Parents jailed for criticising school
Sat 4:26 pm +00:00, 29 Mar 2025 1
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There are some images that come to symbol a much wider crisis. And in the years ahead the image you can see above will become one such symbol.
What does it show?
It shows six police offices in the county of Hertfordshire, England, approaching the front door of a house to arrest two parents.
And what was their alleged crime?
Did they assault somebody? Did they steal something? Were they shoplifting? Did they ram their car into a crowded market?
No. They complained about their local school in a parents’ WhatsApp group.
I’m not joking. I’m deadly serious.
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Prior to being arrested by no less than six police officers from Hertfordshire Constabulary —which, like other police authorities across England, is struggling to solve burglaries, stop shoplifting and end a surge of violent crime—the parents had dared to question the process through which their local school was recruiting a headteacher and appeared critical of school governors in a WhatsApp group.
All this, apparently, “upset” a few teachers, governors and parents —all of whom, reflecting a much broader sickness that is now afflicting Western societies, chose to prioritise their ‘emotional safety’ and a few hurty words above the free speech and free expression that are the lifeblood of our supposed liberal democracy.
In response, aside from having been excluded from school events, including being prevented from watching their own daughter perform in a school play, Allen and Rosalind Levine were then held by police officers in front of their scared and anxious young daughter before they were fingerprinted, searched and dumped in a police cell for eight hours.
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They were then interrogated on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications and causing a nuisance on school property —although the police would later conclude no further action should be taken.
All of which leads me to ask a few questions that will be on the minds of millions of ordinary Brits this weekend as they open their newspapers and phones and read about this shocking case.
Are we living in Britain, once the home of individual liberty and free speech, or some kind of authoritarian regime like North Korea? Because recently it’s become hard to tell the difference between the two.
And in what kind of country, exactly, in what kind of political system, is this kind of police overreach, coercion, censorship, and attempted thought control considered acceptable? The answer is a country that is neither free nor democratic. It is a country that has completely lost its way, a country that is no longer upholding the pillars that support a genuinely free liberal democracy.
And let’s be frank. Britain, as I said on X this morning, is losing its way. We can all see it. We can all feel it. A creeping and increasingly unavoidable sense that we can simply no longer say what we want to say, we can no longer think what we want to think, and we can no longer tell others we are living in a truly free society.
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Look around the world for a moment.
From America to Australia, people are either laughing at us or simply shaking their heads in disbelief while asking the same, troubling question that nobody in Westminster appears to want to ask: what the hell is happening to Great Britain?
But let’s be clear. It’s not just this latest scandal that is currently erupting across media which underlines this growing sense of concern and crisis among millions of Brits and onlookers overseas; it’s also reflected, as we have systematically documented right here on this Substack, in a long line of threats to our free speech, free expression, and very democracy.
Think for a moment about all we have seen in recent months.
There was the shocking arrest of Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson after a year-old deleted social media post.
There is the fact that more than 13,000 so-called ‘hate incidents’ have been recorded against British citizens in the last year, all of which erode free speech and stifle genuine debate in the public square.
There’s been the expansion of the deeply Orwellian ‘non-crime hate incidents’ in this country, with hundreds of thousands of these coercive measures being used to try and control the national conversation and put a black mark against people who dare to challenge the woke orthodoxy, such as by voicing unfashionable views on gender, immigration, multiculturalism, and more.
There’s been Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper casually deriding much of the country as “far right” at pretty much every available opportunity after concerned citizens merely dared to express forthright views about mass immigration, Islamism, and a glaring lack of social integration in our visibly fragmenting nation.
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There was then, in my view at least, the absurd scene of watching more than a few of those citizens be thrown into jail after sharing their views on social media in the privacy of their own home while actual hardened criminals were released early.
There’s the attempt by the same Labour government to expand the definition of so-called “Islamophobia”, which will almost certainly be used to likewise shut down free speech and debate about the role of Islam in Western societies and indeed whether it is even compatible with our ways of life.
It’s worth remembering, for example, that the original definition of “Islamophobia” that the Labour Party welcomed, in 2018, specifically included the ‘grooming gangs’ (read: rape gangs), alongside discussing the demographic rise of Islam in Western societies, as examples of “Islamophobia”.
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And there’s been a concerted effort by this Labour government to pause, water down, and dilute a new law, which I helped design and push through parliament, to uphold free speech on our university campuses, among our young people, which the Labour government only stopped trying to kill once it was dragged through the courts.
So, no, thar chilling image of those six police officers knocking on that front door to arrest those parents for complaining about their local school in a WhatsApp group is not an isolated or freak occurrence, as some people in the establishment would have you believe.
It is merely the latest symbol of our once great country’s free speech crisis —a crisis which, let’s not forget, has been created by both the Tories, who helped mainstream many of these threats to our free speech when they were in power, and now a deeply authoritarian Labour government which like most left-wing parties today will always rush to curb free speech and debate in the name of “social justice” and “diversity”.
What we need in this country more than ever, as again I said on X this morning, which was later shared by Elon Musk, is a genuine political revolution.
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A revolution that firmly opposes and pledges to abolish all these authoritarian and deeply Orwellian measures that should have no place in the Britain and England we all know and love.
A revolution that returns us to who we were before the ascendency of the draconian New Labour laws that set the foundation for all this, the hapless Tories who enabled it, and Keir Starmer’s dogmatic Labour government which is now putting this crisis on steroids.
A revolution that returns us to a country that understands it is defined foremost by an unwavering commitment to freedom in all its forms —freedom from authoritarian censorship, freedom from extremist ideologues, freedom from totalitarian institutions, and freedom from any other threats to the one thing that has long defined these islands —individual liberty.
Because if there is one thing that defines the British and the English people more than anything then it is their unwavering willingness to defend freedom against the kind of authoritarian and dogmatic ideologies that led those six police officers to knock on that front door to begin with. What the people want is freedom —and they want it now.
http://www.englishdemocrats.party