March of the thought police

Feb 2, 2020 by

by Sue Reid, Mailonline:

Until 12 months ago, businessman Harry Miller led a blameless existence. He was running his successful plant and machinery company in Humberside, happily married and watching his four children grow up.

But at 3pm on January 23 last year — a Wednesday he will never forget — he received a call from one of his company’s staff just as he had finished shopping at Tesco. The staff member said a group of police had made an unannounced visit to Harry’s workplace and needed to talk to him. They had left a number for him to ring.

He had no inkling of what it was about, but Harry made the call as he sat in the supermarket’s car park, with his plastic bag full of food on the car seat beside him.

And what happened in the next 34 minutes has changed his life.

During a lengthy conversation with a police constable who said he was from Humberside Constabulary and represented the LGBTQ community, Harry was accused of transphobia due to 30 messages he had tweeted or retweeted the previous year.

His posts were being investigated as a hate incident, the constable told him, because they questioned whether a transgender woman could really be a biological woman.

Then, using a phrase with chilling Orwellian implications, Harry claims the officer added that the police wanted to ‘check his thinking’.

Only this week, the veteran newscaster Alastair Stewart (pictured) was forced to leave ITN after 40 years for tweeting a passage from Shakespeare's Measure For Measure which included the words 'angry ape'

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