Labour’s line on Palestine Action is not about public safety. It’s about stripping away the last tatters of moral credibility from a party that once claimed to stand for justice and internationalism. Alex Davies-Jones1 can dress it up in the language of “respecting peaceful protest” all she likes, but the reality is brutal: proscription is political censorship with a truncheon in one hand and reams of counter-terror legislation in the other.
This government has taken a group whose “crime” is splashing paint on weapons of war and locked them in the same box as al-Qaeda. That is not justice. That is not proportion. It is the language of empire and the machinery of repression, the criminalisation of conscience.
The talk of “credible reports” of targeting Jewish-owned businesses is a smear so calculated it barely needs saying out loud. “Credible reports” without evidence is how authoritarian governments justify crackdowns they can’t defend in daylight. “National security” is the fig leaf covering the naked truth: the Labour leadership has sided with the arms dealers, the Israeli occupation, and the bombardment over ordinary people who dared to stand in Parliament Square with a placard.
Are we really throwing the full force of the law against the retired (half of those arrested were over 60!), vicars, former magistrates and schoolteachers. While arms companies sign contracts drenched in blood with government blessing? You can’t claim to respect the right to protest while dragging hundreds into police vans for holding a sign. You can’t claim moral authority while prosecuting those who oppose genocide.
This is the Labour Party now. Draped in the Union Jack, armed with repressive law, and ready to declare any act of dissent “terrorism” if it embarrasses their friends in Israel. History will not be kind to these cowards.
FOOTNOTES
- Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Justice ↩︎
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