Fair Cop is deeply concerned that new police and CPS guidelines will criminalise schoolchildren for expressing doubts about gender ideology.

The LGBT+ Bullying and Hate Crime Schools Project, announced today, was developed by the CPS, the National Police Chiefs’ Council and NASUWT with the aim of encouraging teachers and pupils to report “identity based bullying”.

We are particularly alarmed that the Project uses a definition of “hate crime” that is currently under judicial review. In November, Fair Cop challenged the legality of the College of Policing’s hate crimes guidance in the High Court; in particular, its complete lack

Police forces are recording thousands of hate incidents even though they accept that they are not crimes.

More than 87,000 ‘non-crime hate incidents’ have been recorded by 27 forces in England and Wales over the past five years, when the national policing body introduced its Hate Crime Operational Guidelines.

The guidelines state that an incident – perceived to be motivated by hostility towards religion, race or transgender identity – must be recorded “irrespective of whether there is any evidence to identify the hate element” and can even show up on an individual’s DBS check, despite them not committing a

By way of illustration he mentions the recent case of Harry Miller, the ex-policeman who was investigated by Humberside police for retweeting a poem deemed to be transphobic. Miller is currently challenging the police investigation in court. ‘The judge reminded the court that freedom of speech outweighs the right never to hear something you don’t

A tribunal upholds the firing of an employee who had tweeted that men cannot become women

Fair Cop, a pressure-group set up by Mr Miller and others concerned about the way police deal with so-called “non-crime hate incidents” and especially statements deemed to be transphobic, expressed outrage at the ruling in Ms Forstater’s case. It went on: “Shocking as this judgment is, we welcome the fact that it unmasks the true demands of the trans-rights movement: that everybody in society must either believe in the falsehood that humans can change sex; or, at the very least, self-censor so that

The reasoning in this judgement has enormous and wide-ranging implications for freedom of conscience and expression. The right to freedom of conscience – as enshrined in Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights – is only meaningful if citizens can express their beliefs without fear of sanction.

The judgment in this case suggests that the subjective belief that humans can change sex trumps a belief that the biological facts of human sex are binary and immutable. In his ruling, Judge Tayler held that Maya’s belief that humans cannot change sex is ‘not worthy of respect in a

Fair Cop discuss the recent judicial review before Mr Justice Knowles — how did it go? What will happen now?

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‘The wording of anti-trans hate-crime guidance is so vague, and so reliant on subjective interpretation, that it could be open to misuse by politically-motivated actors’

Criminals are on the march in Oxford. The details are unclear because the content of the supposedly offensive stickers are not “suitable for sharing”, according to Thames Valley Police. Some of them are known to feature a now-controversial dictionary entry: “Woman. Noun. Adult human female.” Also featured on billboards and T-shirts produced by gender-critical feminists, this common-sense statement is a transphobic dog whistle to the ever-alert trans activists.

Read article: Defining women

A year or so ago, a friend insisted we move from Facebook Messenger to WhatsApp for our communications. The former was too easily hackable, she said, and she was worried that any off-colour comments – or indeed jokes – we might make about politics, life or individuals could end up being released to the world. I hate WhatsApp, but – suddenly feeling uneasy – I acquiesced.

At the time, I thought she was being paranoid. Now it has become abundantly clear that one cannot be too careful.

Read article: Must we all live in fear of a visit from

November. In my mind always the ‘nothing-time,’ the liminal space between the brightly lit days of September and October, when the Northern Hemisphere hasn’t quite finished its tilt away from the sun, and the dank, grey days and rotting leaf-mounds that have to be endured before the light and glitter of the Christmas season. But this November is different. It seems brighter. The Judicial Review is over. We do not yet have a Ruling but Harry and I are filled with a cautious optimism that things may be about to change. Martin Luther King’s words (citing clergyman Theodore Parker)

Previously unaware that Kafka and Orwell had written training manuals for police officers, Miller decided to bring a court case against the College of Policing, whose Hate Crime Operational Guidance (HCOG), issued in 2014, forms the basis of current practice. As Miller has argued at the High Court this week, ‘the idea that a law-abiding citizen can have their name recorded against a hate incident on a crime report when there was neither hate nor crime undermines principles of justice, free expression, democracy and common sense’.

Read article: Putting the thoughtpolice on trial