The appeals court has rightly upheld Harry Miller’s freedom to express his views
A man gets a call from a police officer. He is told that, while he has done nothing criminal, his social media posts have offended someone, so the police have recorded them as a non-crime hate incident that may show up on criminal record checks. The officer warns that if he continues to “escalate” matters, the police may take criminal action against him, a message later reinforced by his superiors.
It may sound like something out of a police state. But this happened in Britain in 2019, in a case that led the high court judge who later ruled the actions of Humberside police force unlawful to warn them, “in this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi”. Despite there being no evidence that Harry Miller, the man in question, might ever stray into unlawful speech, the police took action that reasonably led him to believe that he was being warned not to exercise his right to freedom of expression on pain of potential criminal prosecution; they also opined to the press that Miller’s tweets were “transphobic”.