MARCH OF THE THOUGHT POLICE
A knock on the door was the start of a truly Orwellian nightmare for businessman Harry Miller – as an officer said ‘I need to check your thinking’ over tweets he’d sent. Now he’s gone to court ... in a landmark fight for free speech
UNTIL 12 months ago, businessman Harry Miller led a blameless existence. He was running his successful plant and machinery company in Humberside, happily married and watching his four children grow up.
But at 3pm on January 23 last year — a Wednesday he will never forget — he received a call from one of his company’s staff just as he had finished shopping at Tesco. The staff member said a group of police had made an unannounced visit to Harry’s workplace and needed to talk to him. They had left a number for him to ring.
He had no inkling of what it was about, but Harry made the call as he sat in the supermarket’s car park, with his plastic bag full of food on the car seat beside him.
And what happened in the next 34 minutes has changed his life.
During a lengthy conversation with a police constable who said he was from Humberside Constabulary and represented the LGBTQ community, Harry was accused of transphobia due to 30 messages he had tweeted or retweeted the previous year.
His posts were being investigated as a hate incident, the constable told him, because they questioned whether a transgender woman could really be a biological woman.
Then, using a phrase with chilling Orwellian implications, Harry claims the officer added that the police wanted to ‘check his thinking’. Today, Harry, a former police officer himself, is at the centre of a momentous legal case concerning one of the most controversial issues of our time: the extent to which the police should exert control over free speech, and even the thoughts of ordinary people.
He has been granted a judicial review against the College of Policing, which trains officers and sets standards. He is challenging its guidelines on ‘hate crimes’ in all walks of life, and particularly on social media. The judgment will be announced in the next few days.
Only this week, the veteran newscaster Alastair Stewart was forced to leave ITN after 40 years for tweeting a passage from Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure which included the words ‘ angry ape’. He sent the post to Martin Shapland, who is black and took offence.
There were no police involved, but the furious backlash against Stewart’s ‘ sacking’ — with thousands signing a petition to have him reinstated, and a Shakespeare scholar pointing out that the Bard used the word ‘ape’ to mean someone who is ignorant — shows just how pervasive people believe the ‘hate crime’ industry has become.
It is, in part, for this reason that Harry Miller launched his case. He has handed over the day-today
He has been threatened with murder
running of his business so he can concentrate on the highly contentious legal battle.
Ten days ago, he and his family were threatened with murder and rape in a YouTube video he assumes was sent by protrans activists.
‘I have broad shoulders, but this fight is hard,’ he told the Mail this week. ‘If ordinary people like myself don’t stand up against what I see as overreaching authority by the police, who will?
‘It is definitely not the job of the State to restrict what we can or cannot talk about, either in face - to - face conversation or online.’
And then, referring to George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four in which ‘thought police’ control the State, punishing personal political views which are not officially approved, Harry says: ‘ It’s as though our police have concluded: “Good book. Let’s try it”.’
What happened to Harry in the Tesco car park makes one wonder if he is right. The PC said he had received a complaint about Harry’s tweets from a ‘victim’ — an unnamed member of the public ‘down south’ — who had alerted the hate crime unit of Britain’s biggest police force, London’s Scotland Yard.
Officers at the Yard, in turn, asked Humberside police to interview Harry after tracing him to his plant and machinery business in the force’s area.
The policeman told Harry that he was in trouble for retweeting a ‘transphobic’ limerick.
He was told that he was also being investigated for tweeting support for BBC Woman’s Hour presenter Jenni Murray, who had been criticised by Oxford students after writing a newspaper article questioning whether transgender women are ‘real women’.
Harry was told in the conversation at Tesco that he had not broken the law but was guilty of a ‘ non- crime’ hate incident. According to court papers, the constable explained to him: ‘Sometimes, a woman’s brain grows a man’s body in the womb and that is what transgender is.’
When Harry asked why the officer kept calling the person who had made the complaint a ‘victim’, when no crime had been established, he was told ‘ that’s just how it works’.
The upshot of all this? The 55-year- old now has an official police record stating he has committed a ‘ non- crime’ transphobic hate offence. And, remember, as yet Harry does not know who pointed the finger at him, and probably never will.
At the two-day judicial review hearing in the High Court last autumn, he challenged Hate Crime Operational Guidance issued by the College Of Policing in 2014, which was sent to all England and Wales forces. It states a comment that is reported as hateful by a victim must be recorded ‘ irrespective of whether there is any evidence to identify the hate element’.
Written with the help of pro- trans lobby groups, the guidelines say police should also pursue ‘any non-crime incident which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice against a person who is transgender or perceived to be transgender’.
The same strict rules apply to matters of race, religion, sexual orientation, and disability.
Since the catch-all guidance
‘It is not the job of the State to restrict speech’
was released, police forces have recorded at least 87,000 non-crime hate incidents — none of which break the law. Scotland Yard, which now has a staggering 900 hate crime officers, has chalked up the highest number — 9,473 over the past five years. And hate incident investigations are diverting officers from the priority of tackling violent crime, according to Cressida Dick, Scotland Yard’s Commissioner and Britain’s most senior police officer. ‘We should be focusing on what the public tell me they care about,’ she said in November 2018, in response to the idea that London’s hate crime units should expand their remit beyond the 2014 guidelines to include misogyny ( ingrained prejudice against women). ‘My officers are very busy, they are very stretched. We have young people in London subject to gang violence, getting involved in drug dealing, stabbings . . . lots of priorities’. Her concerns are only too understandable. The number of recorded crimes resulting in a person being charged or summonsed in England and Wales has
halved in the past five years to just 7.8 per cent, according to the latest home Office statistics. Meanwhile, violent crime is on the rise, with offences involving knives rising from 41,000 to more than 44,000 in the 12 months to June 2019.
But police priorities aside, harry Miller and his lawyers are also fighting to save free speech. They point out that the european Court of human rights ruled that ‘ freedom of expression . . . constitutes one of the essential foundations of a democratic society, and one of the basic conditions for each individual’s self-fulfilment’.
The judges in Strasbourg added: ‘This is applicable for information or ideas that are favourably received or regarded as inoffensive . . . but also to those that shock or disturb the State or any section of the population.’
Significantly, Mr Justice Julian Knowles, the judge overseeing the judicial review, appears to agree. he claimed the police had become too quick to report hate incidents without proper proof.
‘It doesn’t make sense to me. how can it be a hate incident if there is no evidence of the hate element?’ he said at the hearing at the high Court in London.
‘We live in a pluralistic society where none of us have a right to be offended by something that they hear,’ he added.
‘Freedom-of-expression laws are not there to protect statements such as “kittens are cute”, but they are there to protect unpleasant things. Their utility lies in exposing people to things that they do not want to hear.’
As harry himself says, ‘We have to be allowed to debate an issue without one group being able to call on the police to shut another group down. Free speech in Britain is being stalked by a climate of fear and secrecy to which the police now contribute.
‘I am pro-police, but it is definitely not the job of the State to restrict what we can talk about.’
But not even legal minds agree over this issue. Maya Forstater, a 45-year-old tax expert, lost her job at a London think-tank last year after tweeting that transgender women cannot change their biological sex. She was accused of using ‘offensive and exclusionary language’ before her contract was not renewed.
her appeal to an employment tribunal, claiming that the european Convention on human rights protected her free speech, was unsuccessful.
The judge said Ms Forstater’s views were ‘not worthy of respect in a democratic society’.
This declaration appeared to infuriate harry Potter author J. K. rowling, who came out in support of Ms Forstater, tweeting: ‘Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill’.
In contrast, Britain’s first transgender hate-crime trial was halted last March, after just one day, as the judge said there ‘is no case and never was a case’.
Miranda Yardley, a 51-year- old accountant who, despite his name, identifies as a transsexual male, claimed he had been put through ‘ten months of hell’ after being accused by police of harassing a transgender activist on Twitter.
After his successful acquittal over his tweets contending that individuals cannot change sex, Miranda Yardley claimed police were being used to ‘enforce a political ideology’.
So what exactly are the Twitter messages that have got harry Miller into such trouble — tweets that were deemed so serious that two police forces and many officers, hundreds of miles apart, were involved?
The Mail has been shown some of them. One merely says ‘huh’ — and harry cannot even remember what he was responding to. In a second, he talked about trouble at a University of Oxford debate, commenting: ‘ The anti- Jenni Murray crowd were out baying, screaming and spitting at (other students)’.
And then there is the retweeted limerick. It included a crude, even cruel, line about transgender women which read: ‘You’re a man. Your breasts are made of silicone. Your vagina goes nowhere.’
Offensive, yes. But worthy of attention from the hard-pressed police? Many will undoubtedly think not.
In a written submission to the judicial review, the College of Policing stoutly defended its hate-crime guidelines, saying that harry Miller had ‘engaged in regular tweeting relating to transgender people’, and in one message said: ‘I was assigned mammal at birth, but my orientation is fish. Don’t mis-species (sic) me . . . ’ harry then added an F-word in plural.
The College also said that it was ‘ not beyond reason that a transgender person reading those messages would consider them to be motivated by a hostility or prejudice against a person who is transgender.’
humberside Police told the judge that its action over harry’s tweets had resulted in only ‘minimal’ interference with his freedom of expressions.
harry, of course, disagrees. he is unrepentant as he waits anxiously for the outcome of the judicial review. Speaking from his pleasant family home in a peaceful part of east Anglia, he says: ‘I’ve broken no law. I have done nothing illegal. Yet I now have a police record on file for retweeting a limerick. It is completely mad.
‘My view is that transwomen are not biological women. But how do I air my views without drawing the criticism of the police?’
It is a question many in Britain might ask themselves today.