Great Britain has unquestionably devolved into a dystopian nightmare.
When the British police make arrests for memes and jokes online, the country has gone down a dark path, but when parents are arrested for expressing concerns about their children’s education and what they say in private, that path’s destination becomes totalitarianism.
This is exactly what the U.K.’s The Times reported late last month when two parents were arrested for speaking out against their daughter’s school.
Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine had previously been banned from the premises of Cowley Hill Primary School, in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, after questioning the appointment of their daughter’s new head teacher and for what was described as “casting aspersions” on the chair of the school governors.
Allen was previously on the board of governors and wanted to make sure his daughter who suffered from epilepsy was being taken care of by the right people.
After being banned from school grounds, administrators told the couple that email communication was the only means they could express their concerns, not an in-person meeting.
After Allen and Levine emailed repeatedly and even filed a formal complaint, the school reached out to police. During their six-month ban, 45 email threads were accounted for with multiple emails therein.
Allen and Levine were also part of private WhatsApp conversations where they spoke about the administration. These conversations were brought to the attention of chair of the governors Jackie Spriggs.
Spriggs wrote to the parent body about “inflammatory and defamatory” remarks made by parents on social media, saying “disharmony” would provoke the school to action.
The warning from Spriggs circulated among the parent chats. Levine joked about the warning but actually predicted what came next.
“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?’” she wrote to the group.
The school justified calling the police, saying, “We 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.”
Six officers showed up at Allen and Levine’s home on Jan. 29. “I was just in complete disbelief,” Allen said, adding, “It was just unfathomable to me that things had escalated to this degree.”
Levine’s 80-year-old mother was called to watch the children as Allen and Levine spent the next 11 hours at the police station.
The two wanted to know what exactly they had done to prompt an arrest, but no reason was given. “That’s what makes it more dystopian,” Allen remarked. “At no point were we given a smoking gun — the email or comment that formed the basis of this. The reason they haven’t given it is because it doesn’t exist.”
The police justified the arrests by saying, “Following reports of harassment and malicious communications, which are criminal offences, a man and a woman from Borehamwood, both aged in their forties, were arrested on Wednesday 29 January.”
The police added, “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.”
On Tuesday, Hertfordshire’s chief constable Andy Prophet doubled down, insisting that “there was a lawful reason to arrest.”
Totalitarianism is best described as an erosion of public and private life. That erosion occurs via the state.
Allen and Levine’s story should chill British citizens to the bone. Parents were arrested for emails and private conversations about authorities.
This is not the former Soviet Union or North Korea. This is Great Britain, once a bastion of liberal democracy and a bulwark against tyranny in Europe as Nazi Germany swept the continent.
Allen’s smoking gun comment eerily resembles the mentality of the head of Soviet secret police Lavrentiy Beria during dictator Joseph Stalin’s reign. “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”
There was no crime. The British system is one of suppression, as this couple now know.
