FORMER police officer Harry Miller lives in Lincoln and is a director of a business that employs some 70 people.
One day in January, he received a call from his office saying that the police had turned up there and wanted to speak to him. He called the police and spoke to PC MansoorGull who told him that an anonymous person had reported him for hate speech.
The caller had found his company and reported that his workplace would not be a safe place for trans people.
PC Gull said he was in possession of 30 offensive tweets by Mr Miller. Mr Miller asked if he had committed a crime. PC Gull said no. Mr Miller then asked if any of the tweets came close to being a crime. PC Gull then read what he called a ‘limerick’ which Mr Miller had re-tweeted.
Mr Miller did not even write the poem, which asserts that transgender women are really men and that trans surgery is artificial. Mr Miller then asked why PC Gull was wasting his time on a non-crime, to which PC Gull replied: ‘It’s not a crime, but it will be recorded as a hate incident.’
But what is a ‘hate incident’? This is how it is defined:
‘A hate incident is any non-crime perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a person’s race or perceived race / religion or perceived religion / sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation / disability or perceived disability / transgender or perceived to be transgender.’
Notice how many times ‘perception’ is emphasised in this definition. Basically, if anyone perceives anything as a hate incident, then it is a hate incident. The police will then have to record it, and there is no innocent till proven guilty.
There is no proven guilty at all. In fact, there is no way to prove innocence either. Such an allegation will be recorded against you forevermore, with no recourse to fact or anything else. No matter whether the motive of the reporting person was actually hate in the first place!
When Mr Miller later asked Humberside police to remove him from their hate-crime statistics, they said they couldn’t because they were following the policing guidelines.
During the conversation with Mr Miller, PC Gull kept referring to the complainant as ‘the victim’. Mr Miller asked how he was a victim since PC Gull agreed that there was no crime.
Mr Miller explained that calling the complainant a ‘victim’ made Mr Miller a ‘criminal’ by default. PC Gull persisted with this terminology, however. Then PC Gull explained that he needed to speak with Mr Miller because, even though Mr Miller had committed no crimes whatsoever, ‘I need to check your thinking’.
Mr Miller explained that that meant PC Gull was acting like the Thought Police. He asked PC Gull if he had ever read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Gull hadn’t, of course, and Mr Miller explained that it was a dystopian novel and not a police handbook.
PC Gull then explained to Mr Miller: ‘What you have to understand, Mr Miller, is that sometimes a female brain grows with the wrong body parts and that is what being trans is.’
Mr Miller asked if that was the official definition of trans. PC Gull said: ‘Yes, I’ve been on a course.’ Mr Miller laughed, and the whole conversation lasted more than 30 minutes while Mr Miller was lectured on thought crime and transgender ideology.
Transgender campaign group Mermaids advertises on its website that it provides training for the NHS, police service, social services, schools and others.
In this way, officers such as PC Gull are being trained in transgender ideology. Even worse, some of them, like PC Gull, seem to actually believe it too, no matter that it is clearly contrary to science and common sense.
Mr Miller has been brave enough to sue the police over the whole ‘hate speech’ agenda. He says that he was merely participating in a contemporary political debate over transgenderism.
The Government did a consultation on gender recognition last year and the law has not changed so far. Yet the police are clamping down on comments which are perceived as ‘transphobic’.
Mr Miller’s only resort in law is judicial review, which is costly and therefore not open to most people. Nevertheless, he has decided that this is a fight worth sacrificing for. People must be able to speak their minds. If we don’t have free speech, we don’t have a free society.
Mr Miller wants his name cleared of a hate incident. As far as he was concerned, there was no hate and there was no incident. He is also calling for the College of Policing to immediately withdraw its guidelines on hate incidents.
He was finally able to get hold of copies of the 30 tweets that the police claimed were transphobic. One of them simply said: ‘Huh?’ What that ‘huh?’ was replying to was redacted. Another said: ‘When did transgender day of remembrance become a thing?’ which is merely a question.
Mr Miller later found that his ‘hate incident’ could appear on an enhanced Criminal Records Bureau check. A crime/non-crime offence of hate on a crime report. No conviction required. No evidence required. No appeal possible. A complaint by a Trans Rights Activist (TRA) is all that’s needed to get you one of these.
This in spite of him not having committed a crime and having no recourse to appeal. This means that anyone who is reported for a ‘hate incident’ could have their career blocked, with that incident appearing in a Disclosure and Barring Service check for employment.
Mr Miller set up a campaign group, Fair Cop, to pressure the police to change their policy on hate incidents. Fair Cop is crowdfunding his case against the police.
The judicial review will be heard in the Royal Courts of Justice today and tomorrow. His lawyers will argue that the police are acting in breach of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which preserves the right to freedom of expression.
This case is very significant. If Harry Miller wins, we could see a wholesale change in policing and a real shift towards freedom of speech. If he loses, then this will demonstrate that we are clearly living in a restricted society and that Thought Police are a reality in the UK today. Either way, it is expected that the case will be appealed.
We will be following the case closely, since it has big implications for the freedom to preach the Gospel and to speak truth in today’s society. We hope and pray that the courts see sense.
You can watch Harry tell his own story here – scroll to the end of the article. Let us hope the judicial review results in the whole ‘hate incident’ guidance being scrapped.
