Free speech activists to hold discussion event in Belfast
A group that campaigns for free speech is holding another meeting in Northern Ireland.
The Free Speech Union (FSU) event in Belfast will entail a panel discussion at the Ulster Museum on this coming Friday evening.
The organisers are inviting both members of the FSU and the public to join them “for a lively evening of conversation and debate as the FSU hosts its third Northern Ireland Speakeasy”.
The event is being held between 730pm and 9pm under the title ‘Policing the Streets vs Policing our Tweets’, with a panel and then questions and answers, followed by a bar that is open until 10.30pm.
In the chair will be the FSU’s Education and Events Director, Jan Macvarish, who said: “We have a panel of three amazing speakers: free speech activist Harry Miller, journalist and editor of spiked magazine Tom Slater and Belfast-based writer Jenny Holland.
Mr Miller was the first person to shine a light on the problem of what the FSU described as “the Orwellian-sounding ‘Non-Crime Hate Incidents’ (NCHIs)”.
An NCHI can be logged against an individual’s name and held in police files even though that person has said and done nothing illegal. In Harry’s case, it was the retweeting of a feminist limerick that led to him being investigated by Humberside Police in 2019.
Tickets are £8 for FSU members, £12 for non-members, £5 for students.
The FSU’s Northern Ireland advisory council includes the human rights activist Jeff Dudgeon, the News Letter columnist Ruth Dudley Edwards and the paper’s editor Ben Lowry. Click here for more information on FSU.
Mr Miller won two landmark free speech cases at the High Court and the Court of Appeal. In the High Court ruling, the judge, Mr Justice Julian Holmes, said:
“The effect of the police turning up at his place of work because of his political opinions must not be underestimated. To do so would be to undervalue a cardinal democratic freedom. In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society…the police’s actions, taken as a whole, had a chilling effect on his right to freedom of expression.”
Mr Miller went on to take the College of Policing to the Court of Appeal in 2021 to challenge their ‘Hate Crime Operational Guidance’.
"Thanks to Harry’s persistence, these judgements can be cited by other free speech campaigners and he has worked tirelessly on behalf of members of the public whose lawful expression has been subject to similar unwanted police attention. He regularly appears in the media, and writes for The Critic Magazine.”
Tom Slater is the editor of Spiked magazine. He also writes regularly for the Spectator, has written for the Sun, the Telegraph and the Sunday Times, and he appears on TV and radio. Tom is also co-host of the spiked podcast, a weekly round-up of news and controversy, and Last Orders, a podcast all about freedom and the nanny state.
Jenny Holland is an Irish-American writer based in Belfast. She writes Saving Culture (from itself) on Substack, and has written for spiked, the Critic, Feminist Current and the Spectator US.