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England seems bent on exchanging its heritage as the birthplace of the Magna Carta and civil liberties for Orwellian ideologies that enable social engineering and ensure obedience.
The increasingly authoritarian nature of the British government is back in the spotlight this week after news broke that police arrested, interrogated, and jailed parents in Hertfordshire, England, for complaining about school policy and criticizing school leaders in a private group chat.
It all started in May 2024, when Maxie Allen, whose daughter Sascha, 9, was attending Cowley Hill Primary School, contacted the chair of governors of the school to question the hiring process of its new head teacher. Allen noted that despite the former head teacher having retired six months earlier, the school had not publicly posted the job and had instead given it to the former deputy head teacher.
Allen says that the chair’s response was “evasive,” so he sent a letter to all the school governors asking about the decision not to open recruitment to other candidates.
Allen posted the letter in a private WhatsApp parents’ group.
The next month, Jackie Spriggs, who is the chair of governors, wrote a letter to parents claiming that parents were using WhatsApp “to make inflammatory and defamatory comments about senior leaders in the school.”
Spriggs then ordered parents not to criticize leaders, writing, “I would like to remind all parents that the school will take action where comments are aimed at individuals in the school community or, as a result, cause disharmony within the school or distress to members of the school community.”
Allen, his partner, Rosalind Levine (mother to Sascha), and other parents mocked the Spriggs’ letter in a private WhatsApp group.
Levine mentioned the leadership having “little spies” in the WhatsApp group and on Facebook who would “keep an eye on what’s being said.”
She and Allen said that the school didn’t have the authority to control what parents said about the school in a private social media message.
Levine ironically wrote, “Can you imagine what the ‘action’ is? ‘Hello 999, one of the school mums said something mean about me in a school mum WhatsApp group. Please can you arrest them?’”
Shortly after, Levine and Allen were banned from school grounds. They were not allowed to attend parents’ night or Sascha’s Christmas play. They were not even permitted to have contact with Sascha’s teachers other than through email.
Sascha has epilepsy and is registered as disabled. Levine and Allen were forced to communicate with teachers about her health needs through email.
Spriggs wrote another letter to Allen and Levine that ordered them to stop making “inflammatory and disparaging” comments on social media, to which Levine expressed anger that Spriggs was collecting her private messages and posted the warning on Facebook.
Eventually, the school contacted the police, and in December an officer came to their home and told them to remove Sascha from the school. The couple did so and believed that would be the end of the row.
A week later, six police officers in three police cars showed up at Allen and Levine’s home.
Levine said,
“My first thought was that Sascha was dead. I could not think of any other reason why six police officers would be at my door. My heart was thumping, thinking something terrible had happened. So when I was placed under arrest, in a weird way I was briefly relieved. And then I started to think, ‘What on earth? What the hell is going on?’ Francesca was cowering in the corner, she was terrified.”
Francesca is Allen and Levine’s three-year-old daughter.
The officers searched the home.
They then arrested the couple on “suspicion of harassment, malicious communications and causing a nuisance on school property” and questioned them at the station, where they were later locked in a cell for at least eight hours before being released at midnight.
The couple says they were never told what they had said or done that resulted in their arrest.
“We don’t know how school personnel acquired our private WhatsApp messages,” Allen stated. “We’ve asked the question and they’ve not explained. We can only presume that somebody in the group was screenshotting them and sending them to someone who worked in the school.”
He added,
“It was absolutely nightmarish. I couldn’t believe this was happening, that a public authority could use the police to close down a legitimate inquiry. We’d never used abusive or threatening language, even in private, and always followed due process. Yet we have never even been told what these communications were that were supposedly criminal, which is completely Kafkaesque.”
Five weeks later, the Hertfordshire police concluded there should be no further investigation.
Cowley said that it “sought advice from the police following a high volume of direct correspondence and public social media posts from two parents, as this was becoming upsetting for staff, parents, and governors. We’re always happy for parents to raise concerns, but we do ask that they do this in a suitable way, and in line with school’s published complaints procedure.”
Hertfordshire Police claim the large number of police were needed to secure electronic devices and care for children present. “The arrests were necessary to fully investigate the allegations as is routine in these types of matters. Following further investigations, officers deemed that no further action should be taken due to insufficient evidence.”
The arrest has received criticism as U.K. police increase their targeting of U.K. citizens over their speech.
Lord Toby Young of the Free Speech Union questioned, “Why are Hertfordshire Police dispatching six officers to arrest a middle-aged couple for criticising their children’s school in a WhatsApp group and ignoring serious crimes?”
“We’ve entered a topsy turvy world in which hurty words by the law-abiding middle-classes are treated as dangerous crimes and violent assaults by marauding gangs as a legitimate form of expression. It’s as though the motto of Hertfordshire Police is: ‘Sticks and stones won’t break your bones, but words will always hurt you,’” he mocked.
The United Kingdom is now a nation that brags about arresting people for “hate speech,” yet has gangs of migrants running sex trafficking operations that it does nothing to stop.
This is a nation that bans ninja swords to attempt to stop the wave of stabbings by migrants — but monitors and jails people upset about those stabbings.
It has traded its heritage as the birthplace of the Magna Carta and the foundational principles of individual rights and due process for the unserious, illogical notions of social justice, virtue signaling, and political correctness.
Just take the Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s response to the controversial Netflix show “Adolescence.” The show has been accused of race swapping a white conservative boy for the story of an actual murderer who was black and of Ugandan descent.
Whether the show is meant to be about that particular situation is irrelevant. Its message sidesteps the real issue of migrants and descendants of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, largely Muslim, who are engaging in widespread stabbings and raping British white girls and introduces a boogeyman of white conservatives.
Starmer praised its focus on so-called misogyny, backing a plan to show it in schools.
“It seems like the whole nation is talking about Adolescence and not just this nation,” he stated. “As a dad, I have not found it easy to watch this with children, because it connects with the fears and worries that you have as parents and adults. There isn’t one single policy lever to pull. It’s actually a much bigger problem than that, and that’s the devastating effect that the problem of misogyny has on our society.”
The point is the U.K.’s leaders couldn’t care less about dealing with violent crime or the real issues facing the country.
They are interested in social engineering and in obedience. They want a populace that is afraid to speak out or to criticize its government. Allen said that for weeks after the arrest he would shudder any time he saw a police car. That’s the point. The U.K. wants its people to fear that any dissent will be met with the force of the government.
It has successfully created a police force that now does this on its own. It no longer even needs a hate speech law or a “public spaces protection order” to punish dissent. The police voluntarily acts as the government’s strongman even when an actual crime hasn’t been committed.
This is not a one-off. We’ve seen this time and again in the U.K.; for example, when police were instructed that silent prayer is not a violation of the public space protection order, did that stop the arrests or trials? No.
U.K. citizens must stand up against this Orwellian abuse of power now, or they will lose all ability to speak freely in the future.
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