History will judge this Labour government for targeting protesters

The Herald Scotland

13 hours ago

There, Donna told me about the man she knew as Carlo Neri and how he used her to gain access to the activists she hung around with. Neri, whose real name was Carlo Sorrachi, affected to like the things she liked, told her he loved her, and asked her to marry him. Then, when she had served her purpose, he disappeared.
Donna has since written her own book about her experience: Small Town Girl. The public inquiry which, back then, had not yet taken evidence, has heard similar stories from other women, whose lives were co-opted by a state intent on stamping out dissent.
Some of the undercover officers fathered babies with their duped partners: tiny bundles of collateral damage, their lives forever tarnished by the deceit that led to their conception.
Beyond the emotional fallout, two aspects of the scandal stand out for me. The first is the way the groups chosen for infiltration were cherry-picked. The Special Demonstration Squad (then called the Special Operations Squad) was set up in 1968 to target Vietnam War protesters. In the following 50 years, it sent officers into, amongst others, the anti-apartheid movement, Camps for Climate Action, and the campaign to bring the killers of Stephen Lawrence to court. Right-wing groups were largely left alone.
Read more Dani Garavelli
Most of those left-wing groups are now regarded as having occupied the moral high ground. Anti-apartheid activists were standing up against the iniquity of the South African regime while Margaret Thatcher was still refusing to introduce economic sanctions. The climate action groups were ahead of the curve on the crisis facing the planet. The Stephen Lawrence campaign exposed the institutional racism the Met was trying to cover up.
The second troubling aspect is the degree to which the police were prepared to cross legal/ethical lines in order to gain paltry intelligence. The women who unwittingly slept with undercover officers see themselves as victims of state-sanctioned rape. Meanwhile, many of the officers acted as agent provocateurs, actively encouraging the acts of sabotage the police could act on and the courts punish. One law for those upholding the status quo, and another for those challenging it.
You might think these revelations, which have been entering the public domain in dribs and drabs over the last few years, would have given the establishment pause for thought; that governments, under whose auspices the police operate, might have asked themselves searching questions about how this was allowed to happen, and the double standards being applied.
Instead, the Conservatives introduced two pieces of legislation — the Police Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 — designed to further restrict the right to demonstrate, by criminalising long-established forms of civil disobedience such as chaining yourself to fences or disrupting major road networks and national events.
Earlier this year, a report by the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) claimed the aggressive police use of these new laws, along with the demonisation of peaceful protesters, had become so pronounced it amounted to repression.
The powers are most often used against activists who threaten those policies the government is hellbent on pursuing: the expansion of roads and airports and oil fields, for example, and the freedom to support any heinous regime it regards as useful.
Yvette Cooper is targeting Palestine Action (Image: PA) Far from reversing this trend, Labour has entrenched it. Yvette Cooper unsuccessfully defended her predecessor Suella Braverman against claims the government had acted unlawfully when it reduced the threshold for police intervention from 'serious disruption to the life of the community' to 'more than minor'.
Now she seems determined to proscribe Palestine Action, a protest group which is committed to 'ending global participation in Israel's genocidal and apartheid regime'. This would place it on a par with Isis, the IRA and Al-Qaeda, and criminalise not only those who take part in action, but anyone who expresses sympathy or support.
So what did Palestine Action do to deserve this treatment? Did it threaten or perpetrate acts of violence? Did it cause widespread alarm or endanger lives? There is no evidence to suggest so. Mostly, its activities have involved vandalism at factories and military bases it claims to be involved in supplying weapons or assistance to Israel. In 2022, it broke into the Thales factory in Glasgow, causing more than £1m of damage to munitions produced there. Then, last week, it sprayed red paint into the engines of two Airbus Voyager aircraft.
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Are there problems with such tactics? I would argue there are. Thales and our military bases are also producing weapons and carrying out missions unrelated to Israel's attacks on Palestinians. Thales' Belfast factory has a contract to supply 5,000 air defence missiles to Ukraine. Aircraft from RAF Brize Norton have been involved in dropping humanitarian aid to Gaza. If there is one thing Russia's invasion of Ukraine has taught old anti-war types like myself it is that there are times when a strong defence capacity is essential.
But these are arguments about specific choices, not the legitimacy of dissent. They are not a justification for increasing the gravity of the offence or the punishment meted out to those who commit it.
The vandalism Palestine Action inflicted is already a criminal offence. But the four people arrested in connection with the Brize Norton attack have been arrested not, as you might expect, in connection with criminal damage, but under the Terrorism Act.
This despite the fact that attacks on military air bases are not new. In 2017, two men cut through fences at BAE Warton in an attempt to target fighter jets destined for Saudi Arabia and attacks on Yemen. They were charged with but acquitted of criminal damage. In 2003, a group of anti-war protesters broke into RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire to sabotage US bombers before they flew to Iraq. Keir Starmer knows this because he defended them on the grounds they were trying to stop the planes from committing war crimes.
Apparently, Starmer has no such qualms about war crimes now or at least not the ones being carried out by Israel. It's impossible — isn't it, given the way events have unfolded? — not to notice that the crackdown is being carried out selectively, and with one particular brand of activism in mind.
That's what the smearing of pro-Palestinian protesters on peaceful marches exposes.
A pro-Palestine protest at Westminster. (Image: PA) But the proscription of a particular group on political grounds is dangerous on multiple fronts. It may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, tipping that that group into violent acts its members would not otherwise have countenanced. And it sets a precedent for the future proscription of any protest group whose goals any government doesn't like.
When suffragette statues were being attacked by trans rights activists last year, Cooper described them as honouring 'women who fought for freedom and justice' though they committed acts similar to the ones she is now trying to proscribe, and were mostly loathed by the politicians of their day.
History will judge her government for its targeting of those who — in the face of establishment recalcitrance — are also driven to take direct action. Perhaps future Home Secretaries will praise pro-Palestinian protesters as champions of freedom and justice. But how many more will die in Gaza before that day comes?