Police officers turning up at an ordinary couple’s door. Arresting the man and woman in front of their young daughter. Throwing them in the cells for eight hours. All this, for the apparent crime of complaining too vigorously to their other, disabled daughter’s primary school.
What happened to Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine at their home in Borehamwood in January is so absurdly authoritarian, so redolent of genuine tyranny, it’s almost like I made it up. It’s almost too perfect an encapsulation of the British constabulary’s zealous embrace of the new censorship. All it’s missing is a misgendering.
Allen and Levine had been locked in a dispute with Cowley Hill Primary School for months. Allen, until last year on the board of governors, wanted to know why, after the school’s headteacher retired, there had been no prompt, open recruitment process to find his replacement. He and Rosalind also aired their grievances on private parents’ WhatsApp groups.
This apparently really upset the chair of governors, who wrote to Allen and Levine about their ‘inflammatory and disparaging comments made on social media’. She told them, in no uncertain terms, to stop. Levine, furious that the school had a mole in the WhatsApp groups, posted the letter on her Facebook profile, venting her anger.
They were then banned from the school. They had to collect their daughter, Sascha, from the edge of the premises. When they asked if they could brief Sascha’s new teacher in person about her medical needs – she has epilepsy, is neurodivergent and is registered disabled – the school told them to make do with email instead.
Cowley Hill then went to the police, citing a ‘high volume of direct correspondence and public social-media posts’ that were supposedly upsetting school harmony. One officer showed up at Allen and Levine’s door in December, warning them off and telling them to take Sascha out of the school. Which they did. Then, in January, six officers showed up with handcuffs and evidence bags and took them away.
The couple were accused of harassment and malicious communications. But after a five-week investigation, Hertfordshire Police have now concluded there is insufficient evidence to take things any further.
Surely, there’s more to this, you must be thinking. Because you’re a normal, rational human being who cannot fathom why such a pedestrian dispute could escalate to this level. Show me the death threats!
Well, The Times has found a few salty WhatsApps, in which Levine called the acting head a control freak and useless. Prophetically, she also jokily anticipated her own arrest, after the school threatened to take ‘action’ against the dissenters: ‘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?”’
Allen and Levine showed The Times 45 email threads between them and Cowley Hill during their six-month ban. Which is a lot. But they weren’t filled with expletives or thinly veiled menace. The Times approached the school, council and police for ‘information about the quantity of emails and for examples of what constituted malicious communications’, but none was forthcoming.
At this point, stories like this are shocking, but wholly unsurprising. Not only do police routinely, wildly, over-interpret our already illiberal speech laws, pursuing journalists over year-old tweets or arresting Christian street preachers for being Christian street preachers. They also spend inordinate amounts of time recording ‘non-crime’, in the form of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs) – a dystopian enterprise that was cooked up by police quangos rather than mandated by parliament. Most famously, former police officer Harry Miller was called up by a Humberside cop in 2019, who said Miller’s trans-sceptical tweets had been chalked up as an NCHI and, most chillingly, said ‘I need to check your thinking’.
Now the police are apparently willing to act as the hired goons of other easily offended state employees, from acting headteachers to councillors. Last month, we learned a woman in Stockport had been visited by Greater Manchester’s finest for daring to criticise her local Labour councillor on Facebook.
A few days after that incident, our prime minister, with a straight face, sat in the Oval Office and insisted – contrary to the jibes of US vice-president JD Vance – that free speech is in rude health in the United Kingdom. ‘We’ve had free speech for a very long time, it will last a long time, and we are very proud of that’, warbled Keir Starmer.
I wonder what he thinks bad looks like. Investigating all of Labour’s critics? A Telescreen in every living room? Gulags? If you don’t think we have a free-speech crisis in this country, you need your thinking checked.
Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater
