A common aphorism amongst freedom-lovers – spuriously attributed to Thomas Jefferson – is “an educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people”. As the recent Miller -v – College of Policingcase has shown however, far more important than an educated citizenry is an educated police force. The most alarming thing about this recent case of politically correct policing is not the shockingly Orwellian nature of the whole affair, with PC Gul literally telling Mr. Miller to “check your thinking”, but the fact that it seemed completely and totally lost on this particular police officer – and Humberside police more broadly – that they were acting as nothing less than the foot soldiers of totalitarianism.
Listening to Mr. Miller’s account of the phone conversation between himself and PC Gul, one can be forgiven for thinking that the latter doesn’t really sound like a true believer in modern gender theory. Rather he comes across as a drone with no critical thinking skills of his own, mindlessly parroting buzzwords into which he had been indoctrinated by faceless bureaucrats from the college of policing. Although Gul repeatedly spouted pseudoscience and psychobabble about in-utero male babies growing female body parts and similar nonsense, unlike a true gender ideologue his tone sounded somewhat… half-hearted? He did not come across as a raging zealot of the new left-wing orthodoxy, ranting about microaggressions and gender being a social construct.
Indeed, the rather flippant justification he provided for his imposition of leftist dogma on the public is not an offended moral sense, but that he’d “been on a course”. Now perhaps this can be explained by the fact that PC Gul cuts a far more professional, calm and collected manner than your average campus feminist. But that doesn’t explain, for example, that Gul had never even heard of Orwell or 1984, a book that should be required reading for all GSCE English students, let alone police officers.
In my informal phone conversation with Mr. Miller last week he was quick to assure me that his fight was with the broader police establishment and not with PC Gul as an individual. His biggest worry was not so much the officer acting like an “old-style grunt” (indeed, PC Gul was probably unaware that his actions constituted a violation of police regulations on political activity) but rather the fact that nobody further up the Humberside chain of command intervened.
He painted a far broader and darker picture, a picture of an entire police force that had been “ideologically captured” by political correctness, specifically, by the LGBT pressure group Stonewall. Among other problems that had come to light as a result of his case, he described a photo of a police officer wielding a rainbow flag-embossed riot shield, and more worryingly, footage of senior officers taking a pledge in support of Stonewall.
This demonstrates a widespread and systematic attitude of unquestioning, blind ideological allegiance to a left-wing political position within Humberside police, and an inability on their part to recognise that their actions constitute partisan political activity. Furthermore, I would argue the phenomenon is not isolated but is one example of a much wider pattern of police misbehaviour.
Glasgow Police, for instance, seemed totally lost to the implications of the following April 2016 tweet: ‘Think before you post or you may receive a visit from us this weekend”. And I need not remind anyone that the horrors endured by thousands of English girls pimped and prostituted by Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs can be directly laid at the feet of the various constabularies up and down the country for refusing to investigate such crimes for fear of being labelled as racists. This conclusion and course of action would be unthinkable and abhorrent to anybody who had not had their moral compass warped beyond all rational capacity by a nightmarish, dystopian political ideology.
It is clear that a police service which by-and-large consists of grunts who lack critical thinking skills will be highly susceptible to the aforementioned “ideological capture” by lobby groups such as Stonewall, and in the longer run, to becoming nothing less than the next incarnation of Orwell’s thought police. We should count our blessings that the High Court ruled in Mr. Miller’s favour (and that of freedom more broadly) this time, because next time we may not be so lucky. If we do not learn from cases like these, of the dangers of a police force uneducated in world history and critical thinking skills, we may in fact find ourselves living in an Orwellian nightmare after all.