The dawn raid on Mat Cobb’s flat wasn’t about one man, one post, or even one banned group. It was about a government trying to shut down a political problem it cannot solve. Gaza has split open the gap between Britain’s stated values and its actual alliances. Palestine Action exposed it, blockading arms factories, scaling RAF bases, chaining themselves to Ministry of Defence suppliers, dragging Britain’s role in the killing into daylight. They embarrassed the MOD and the RAF. The state’s answer? Don’t change policy; change the law.
So Palestine Action is banned. Not for bombs or guns (whispers….they have none) but because their protest hit too close to Britain’s complicity. Once proscribed, the logic unfolds automatically. Police now treat placards as contraband, Morph as a freedom fighter, and Facebook shares as evidence. The law produces its own reality: support becomes terrorism by definition, so long as the Home Office says so.
Yvette Cooper hides behind classified “assessments”, the same way ministers once invoked secret intelligence to justify wars and crackdowns. The content never matters, only that we are told it exists. Meanwhile, over 500 people (and counting) are arrested in Parliament Square for holding signs, and the spectacle becomes the point: show the public what happens when you step out of line.
Shami Chakrabarti calls it a “poll tax moment”, but it’s worse than that. Poll tax protests confronted the state in the open. This is slower, quieter: a suffocating of political life by law, warrant, and morning raid. A democracy where speech can be reclassified as terror has already begun to hollow itself out.
Abroad the same logic plays out in steel and fire: Britain supplies the weapons while banning the protests against them. Violence there, repression here. Two fronts of the same policy.
I thought New Labour was bad (Iraq, ASBOs and control orders at home) but Starmerism is worse because it has learned all the wrong lessons. Blair at least staged his authoritarianism as modernisation: the era of spin, Cool Britannia, rights talk and private finance wrapped in the language of progress. Starmerism dispenses with the gloss. It is Labour stripped to the wire. Technocratic, punitive, and thin-skinned, a party that bans protest one week and writes more arms export licences the next.
New Labour’s “tough on crime” was about reassuring Middle England that modernisation wouldn’t mean disorder. Starmerism’s dawn raids over Facebook posts tell us something else: this isn’t about reassuring anyone, it’s about foreclosing dissent altogether. The machinery of counterterrorism, surveillance, and policing built under Blair has been handed to a party leadership that sees political opposition itself as a kind of threat.
That’s what makes it worse. Blair wanted legitimacy; Starmer seems to want compliance. Under New Labour you could still march against the Iraq War in your millions, even if they ignored you. Under Starmer, the march itself risks becoming a crime scene.
