Businessman launches a landmark High Court battle to overhaul official rules on hate crimes
by Sanchez Manning and Joani Walsh, Mailonline:
A businessman investigated by police over a poem about transgenderism is launching a landmark High Court case to overhaul the official rules on hate crimes.
Harry Miller is to seek a ‘judicial review’ of the hate crime guidelines followed by police forces across Britain, claiming they are ‘unlawful’ because they ‘inhibit freedom of expression’.
The 54-year-old company boss, who is a former policeman, argues that the current guidance, published by the College of Policing in 2014, the body responsible for training officers, ‘promotes the recording of hate incidents’.
His legal team have highlighted a clause in the rules that state such incidents must be recorded by officers ‘irrespective of any evidence to identify the hate element’.
Mr Miller, chairman of a machinery company at Immingham Port, is also challenging a decision by Humberside Police to record his re-tweeting of the poem as a hate incident – despite officers concluding that no crime had been committed.
The businessman was quizzed by Humberside Police in January after posting the verse about men who transition to be women, which included the lines: ‘You’re a man … And we can tell the difference … Your hormones are synthetic’.
He claims he received a call from an officer telling him that someone ‘down south’ had sent the force 30 of Mr Miller’s tweets, which they alleged to be transphobic, and informing him ‘we need to check your thinking’ – a comment police later denied making .
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