No country did more than Britain to establish the values of free speech and equal justice under the law. In 1215, King John issued the Magna Carta, which established that even the king was subject to equal justice under the law, and in 1644, John Milton published his famous defense of free speech.

That tradition is now at grave risk of being destroyed, says UK journalist and professor Matt Goodwin. He says that the arrest by six police officers of a father who complained on WhatsApp about the local school “is merely the latest symbol of a much broader assault on free speech and free expression.”

And it comes at a time when the government’s Sentencing Council is recommending that judges give preference to non-white criminal defendants, undermining the principle of equal justice under the law.

The mysterious circumstances surrounding the father’s arrest may make the case more complicated than the media has reported. It appears that the school felt threatened in some way by him and the WhatsApp messages. “The school had told the parents to stay off school property and they had not even been able to go and watch their daughter perform in a school play at Christmas,” said Goodwin, who has the largest Substack in Britain and is a  senior visiting professor at the University of Buckingham.

But there is no evidence that the father, who works for The Times of London, threatened anyone with violence. And the police dismissed the case last week.