POLICE ARREST PARENTS FOR COMPLAINING ABOUT A SCHOOL

POLICE ARREST PARENTS

The above article makes incredible reading. Six officers sent to make the arrests, then parents held in the cells for eight hours. This in a force which cannot deal with routine shoplifting, so forget burglaries.

I don't want to sound pessimistic but these five points have to be made:

1. The very fact this occurred shows we've lost free speech. As ever, there was - eventually - no charge. But that's not the point. It happened without any great media outrage, because such harassment is normalised and not news-worthy. Yet it’s no exaggeration to say the story matters more than George Floyd, Boris Johnson eating cake, and virtually anything else that dominates the news for days.

British people need to know they can be arrested for criticising those in authority who don’t like being criticised. This only seems to happen if the authorities are left-liberal, but progressives should think whether they want this to happen to them, under future governments who aren’t on the left. One can imagine their screaming if they were on the receiving end of this intimidation, rather than egging it on.

I don’t want them to suffer that, but they seem remarkably unconcerned and short-sighted, in laughing off this attack on free-speech. And some are even justifying it, along the grounds of free-speech itself being intimidating. English law - before Blair politicised it for his side’s advantage - worked perfectly well, in preventing specific threats and incitement but distinguishing these from fair comment and discussion. Very deliberately, that distinction no longer exists.

2. Oft-repeated: ‘the process is the punishment’. Simply going through this nightmare for those parents would have been unthinkable to - say - my parents. It shames us as a nation how this happens routinely in Britain.

3. Less oft-repeated: the fear of undergoing the process is the intention, ensuring self-censorship. How many people now feel that criticising their child’s school is dangerous? That’s called silent tyranny.

4. The Free Speech Union et al have done a good job. But the vast majority of this is ongoing, every day, in every workplace. The fact we don’t hear about it means nothing - it’s now routine.

5. Until - and unless - people get angry about this, it will get worse, much worse.

I’ve seen many asking: ‘but what did these parents say?’. I understand: people simply can’t believe the arrests were for saying something the school didn’t like. But the parents weren’t investigated for incitement or threats. So that is the case. No doubt the school and Governors at the school were upset. In no sane country does that make it a police matter.

But this isn’t a sane country. It’s no exaggeration to say that only an idiot would trust the police or our judiciary. And even an idiot wouldn’t trust our political leaders. Doubtless this stems from the ‘hate’ laws Blair introduced, criminalising speech if someone pretends to feel threatened.

Surely somewhere in the British system, someone is thinking:

Why are we arresting non-criminals for non-crimes, when the vilest and most dangerous walk free; and what effect will this have?

An early-release prisoner in September 2024 killed a man the day he was let out. Starmer made great play of his early-release policy, to attack the Tories. His policy was literally lethal.

The intention behind all this is clear: intimidation and demoralisation of the law-abiding who aren’t left-liberal. Conveniently, they’re so much easier to drag off to the nearest cells. And drug-dealing scumbags - like the early-release killer - aren’t the ones annoying school-governors. If they were, the police would doubtless steer well clear, staying in Greggs or online looking for ‘dangerous tweets’ by old ladies.

It’s often been observed that in the old Soviet Union, actual criminals were treated far more leniently than those convicted of political ‘crimes’. It was routine for the former group to be used in terrorising the latter. This was done deliberately, to show how political dissent was the greatest crime conceivable in the Soviet system.

The same thinking - and method - is policy in Starmer’s government. At best, it believes in licensed speech, with them licensing only those whose views they judge as safely progressive.

I know a number of so-called writers who have the same view on free-speech, that it’s their right to withhold it, if they can manufacture some bullshit about ‘offence’ or ‘danger’. Needless to say, their own writing is never to be judged in this way.