They call it terrorism now. A few spray cans, some broken windows, the odd incursion onto a weapons factory roof, and that’s enough for Yvette Cooper to drag Palestine Action before Parliament under anti-terror laws. Not on its own, of course. That would look vindictive. So it’s bundled in with actual fascist organisations and sectarian militias. One vote. All or nothing. If you want to oppose the far right, you’re made to endorse the criminalisation of protest. If you want to defend civil liberties, you’re accused of siding with hate.
This is lawmaking by shotgun blast. Not justice, just performance. And like all state theatre under Starmer’s Labour, it ends in a show trial. You’re either with the government, or you’re “extremist-adjacent”. You can debate the merits of direct action all you like, but once it’s labelled terrorism, all nuance dies.
What Palestine Action carried out (controversially and now criminalised) was targeted disruption of facilities connected to the arms trade. Their actions have drawn condemnation and support in equal measure. But we should be clear: they did not target civilians, nor seek to instil fear in the public. UN experts, human rights lawyers, and even former ministers have raised serious concerns about whether this proscription crosses a legal and ethical line. The Home Office claims this is about safety. But who, exactly, is being protected?
You don’t have to like the tactics. You don’t have to agree with the slogans. But if protest that disrupts power is treated as terrorism, then the state has rewritten the definition to suit itself. That should worry all of us, especially when it’s a supposed centre-left government wielding the pen.
“The point of protest is to disrupt. That’s why suffragettes smashed windows, why striking miners stood at pickets, why students occupy campuses. None of this is new. What’s new is how criminalised dissent has become.”
The legal trick here isn’t new. The government bundled Palestine Action into a single vote with two actual violent extremist groups: the Russian Imperial Movement and the so-called Maniacs Murder Cult. MPs weren’t given the chance to assess each group on its own merits. As Green MP Carla Denyer noted in Parliament, “Every single person who just voted no… wanted to vote yes on the Maniacs Murder Cult and the Russian Imperial Movement, but we were prevented… by the cynical way the government lumped together those two clearly terrorist organisations with Palestine Action.”
“They could have debated the group alone. Instead, they bundled it with fascists. That wasn’t procedure. It was politics.”
Even the courts aren’t entirely sure. A High Court judge refused to suspend the ban pending judicial review, but did so reluctantly, acknowledging serious questions under Articles 10 and 11 of the Human Rights Act, that of the right to freedom of expression and assembly. Liberty, Novara Media, and even former Labour ministers have all voiced concern that this is an authoritarian overreach, not a proportionate counter-terror measure.
Legal scholars have pointed out that this is the first time a non-violent civil disobedience campaign has been placed on the UK’s proscription list. Historically, such listings were reserved for groups with clear links to violent extremism. The Islamist, the fascist, the separatist, or paramilitary. But this time, the bar has moved. That shift didn’t just happen. It was designed.
“A protest group that damages property is now treated the same as a neo-Nazi paramilitary. That tells you everything about who this government fears.”
Novara Media has even written to the Attorney General seeking clarification: can journalists still report on Palestine Action? Will writing about them become criminal? No clear answer has been given. That’s the point. The proscription doesn’t need to convict you. It only needs to make you hesitate. Make you rewrite. Make you stay silent.
Palestine Action, whatever your view of its strategy, offered one thing many elected politicians haven’t: clarity. No hedging, no triangulation, no pretence of neutrality. It confronted the complicity of the British state in the arming of Israel during an ongoing ICC investigation into war crimes. That’s not comfortable. But it’s not terrorism either.
This isn’t about national security. It’s about narrowing the field of acceptable dissent. Today, it’s Palestine Action. Tomorrow, it could be climate activists. Or striking workers. Or tenants organising rent strikes. The law has always been political. Now it’s ideological too.
If we can’t say that clearly (if we’re not even allowed to debate it) then the proscription wasn’t about Palestine Action at all. It was about all of us.
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