Over the last week I’ve been following the story of how Harry Miller, the free speech campaigner who took on the police’s system for recording ‘non-crime hate incidents’, got arrested for standing up for the right of Britons to speak freely. He was arrested by officers from Hampshire Police for defending a man who had already had previous intimidatory visits from Hampshire officers over his opinions.

The gist of the story, although it is told in much more detail by Mr Miller over in his piece called ‘The Facebook Police’ over on the pages of The Critic magazine, is that a resident of the Hampshire police force area, who is said to be ex-Military, republished on social media an image of a flag. This flag is a very famous, or rather I should say infamous, interpretation of the ‘Trans rainbow flag’, you know the one, it’s got the triangles representing all the things after the B in LGB eating its way into the rainbow, just like how the parasite gender ideology can be on the LGB communities. When this bastardisation of what was a perfectly acceptable and indeed representative rainbow flag appeared on the scene, people much cleverer than I am noticed that when you copy and paste this trans rainbow flag at right angles to one another you get the image of a Swastika made up of the trans triangles as per the image, which I’ve uploaded for educational purposes below, shows.

This cut and pasted image of the trans flag went absolutely viral and I believe that this virality has been in part due to the policy of trans activists stating that there is to be ‘no debate’ about their ideology, a demand that in my view should never be entertained, let alone accepted. All ideologies should face challenge but too many trans activists do not want to have any debate about their ideology, let alone have their views challenged.

Because of this widely observed pattern among trans activists of not wanting any debate about their positions to be allowed, the swastika trans flag took off, as it was a seen as a comment about this desire for no debate. People used the swastika trans flag in order to compare a truly horrible regime with trans activists because back in the early 1930s in Germany the Nazi government cracked down on all dissent just as trans activists do today. Of course some will say that this is a clumsy metaphor but that’s about all that can be said negatively about it. In this case the swastika was not used to big up neo-Nazis or anything like that and neither does it denigrate the Holocaust or minimise the crimes of the Nazis. It comes across to me as a comment on free speech and the suppression of dissent by, on this occasion, those on the wilder shores of trans activism.

My own opinion is that in this context the use of the swastika made from trans flags is not that much of a problem. If I saw a man or a woman walking down the street wearing the image above on a tee shirt I would not be at all bothered, in fact I would probably smile and think ‘now there goes someone who believes in biological reality and free intellectual enquiry’. I’d feel completely different if a person was waving a genuine WWII Nazi flag outside my house at midnight whilst continually shouting ‘Kike-servative’ at me. The second use of a swastika image is a problem and represents a possible clear and present danger to me and one that I must take all possible legal action against. But the first use of a swastika image is not really a problem to me as I can see that the image is being used in a particular and more acceptable context and in things like this context matters.

Unfortunately, Hampshire Police do not seem to understand or want to understand the context of an image that has been very very widely shared, partly because of the reasons regarding suppression of dissent that I mention above. The veteran in question shared an image of the flag that was put out on the social media feed of the Reclaim Party leader Lawrence Fox. Hampshire Police, allegedly acting on a complaint that the imaged had caused an unknown person ‘anxiety’, went mob handed to this military veteran’s door and threatened him with arrest under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003. What’s worse is that the police, in a blatant act of political bias, offered to impose a ‘community resolution order’ on the veteran whereby the ‘offender’ could pay a fee and go on a ‘re-education’ course. The officers also suggested that the veteran should ‘clear’ any online comments with his neighbours, a ludicrous and authoritarian suggestion if ever I heard one.

When the Hampshire officers turned up at the veteran’s home in order to arrest or intimidate him into paying for a ‘re-education’ course, they were faced with Mr Fox and Harry Miller of the Bad Law Project. Mr Miller, who is an ex-police officer himself, not only remonstrated with the officers over their harassing a men who had not originated but only shared an image, but also pointed out where these officers were overstepping their legal authority.

Mr Miller was subsequently arrested but released without charge a short while later. There is good background information and commentary on this case to be found not just in Mr Miller’s piece for The Critic but also from some posts on Graham Linehan’s Substack which can be found here and here. There’s also video criticism of Hampshire Police’s actions from the pop culture vlogger The Quartering and Sargon of Akkad’s Lotuseaters channel.

Whilst there are a great deal (far too many) stories and examples of UK police actions regarding the use and misuse of ‘hate speech’ laws and harassing people who have ‘offended’ others, this Hampshire case is, in my view, especially egregious. My reasons for considering this incident particularly egregious is that here we see a whole bunch of behaviours by the police that the public should not either expect or accept.

Firstly there is the fact that the military veteran at the centre of this story is someone who the police or elements in the police have taken prior exception to, because of his political views and who has had at least one prior visit from police harassing him about his opinions. It’s fair to say having read about this story and seen the videos out there that relate to this incident that the police come over not just as bullying thugs but also bullying thugs whose mindset is to follow orders without question and ask ‘how high’ when told by some identity politics group to jump. What we have here are police officers deciding by seemingly capricious means, what is acceptable with regards speech and what is not. This is the spectre that many have warned about of police actively policing in a highly politicised manner. These officers were not policing for the benefit of the local people in Hampshire, they were policing for Stonewall and Stonewall’s favoured ideology.

Secondly to act as enforcers for those who have chosen to be offended by something they’ve seen online is not what our police forces should be doing, especially not police forces in areas such as Hampshire that suffer from horrendous levels of real crime such as burglary of which there were 8000 of such crimes in Hampshire in just one year. To send a considerable number or officers (I counted at least four in some of the footage I’ve seen) to harass a man over a meme that has probably already been posted by tens if not hundreds of thousands of people, is both a shockingly bad use of police resources and shows Hampshire has shockingly poor choices when it comes to police priorities.

Finally, on the matter of egregiousness, there was the part of the incident when the police tried to pressure the person they were harassing into accepting a small fixed penalty notice and a trip to a re-education class. This is shameful behaviour by the police. They are shaking down people and getting them to sign up to dodgy re-education classes with all the enthusiasm of some uniformed Soviet functionary faced with someone caught reading something anti-Soviet. I’ve looked up the relevant information about the Community Resolution Order that the police tried to get the person they were harassing to agree to and in my view it’s correct that he did refuse.

According to information published by West Midlands Police, the website of Bindman’s Solicitors and the criminal rehabilitation organisation Unlock, accepting a Community Resolution Order means making “a clear and reliable admission” of guilt. In other words the person being harassed by Hampshire Police for sharing an image that has already been shared thousands of time, is being asked by the police to admit personal guilt over sharing an image that thousands have already shared and without police intervention.

If the man at the centre of this story, a man who it seems has been consistently and personally harassed by Hampshire Police, had caved in and accepted this £60 fixed penalty notice and the Community Resolution Order then he would have saddled himself not only with a quasi-criminal record but one that would appear on enhanced DBS checks for future jobs or community work. The existence of the Community Resolution Order might also be taken into account by a future magistrate or judge should Hampshire Police decide to up the ante by prosecuting this man for ‘hurty words’ under Britain’s varied and increasingly capricious and misused bits of ‘hate speech’ legislation.

The use by Hampshire Police of the concept of re-education classes is extremely worrying. There is provision in the legislation that governs Community Resolution Orders for low level criminals who have been given a CRO to be given ‘victim awareness classes’ in order that they can understand the impact of what they’ve done to others. However, although I can understand how this could work when it comes to general low seriousness crime such as the bungled theft of a lawnmower from a shed by a drunk with no previous, to stretch this idea to encompass areas that are intimately connected to concepts such as freedom of speech and thought, is wrong.

I can’t help but wonder two things about this aspect of the case. Firstly, what form do these re-education classes take when those forced to take them are the sort of dissidents who for example, have the temerity to say that women don’t have penises? Are they required to be shuffled into a grim, beige, florescent lighted room at the local town hall or civic centre and be lectured for a couple of hours by some employee of the local, taxpayer funded of course, council diversity section? Or are they required to enter a similar room and be lectured for hours by a reality detached zealot who is either employed by or an acolyte of Stonewall? Either would be wrong.

The second thing that springs to mind when I hear of Hampshire Police harassing people into accepting a Community Resolution Order over words that someone has found ‘offensive’ is that if these officers were so confident that they could do this on camera, then how many other residents of Hampshire who are policed by this force have similarly been shaken down but whose harassment by the police into accepting a CRO for speech crimes has not been filmed or publicised? Mr Miller and Mr Fox have done us all a great service by highlighting what Hampshire Police were doing to this man. It opens up questions about how many other people are Hampshire Police treating like this, how many sixty quids have they taken and how many ‘re-education’ classes have been filled because of Hampshire Police’s actions?

Before I conclude I want to say that this is still a moving story and it is one that has gone absolutely wild not just in the UK where it garnered mainstream media attention , but it has also garnered much attention over in the USA. From the little of the massive amount of comment I’m seeing from there it seems that more than a few people are expressing astonishment at the behaviour of Hampshire Police. This is, of course, a massive PR disaster for Hampshire Police, it’s shown the world the calibre of stupid, aggressive and ideologically driven thugs that seem to survive all too easily in today’s police force ecosystem. It’s made Hampshire Police a complete and utter laughing stock both in the UK and across the world. I’m of course very pleased to see how the elected Police and Crime Commissioner for Hampshire has come out and criticised the actions of her own force with regards the harassment of this veteran. She said:

“When incidents on social media receive not one but two visits from police officers, but burglaries and non-domestic break-ins don’t always get a police response, something is wrong… As Police Commissioner, I am committed to ensuring Hampshire Constabulary serves the public as the majority of people would expect. It appears on this occasion this has not happened… In order to support this I will be writing to the College of Policing to make them aware of this incident and encourage greater clarification on the guidance in order to ensure that police forces can respond more appropriately in the future.”

This statement from Donna Jones, the Police and Crime Commissioner, was absolutely the correct thing to say. I must admit that it’s good to see a PCC take a stance like this and I wish more would call out bad policing like we’ve seen in Hampshire because what we saw in the incident in question was bad policing. It was not policing for all, it was acting as the enforcement arm of Stonewall and other entities that hold a similar antipathy to having their ideologies challenged either by serious debate or the satire which is what is now referred to more widely as the ‘swastika trans flag’.

To conclude I will give full marks to Harry Miller and Lawrence Fox for their choice to intervene in this case. I may not always agree with everything that they both say but I’m damned pleased that they are out there fighting for your and my right to speak freely. If they had not intervened Hampshire Police might have been able to continue to squeeze people in their area into coughing up sixty pounds and a trip to a dubious ‘re-education’ class for years before it got noticed; they may even have already been doing such disgraceful political policing for years already. Hampshire Police’s record in this area of the use of Community Resolution Orders for matters regarding conflicts over speech is something that I believe urgently needs to be examined in order to ascertain just how long CRO’s have been used by Hampshire in this way and also how many people have been subjected to them over speech conflicts.

I don’t believe that this story is over yet. Not by a long chalk. This story might be the beginning of yet another policing scandal but yet again one where a force has chosen to cleave to ideology and political correctness rather than follow the path of impartial, honest and proportionate policing.

No matter where this story goes or ends up it does one thing. It highlights just how important it is for the UK to have some approximation of the USA’s First Amendment in order to protect freedom of speech. For too long have we lived under the tyranny of the offended because we suffer as a nation the twin afflictions of a free speech right that only applies to MP’s rather than to every Briton and ‘hate speech’ laws that are all too easily abused to shut down legitimate free speech. It’s time that this situation changed. What happened in Hampshire shows that when you have a police force that reeks of being ideologically bent enforcing laws that are and have been shown to be inequitable, then the outcomes for those who have the misfortune to be policed in this way tend to end up being bad.