Harry Miller has won his High Court freedom of speech battle against Humberside Police over his right to make jokes about transgenderism on social media.
Miller, himself an ex-copper, was incensed when Humberside Police sent a police officer round to his home in order to ‘check his thinking’ after some remarks he had made on Twitter were classified as a ‘non-crime hate incident.’
As Miller told Breitbart London last year, he decided that he would fight the issue in the courts rather than accept that the police had any business sniffing through his Twitter feed in search of offensive material.
The judge has agreed that his tweets were legitimate.
Mr Justice Knowles said:
The claimant’s tweets were lawful and there was not the slightest risk that he would commit a criminal offence by continuing to tweet.
I find the combination of the police visiting the claimant’s place of work, and their subsequent statements in relation to the possibility of prosecution, were a disproportionate interference with the claimant’s right to freedom of expression because of their potentially chilling effect.
It gets better. He continued:
In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.
However, the court ruling is unlikely to resolve much because the judge did not accept Miller’s wider challenge against the College of Policing guidelines on ‘hate crime.’
As the BBC reports:
These define a hate incident as “any non-crime incident which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by a hostility or prejudice against a person who is transgender or perceived to be transgender”.
Clearly, if one of the plans of the Boris Johnson/Dominic Cummings/Priti Patel law and order faction in the new administration is to restore commonsense to the English justice system, much work still needs to be done to strip out the entrenched political correctness introduced during the Blair years.
WATCH: James Delingpole interviews Harry Miller in 2019
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