Keir Starmer has inherited the worst instincts of the British state and made them his own. The proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation is not merely an act of political cowardice; it is a test case in how an authoritarian government dresses up repression as security, and how the machinery of the state can be retooled to crush dissent.
For weeks, more than 200 people (many of them pensioners, retired clergy, and doctors) had already been arrested under counter-terrorism legislation for the “crime” of holding placards, sharing posts, or publicly supporting a group that paints arms factories red. Yesterday, that number more than doubled in a single day. The Metropolitan Police arrested 474 people in Parliament Square and Whitehall (the largest number of arrests in a single operation in at least a decade) for silently holding signs reading “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.”
474 people arrested. Yes, you read that correctly. Not for a riot, not for mass violence against police, but for protesting. On the ground, witnesses say the figure is inflated, with barely twenty people detained in the first hour.
The operation is another show of force against Palestinain solidarity. Officers had been drafted in from other forces; the square was saturated with uniforms and vans. Many detainees were simply given street bail and sent home, not because the law didn’t apply, but because the logistics of mass repression buckled under the weight of its own ambition. As Defend Our Juries put it, “The police have only been able to arrest a fraction of those supposedly committing ‘terrorism’ offences … this is a major embarrassment to Yvette Cooper.”
What the Starmer government wants to prove is not guilt but reach. To define Palestine Action as “terrorism” because it has damaged property (Elbit Systems offices, RAF planes, Donald Trump’s golf course) is to write a law that would have criminalised the suffragettes, the dockers who blocked arms shipments to Pinochet’s Chile, or the anti-apartheid activists who wrecked Shell billboards. Yvette Cooper, ever the home secretary who can quote the statute but not the conscience, insists the ban does not affect the freedom to protest “about Palestinian rights.” In other words: you may speak so long as you are unheard; you may protest so long as you do not touch power.
The authoritarianism here is not just in the arrests, but in the architecture being built: the state’s power to define resistance as terrorism, to criminalise solidarity, and to draw the boundaries of “legitimate” protest ever tighter. Counter-terrorism is no longer a shield against violence; it is a sword against political disobedience.
This is also the political culmination of Starmer’s Labour. From backing anti-strike laws to defending Prevent, from waving through police powers at protests to this latest proscription, Labour has repositioned itself as custodian of the security state. The rights you thought you had are now conditional: the state will decide when you may assemble, and who you may support.
The grotesque absurdity is plain. Deborah Hinton, 81, a former magistrate honoured by the late Queen, arrested and swabbed like an al-Qaida bombmaker. Reverend Sue Parfitt, 83, taken into custody for sitting in a camping chair with a sign. Jon Farley, a retired headteacher, detained for holding a satirical cartoon from the Private Eye. Yesterday, hundreds (if you believe the police) more (many in their seventies) marched silently into police vans for holding a sheet of paper. The charges are not the point; the spectacle is.
There is a lineage. Britain’s counter-terrorism apparatus was forged in Northern Ireland, where proscription was used not only against armed groups but to criminalise political association and solidarity networks. The definition of “terrorism” was elastic then, and it is elastic now, stretching to cover acts the state finds intolerable. What began as a colonial measure in Ireland was repurposed during the War on Terror against Muslim communities and is now being deployed against retired vicars and Jewish activists whose “offence” is opposing Britain’s role in Gaza’s destruction. The target shifts, but the doctrine remains: dissent is a security threat.
Yesterday’s demonstration was everything the government’s narrative denies: peaceful, sedate, and moving. Arrested women in their seventies were still mid-sentence in interviews when officers carried them away. A patch worn by one protester read “Jews Against Genocide.” Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack stood among the sign-holders: “UK civil liberties are trapped in a manufactured crisis. Peaceful citizens of conscience (including pensioners) have become terrorists, at the will of a human rights lawyer turned authoritarian who now lunges at opinions that expose the moral vacuum of his unrecognisable government.”
This is not about Elbit’s broken windows; it is about Gaza’s open graves. The proscription is an ideological weapon, erasing the politics of resistance while preserving the image of “terror” the state requires. Amnesty International has called the arrests “deeply concerning” and “disproportionate to the point of absurdity.” Even the UN’s human rights chief has condemned the ban as incompatible with international law.
Hinton is right: we are on a slippery slope. Starmer is greasing it. The authoritarian turn is no longer creeping. It is marching, with Labour’s red rosette pinned neatly to the lapel of the British security state.
