir Starmer back in 2020. And indeed the public rightly has access to a raft of statistics and data on what’s being done, where and how decisions have been reached.

But transparency isn’t the same thing as visibility. It’s one thing to have access to information about Parliament, it’s another to experience it.

That’s why I agreed to participate in this year’s Evidence Week in Parliament, a week-long series of activities organised by the charity Sense about Science to champion the public interest in sound evidence use, and in the process help demystify the workings of our democracy.

Evidence Week opened with a unique ‘Reverse Select Committee’ hearing: 20 members of the public, selected to represent as wide as possible a range of interests and backgrounds, assembled in a Committee Room to each put a question to a panel of Select Committee Chairs and Members, alongside other expert advisers.

Chaired by Sense about Science’s Chief Executive Tracey Brown, it followed the form of an authentic select committee hearing and challenged us panellists to explain our work.

“How does Parliament stay informed of the realities of defence technologies, when they are rapidly developing?”

“Given the rising number of 16-24 year olds not in education or employment, how does Parliament make sure that government is implementing AI technology in a way that addresses this issue, rather than exacerbates it?”

“How can Parliament keep track of the social value created by sports groups?”

These questions – just a handful of those asked and answered – are intelligent, incisive and deserve attention. But in what other forum would members of the public normally get to ask them?

Having the opportunity not only to address their queries, but also to explain how we were able to address them – to describe the workings of a select committee, to outline the Parliamentary process to people who would otherwise never have an opportunity to see inside the Palace of Westminster, let alone observe a committee meeting – was both humbling and empowering.

My fellow panellist Lord Clement-Jones noted that the experience was “both of interest and reassuring to those who came – that’s democratic engagement for you.”

And isn’t that the antidote to “they don’t speak for us”? A window into Parliament. Direct, democratic, public engagement. The participants, I hope, left with a deeper understanding of how policy is formed and scrutinised, and a greater awareness of the accountability that the select committee process enforces. Most of all, they saw that the great Westminster machine is intended to work for them. And you can bet they’ll tell their friends.