Justice Julian Knowles 14 February 2020 full judgement in the case of Miller vs College of Policing and Chief Constable of Humberside
“Free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative … Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having ... “ - Sedley LJ in Redmond-Bate v Director of Public Prosecutions (1999) 7 BHRC 375, [20].
In other words, people in Nazi Germany were relatively free to speak inoffensively about Hitler, people in the USSR were relatively free to speak inoffensively about Stalin. People were also totally free to speak offensively in each case when locked in sound-proofed rooms, with nobody else present to hear their words. The test of freedom of speech is whether bigotry closes it down by sending the police in when someone with a minority viewpoint challenges orthodoxy.
This judgement begins by quoting the unpublished introduction to George Orwell's book 1984 (in which doublethink hypocrisy is defined, along with other propaganda techniques used to reverse freedom for political ends), and ends by quoting J. S. Mill's On Liberty, as follows:
"In his unpublished introduction to Animal Farm (1945) George Orwell wrote: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” "
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"Conclusion 288. In his treatise On Liberty (1859) John Stuart Mill wrote: “If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.” 289. For the reasons I have set out, whilst Mrs B made a complaint that was recorded under HCOG, the police’s treatment of the Claimant thereafter disproportionately interfered with his right of freedom of expression, which is an essential component of democracy for all of the reasons I explained at the beginning of this judgment."
The case centred on the use of a complaint to the police about someone's allegedly hate provoking or stirring speech risking the incitement of violence. If in the USSR you argued with authority and incited a people's attack on KGB headquarters, and some Communist complained that they found you "offensive" to their Marxist bigotry religion, you were tried and the jurors would have to either expose themselves to KGB investigation involving harrassment and hatred, or find you guilty of incitement of hatred and incitement of violence. Then you were lucky if sent to a mental asylum (more probably, you were sent to a Siberian salt mine under Stalin's genocidal regime). Here in Britain, if the hard left which has infiltrated pseudo-"liberal democracy", from journalism to policing, is attempting impose conformity of thought and restrict freedom of expression.
Note that the uploader is fully in tune with people's freedom to identify their gender as they see fit; the issue is reverse-bigotry in the form of censorship (rather justified argument) being use to replace bigotry. To be clear, what happens is that when freedom of expression is abused to make "offensive" remarks, the old spirit of the Spanish Inquisition or other "anti-heresy" thuggery comes back to life and tries to "no-platform" the speaker or to "close down the debate", without actually having the debate. In other words, it uses force (e.g. the police force) to censor critics, instead of engaging with critics and actually resolving the issue by rational argument based on evidence.
The pendulum swings from a right-wing dictatorship which curtails freedom of speech by the left to prevent offense to a left-wing dictatorship which curtains freedom of speech by the right to prevent offense. What is needed is what Mill described in On Liberty, evidence based rational debate to resolve issues, not forceful censorship by one side or the other.
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65 pages