No Cheka, no Gestapo, no Stasi
Harry Miller was visited by Humberside Police at work in January last year after a complaint about his tweets.
He was told he had not committed a crime, but it would be recorded as a non-crime “hate incident”.
He hadn’t committed a crime, yet the plods “visited” him at work. No crime, but punishment anyway.
The court found the force’s actions were a “disproportionate interference” with his right to freedom of expression.
…
Mr Justice Julian Knowles said the effect of police turning up at Mr Miller’s place of work “because of his political opinions must not be underestimated”.
He added: “To do so would be to undervalue a cardinal democratic freedom.
“In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.”
Funny to edge toward it on behalf of men who say they are women.
I would suggest reading Amelia Gentleman’s ‘The Windrush Generation: Exposing the Hostile Environment’, which is about the treatment of British citizens who are black and originally from the Caribbean, or children of immigrants from the Caribbean. (It is a betrayal that is now continuing under Boris Johnson’s government, who are now bent on deporting people back to places where they have never lived, or lived only in the very earliest youth, destroying their families in the process.) Or watch Ken Loach’s film, ‘Daniel Blake’. The former, very well-researched & well-written book arouses mingled fury & grief, and ‘Daniel Blake’ is not far behind in this respect. Pace the fond beliefs of Mr Justice Julian Knowles, which are all too common among Britain’s complacent – because blissfully unaffected – upper middle-classes Britain has become an ‘Orwellian society’.
And/or a Kafka-esque one, in which bureaucrats concentrate on giving people the runaround.