Danny Shaw and Ben Riley-Smith’s Telegraph article on the proscription of Palestine Action is less “full story” than full-throated recitation of a Home Office press line. It reads like the kind of copy you would file if you were told the story couldn’t be printed without MI5’s blessing, and rather than pushing back, you found that convenient.
From the very first paragraph, the narrative is set in concrete: Palestine Action is a threat, the state has “intelligence” we aren’t allowed to see, and any reluctance to accept this must be the product of ignorance. That this ignorance is enforced by the same state withholding the evidence is treated not as a democratic problem, but as a mark of maturity. We must learn to trust the grown-ups in the security services etc etc.
The Fiction of the Hidden Dossier
The beating heart of this piece is the “secret evidence” motif. It is repeated like a charm: Yvette Cooper hints at it, Amber Rudd vouches for it, Chris Phillips assures us there’s “a lot of intelligence… not out in the open.” The function is obvious, to turn absence into presence, to make what we cannot see more persuasive than what we can.
It’s an old trick. Britain’s history is littered with these moments: the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, Iraq’s WMD dossier. Each time, journalists played along, treating the security state’s word as gospel until the scandal became too big to ignore. The Telegraph shows no sign of having learned the lesson.
Redefining Terrorism on the Fly
The article smuggles in a quiet but radical shift: “sabotage can constitute terrorism.” In other words, property damage in the course of political protest is to be treated as morally and legally equivalent to mass killing. Once that line is crossed, the ground under every protest movement changes. Greenpeace, Just Stop Oil, animal liberation groups, all could meet the same “bar” if ministers were politically inclined.
But the Telegraph won’t dwell on that. It isn’t here to discuss civil liberties. It’s here to normalise the redefinition, to put Palestine Action on a list alongside al-Qaeda and ISIS and then close the file.
The Weaponisation of Antisemitism
The allegation that Palestine Action “targeted Jewish-owned businesses” is thrown in with theatrical gravity, illustrated by a single disputed case in Stamford Hill. The business denies the link to Elbit; the group denies targeting Jewish ownership per se. But the insinuation is left hanging, too useful to check too hard. The political work here is familiar: to collapse the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, making the proscription appear not only a matter of security but of moral hygiene.
That Starmer himself reportedly underlined this at Labour’s NEC is no surprise. It fits neatly with his broader effort to criminalise the organised Palestine solidarity movement while laundering Labour’s own authoritarian turn through the language of communal protection.
What the Article Refuses to See
Half of those arrested in the protests against proscription were over 60. Some were 90-year-old pensioners, some in wheelchairs, one man was blind and in a wheelchair. That image, the British state arresting the blind and elderly for holding a placard, is briefly acknowledged and quickly moved on from, as though it were a regrettable PR slip rather than the core truth of what proscription does: it criminalises political speech.
There is no mention that under the Terrorism Act, support can mean little more than a tweet, a speech, or being in the same room as a banned group. No mention that proscription powers have almost never been used against UK-based political organisations, precisely because of their extraordinary reach. No examination of whether “£7m worth of damage” is an inflated MoD number meant for public consumption. No historical context for how direct-action sabotage has been prosecuted in the past.
The Emotional Choreography
The structure of the article is a propaganda model in miniature:
- Start with a night-time raid on an RAF base . Get in the drama, danger, and national security issue.
- Roll out the credentialed voices: ex-Home Secretaries, counter-terror chiefs, anonymous “insiders.”
- Seed the Iran connection, antisemitism, and a general aura of shadowy menace.
- Keep repeating that there’s more, much more, that you can’t be told.
- Close with the Home Secretary, centre stage, reassuring us she knows what’s best.
It’s a security-state bedtime story for a readership already primed to believe in external enemies and internal subversives. The point is not to inform but to shape the mental terrain so that dissent from proscription feels eccentric, naïve, even dangerous.
The Role of the Press in the Authoritarian Turn
When the press becomes a willing stenographer to power, it ceases to perform its democratic function. This article could have been written (with minimal changes) by the Home Office press office. It treats “rigorous process” as proof of justice, though anyone who has seen a miscarriage of justice unfold knows that a process can be both rigorous and corrupt. It takes at face value the idea that secrecy is necessity, not convenience. It reproduces the logic that in times of alleged danger, rights must contract.
The danger isn’t Palestine Action’s paint-throwing. The danger is the normalisation of proscription as a political weapon, and the transformation of direct-action protest into a branch of terrorism law. Today it’s Palestine Action. Tomorrow it could be any movement that crosses a minister’s red lines.
In truth, the “full story” will never be in the Telegraph. The full story is in the streets, in the courtrooms, in the lives of the hundreds now facing arrest for the crime of dissent. And the job of journalism should be to prise open the black box of the state, not to decorate it with official quotes and hope the reader learns to love the lock.
