On a January morning this year, three police vehicles containing six officers, arrived unannounced at the home of a law-abiding British couple—Maxie Allen (50) and Rosalind Levine (46)—in Borehamwood in Hertfordshire, England, and handcuffed and arrested the two parents for voicing complaints about their daughter’s primary school. This is the lead-off story of Think Before You Post, a new documentary on online censorship in the UK produced by Spiked, a British online magazine focusing on politics, culture, and society.
“Think before you post” is the warning that the UK government, via the Crown Prosecution Service, issued to its citizens last year.
Frustrated with the school's management, reportedly involving issues like bullying, curriculum, and administrative responses, Allen and Levine began raising their concerns by sending emails directly to school staff and participating in a WhatsApp group chat with other parents and school representatives to discuss and criticize school policies. The couple described their critiques as "robust but polite" advocacy for better standards, not threats or abuse. However, someone from the school reported the messages to Hertfordshire Police, alleging harassment and malicious communications. Then came the arrest, after which they were held for eight-11 hours at a police station and questioned on suspicions of harassment, malicious communications, and causing a public nuisance.
Spiked sent its editor, Tom Slater, to the couple’s home to discuss the incident. They told Slater that they had to plead with the cops not to handcuff Rosalind in front of their three-year-old daughter. The officers read a list of alleged offenses, including “sending emails to the wrong person,” and “slander,” which is a civil matter the police aren’t involved in. The investigation went on for five weeks, before the police said the investigation had been dropped for lack of evidence. The only “crime” was hurting the feelings of some school officials who knew they could use the police to retaliate because the UK police arrest first and investigate later. The school released a statement saying they’d contacted the police due to a high volume of emails and social media posts that were upsetting their staff.
Toby Young, a conservative member of the House of Lords, was interviewed for the film. He pointed out a headline in The Times citing the fact that 30 people per day are arrested in the UK for offensive online messages (more than the American government arrested during the moral panic of the first Red Scare), but only 10 percent of the arrests result in a conviction. The police are trying to intimidate citizens in full awareness that they lack evidence of a crime. Young believes that UK law enforcement has been captured by radical progressive ideology, which from an American point of view is difficult to understand. Our blue-collar-mentality cops are hardly bleeding heart liberals dedicated to protecting the feelings of the vulnerable and the historically-marginalized.
According to Young, this police aggression is an attempt to nip things in the bud, which stems from the feeling that the UK’s disastrous mass-immigration policy has created a pressure cooker. Perhaps the British police don't buy the liberal mantra, “Our diversity is our strength,” and they don't understand that they've become tyrants, a blind spot that's common when “well-intentioned” people in power believe they’re working for the “greater good.”
The film then turns to the case of Allison Pearson, columnist for The Daily Telegraph, who commented on Twitter in 2023 about a photograph of a group holding a flag, flanked by supportive police officers. Mistaking the group for pro-Hamas or anti-Jewish protesters in London, she tweeted that the cops were posing with “Jew haters.” In fact, the photo, taken in Manchester, was of a group of supporters of a Pakistani political party. Pearson soon realized her mistake, and deleted it, but a year later she was investigated for inciting racial hatred. Conforming to the pattern, the case was dropped but, as she puts it, the process is the punishment. The thought police refused to tell her which tweet they were visiting her for.
Pearson, when Slater asked her why the police focus so much on offensive online speech rather than real crimes, said it's a lot easier to scroll through Twitter. Given UK law enforcement’s bizarre focus on speech over violent crime, this accusation carries weight, especially in light of the fact that their cops don't carry guns, making them much more vulnerable to knife-wielding thugs than are American police. Raiding the homes of Tweeters probably looks like low-hanging fruit in comparison.
A lawyer who’s represented Allison Pearson tells Slater that the UK has never had a principled protection of free speech. In a country lacking such codified protection, police officers end up as the de facto arbiters of speech. But the British public doesn't fret much over this threat.
For the last segment of this documentary, Slater visited the South Wales home of Jamie Michael, a military veteran the Crown Prosecution Service tried for publishing threatening material on a Facebook account “intending to stir up racial hatred” under Section 19 of the Public Order Act 1986. The charge followed a video he posted on Facebook in July of 2024 in which he spoke about migration, immigrants, and community action in the UK after a high-profile stabbing in Southport in which a man named Axel Muganwa Rudakubana invaded an event marketed as a “Taylor Swift-themed” workshop for children and stabbed three of the children to death.
By Michael's own admission, he expressed himself clumsily, and included a factual error about the killer's birthplace. Still, he explicitly disavowed violence. In February 2025, the jury acquitted him in 17 minutes.
Michael’s case is exceptional in that he refused to plead guilty, which rarely happens. The police, knowing that few of their arrestees have the grit of the former Iraq combat veteran, feel free to arrest people with insufficient evidence of guilt because they know most of them won't fight back. Once again, the process is the punishment, which flips the basic concept of justice, tipping it towards authoritarianism.
Think Before You Post is effective in that it gives faces to those the UK government harass and prosecutes for their opinions. Seeing three police cars and six police officers in front of a middle-class home where no crime’s been committed drives a point home. Generally speaking, people have always known when they’ve broken the law, even though they may try to rationalize it to feel better. The UK has reached the point where people type and post something with no knowledge of wrongdoing, yet the police may show up months later at their door. As the nearly instant acquittal of Jamie Michael demonstrated, the police, in concert with the media and politicians, aren’t carrying out the will of the people.
This film makes it clear that people in the UK have gotten too used to the idea that they can call law enforcement if they don't like something that someone says. This has led to a successful campaign to impose self-censorship on the cowed masses, the exact same goal that the Stasi, which also encouraged people to turn their fellow citizens in, achieved in East Germany in the 1960s to the late-1980s.
The lesson’s written clearly in history. Hanging in the balance is whether or not the British people can see it.