Over 500 people were arrested in London last weekend for allegedly showing support for Palestine Action, an organisation proscribed under terrorist legislation. About half of those arrested are reported to be over 65 years of age and many of the arrests were for carrying signs, with words such as “Stop the Genocide – Support Palestine Action”.
Palestine Action was banned as it was responsible for causing costly criminal damage to military aircraft. The Home Secretary has sought to defend the ban by saying Palestine Action is “not a non-violent organisation” and that further information will come out which will justify the ban.
People have a right to protest. With such huge loss of life, starving children, and suspected targeting by the Israeli military of journalists, medical staff and aid workers, the situation in Gaza is desperate. It would be surprising if there were not many wishing to demonstrate support for those caught up in the suffering, and call for a ceasefire.
This country, and London in particular, has faced terrorism and bombings before. But even during the worst of the Troubles, government did not prevent people from speaking in support of the aims of the IRA or even trying to justify the actions of the IRA. At one stage the voices of Sinn Féin MPs were not allowed to be heard: instead a voiceover had to be used, but no one was arrested simply for expressing support for the IRA.
Terrorist legislation grants the state and its police forces the most draconian powers over the individual. These powers can only be justified in defence of the public and to protect life, or as an emergency measure. It makes a mockery of the law, undermines freedom of expression in a dangerous way and sets a worrying precedent for the use of state power if terrorist legislation is being used to criminalise people who are expressing a legitimate point of view, whether one agrees with them or not. It is a waste of police time and public resources to be arresting people for holding up signs.
I doubt whether many of those arrested were in fact intent on expressing support for Palestine Action as an organisation but even if they were, it appears a rather weak excuse for arresting someone. If one is to persist with this law, then the government must at least be made to justify its decision to proscribe Palestine Action by clarifying and communicating better its violent and dangerous nature and its supposed threat to the British public. Terrorist legislation should be used only in response to extreme circumstances or danger. I hope that the Liberal Democrat MPs can press the government on this.
* David Morrison is a Lib Dem member and solicitor. He stood as a candidate for the LibDems in local elections in Kent.
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25 Comments
A great shame that our parliamentary party, without exception, abstained on this issue.
An attack on any military infrastructure with the intent to destroy or inpeed UK military capability is treasonable act. The organisation should be considered terrorist. Those who support a terrorist act against our people,our infrastructure,or our military are acting outside common law and should be dealt with military law.
………Should Palestine Action be a Proscribed Organisation?………
NO!
@David ‘…the government must at least be made to justify its decision to proscribe Palestine Action’
You’ve already pointed out that it was because it caused criminal damage to military aircraft.
Which cannot be condoned. Because you cannot have ‘one rule for people whose cause I believe in’. Without giving free rein for anyone with strong beliefs to use violence and/or criminal damage in support of whatever their cause is.
I can’t comment on the London arrests, as I don’t know any of the facts and it’s presumably all sub judice anyway.
It would be helpful if we knew exactly what events this group has taken part in to cause the proscription. There was the airfield for which the full force of the law should be thrown at the perpetrators and the alleged damage and violence at the arms manufacturer premises. Is there more, the Home Secretary appeared to indicate there was.
As for the arrests at the weekend, a gross embarrassment for all concerned, overkill by any name.
Is it a sledgehammer to crack a nut, I honestly do not know without further information.
The government cannily grouped Palestine Action alongside two white supremacist groups – the Maniacs Murder Cult and the Russian Imperial Movement. The vote on the three groups was not taken separately. Therefore, MPs were asked to vote for or against all three of the groups together. As such, many MPs who opposed the proscription of Palestine Action may have abstained on the vote so as not to be voting against the proscription of the Maniacs Murder Cult and the Russian Imperial Movement.
A pity Lyal Yardarms that you didn’t look more closely at what MPs were asked to vote on. If it had been simply Palestine Action then your disquiet would have been justified. Unfortunately the order included two Neo nazi organisations as well as Palestine Action and voting against it would have meant supporting the Nazi groups as well. Hence abstention.
Such a pity that life isn’t as simple as you’d like it to be.
So far, the total number of arrests is around 750 – that’s a lot of Terrorists. The IRA at the height of its operations was thought to have around 250 active “Soldiers” on the Front line activities of kidnapping, torture, murder & bombing.
Of course most of those 750 will be charged with lesser offences , The Government don’t want them facing Juries.
We, as a Party have been very quiet about this, we need to stand up & be counted.
This legislation, as Jonathon Porritt pointed out on Channel Four News last night, is intended to shut up the most vociferous critic of the Labour government over their failure to act decisively to end the war in Gaza, as they are required to do under international law. The proscription is purely political, and has nothing to do with terrorism. Indeed the very fact that Jonathon Porritt is now officially (having himself been arrested at the demonstration) a terrorist shows how utterly laughable parliament has become. I also notice that Yvette Cooper has publicly stated that if we knew what she did about Palestine Action we would agree with her – identical to one of the tactics used before the illegal invasion of Iraq – Blair: “we know some really scary stuff about WMD, but can’t tell you, because it’s secret, (the actual secret was that they were lying).
No, they should not be proscribed. Any individuals carrying out assault or criminal damage should be prosecuted under relevant laws, but Palestine Action are not a terrorist organisation in the sense that most would understand that to mean. Arresting hundreds of over-60s who are peacefully demonstrating shows what a nonsense the situation is – lots of free publicity for PA, and clogging up the criminal justice system assuming they are not all ultimately released without charge.
Christine Nuttall 12th Aug ’25 – 5:49pm..The government cannily grouped Palestine Action alongside two white supremacist groups – the Maniacs Murder Cult and the Russian Imperial Movement…
‘Cannily’ is not the adverb I’d use.. When a government is reduced to using such underhand tactics to get it’s way it is an admission of ‘having lost the argument..
I was prepared to give Starmer, et al, the benefit of the doubt during its first year in power. That ‘benefit’ stops here..
The excuse being that the party abstained only because the government had included other groups in the same bill, doesn’t hold up considering our members of the house of lords almost entirely abstained on an amendment expressing the houses disapproval of proscribing Palestine action.
Meaning that the party doesn’t even have a position on whether they should have been prescribed.
https://votes.parliament.uk/votes/lords/division/3339
The big dilemma for the party is that being ideologically liberal would require us to take positions that some people might disagree with.
If you’ve got an idea of what to do about this dilemma, send answers on a postcard to Ed Davey, Leader of the Liberal Democrats.
The key issue is that criminal damage by actual Palestine Action activists is punishable by existing law. What proscription does is make peaceful protestors into “terrorists”, which has the purpose of silencing protest. Criminalising free speech on such an important issue as the government’s failure to uphold international humanitarian law is bad enough on it’s own, but using the Police to enforce an unpopular stance taken by the Prime Minister (obviously Yvette Cooper is merely a pawn in this particular game) is a step towards making our country a Police State – admittedly a small one, but still troubling.
It is disappointing that people like Meby choose to use our site to promote ideas such as the applying military law to civilians in times of peace. This is the emboldening effect of procedural tactics being used to manipulate the democratic process by those in power.
The root cause of this legislative mess is that the government deliberately chose to include in the vote on the proscription of Palestine action, two other organisations – the Maniacs Murder Cult and the Russian Imperial Movement. This was a seedy political abuse of power to quash debate on an important issue that really should not be allowed in parliament.
However, we have to remember that our party has on occasions in the past loaded in extra goodies for some groups to make it easy to ensure members voted through other issues that should have been dealt with on their own. Nobody comes out well from these individual abuses of power by the powerful as it just sets a precedent for those who want their own way to find ever more methods to manipulate democracy to their will.
There lies the route to Trumpism.
“Unfortunately the order included two Neo nazi organisations as well as Palestine Action and voting against it would have meant supporting the Nazi groups as well. Hence abstention. Such a pity that life isn’t as simple as you’d like it to be.”
It’s not that complicated.
On principle no MP should support, even by abstention, any law which contains anything that should be opposed. Which way should anyone vote if the Government introduced a bill to ban the Boy Scouts but mixed it in with a ban on a modern UK version of the H****r Youth?
Not that I’m comparing the Boy Scouts with P.A. but the point is the same.
Hardly anyone would have previously heard of the Maniacs Murder Cult or the Russian Imperial Movement. The last time I checked, murder was already illegal. What have the R.I.M. supposedly done? Why give them all this free publicity?
I understand why our MPs abstained, and it is Labour to blame for grouping the 3 organisations.
But I have not heard what our MPs said, presumably a passionate speech on why one of them should not have been on the list?
??????
Meby 12th Aug ’25 – 3:52pm…An attack on any military infrastructure with the intent to destroy or inpeed UK military capability is treasonable act…
If memory serves there were several occasions when the Greenham Common women broke into the site and ‘impeded the ‘military capability’ of the base…
I don’t remember ‘Treason’ charges being mentioned.. Still, THEN was Another Country’..
@ All @ Expats @ Melby
I don’t think Treason was mentioned when the Suffragettes tried to kill David Lloyd George! Was he a military target? It was probably even more of a different country then.
Most women MPs, especially Lib Dems, Greens, and Labour MPs, would personally identify with the Suffragette movement. They might want to acquaint themselves with some of the tactics used.
https://www.exploringsurreyspast.org.uk/themes/subjects/womens-suffrage/the-womens-suffrage-movement-in-surrey-new/activism-and-militant-suffragettes-in-surrey/lloyd-george-and-the-suffragette-bomb-outrage/
@Meby – “ An attack on any military infrastructure with the intent to destroy or inpeed UK military capability is treasonable act.”
Taking that benchmark, it is clear PA in their trespass on to a military airbase and graffiti on an aircraft, fails short of being a treasonable act. As many more rational people have already observed, everything PA has done to date can be addressed by existing laws without invoking terrorism or treason.
If you really want to go on about treason, I suggest you need to focus on the politicians who gave us a military that has to ask permission from the Whitehouse before it can use some of its weapons… Also many of the military systems, based on US sourced software, also only run at the consent of the Whitehouse…
Why have the comments, which present the carefully constructed article by Craig Murray on his blog, that Yvette Cooper has lied publicly in this matter, not been included among the other comments?
@Peter Martin. The suffragettes didn’t try to kill Lloyd George. They set fire to his partially built house at Walton Heath next to the golf club before it was completed. Incidentally, LlG didn’t pay for it. It was a gift to him by a friendly newspaper proprietor.
I’ll leave it to you to guess why it was gifted.
Can we please develop some level of perspective here! We have a major war in Europe tearing apart a democratic nation but instead everybody is obsessed with Gaza. I am the 21 entry here but only three have commented on the Ukraine story just before this.
A few people have made the point that the government including two neo-Nazi groups in the vote, forcing our MPs to merely abstain when otherwise they would have voted against the proscription of Palestine Action.
To which I say – are you sure? Where was our amendment? Speeches? Votes in the upper chamber? Party Twitter accounts?
No – our MPs were completely supine. Roz Savage and many others even declined to sign the letter calling for recognition of a Palestinian state.
@ Lyell Yardarms What evidence do you have for writing, “Roz Savage and many others even declined to sign the letter calling for recognition of a Palestinian state” ?
According to Ms Savage’s Facebook page, “I’ve signed Ed Davey’s letter to the Prime Minister, urging immediate and unconditional recognition of the State of Palestine. This isn’t a gesture to be traded – it’s a moral imperative, and a crucial step toward a just and lasting peace.
Last year, I led a Westminster Hall debate on this very issue, because I believe that principled leadership means standing up – consistently – for international law, human rights, and dignity for all. The suffering in Gaza cannot continue. Aid routes must reopen. Hostages must be freed. And recognition must not be used as a bargaining chip”.
David Raw – no, she didn’t. Many other Lib Dem MPs with Christian views are conspicuous by their absence:
https://x.com/sarahchampionmp/status/1948775130881990697?s=46