Labour's misguided assault on Palestine Action

New Statesman​

14 hours ago

Metropolitan Police officers surround a demonstration against Palestine Action's proscription as a terrorist organisation, before arresting the in Parliament Square on July 12, 2025. Photo byAt the weekend (12 July) more than 70 people were arrested under anti-terror legislation at protests in support of the now proscribed organisation, Palestine Action. The group are the first non-violent, direct action group to have been designated a terrorist organisation in the UK, and are now listed alongside Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram and the neo-Nazi group National Action – a member of whom is currently serving a life sentence for planning the assassination of former Labour MP, Rosie Cooper, in 2018 – under the Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000.
The proscription of Palestine Action is not only a wildly disproportionate act against a group whose targets have been confined to the state and corporate infrastructure that supports the Israeli military. It is sure to have chilling effects on the already dwindling right to protest. The proximate cause, as Huw Lemmey has convincing argued, is the 'wider effort to limit jury nullification', where a jury acquits a defendant as a matter of conscience regardless of whether or not they have broken the law. Fearing embarrassment if 'the chasm between government policy and public opinion' is exposed by a jury acquittal, the government has decided it is better off avoiding juries altogether.
Even so, there is a wider context at work. The action against Palestine Action is merely the latest punitive measure against non-violent protesters. In July last year, five activists from Just Stop Oil were sentenced to between four and five years for conspiring to block traffic on the M25 – imprisoned, in effect, for being on a Zoom call, and for far longer than many who are convicted of serious sexual assault or other violent crimes. While those prosecutions began under a Conservative government, the sentences were handed down weeks into Keir Starmer's term of office. Tellingly, the former human rights lawyer refused to intervene, while his home secretary Yvette Cooper has since defended the Tories' 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act and its 2023 Public Order Act, which introduced even more draconian anti-protest legislation. It was only action by the civil rights group, Liberty, that got some of regulations contained in the 2023 act quashed.
On the right, meanwhile, the case of Lucy Connolly, who was sentenced to a 31-month jail term for inciting race hate after calling for protestors to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers, has become a minor cause célèbre. While the claims that she is a 'political prisoner' are clearly absurd, her lengthy sentence has only served to further erode trust in Britain governing institutions.
Labour are, of course, no strangers to this kind of social authoritarianism. Between 1997 and 2010, New Labour pursued a brand of authoritarian populism that even Keir Starmer has yet to reach. The socially restrictive measures introduced under Blair and Brown include the issuing of Asbsos for low-level social intimidation, the effects of which were further exacerbated by a 'name and shame' campaign that included the targeting of children as young as 10, the failed attempt to extend detention without charge to 90 days for terror suspects, and the escalation of police stop-and-search powers.
Yet then, as now, it is who is targeted, and who evades justice, that shines the starkest light on the priorities of the British political system. While elderly grandmothers are thrown in jail for holding placards on public streets, others far more guilty of degrading the fabric of British society get away scot-free.
Here I must confess something of a certain personal stake. In 2013, my second cousin was sentenced to nine months in prison for allegedly stealing thousands of pounds while running a sub post office. Of course, what we now know is that he was just one of around 1,000 innocent people who were falsely prosecuted due to failures in the Post Office's Horizon IT system. At least 13 of those implicated have subsequently taken their own lives. Yet the people who hold ultimate responsibility for this national scandal, the largest miscarriage of justice in British legal history, have, beyond public opprobrium and the odd lost directorship, continued to avoid justice. The question of jail time has barely even been raised.
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The same is true of water bosses. Only three people have ever been prosecuted for obstructing the Environment Agency in its investigations into sewage spills, none of whom even received a fine for doing so. Hundreds of cases of illegal spilling have been identified in the past few years alone; all occurred as privatised water firms paid out billions in dividends, while cutting back services, raising prices and saddling debt amounting to hundreds of millions of pounds onto the stricken companies. The government's recent water bill does strengthen its powers, but we are yet to see them utilised – all while groups like Palestine Action feel the full force of the state.
All of this is deeply damaging to the public's faith in government and its institutions, already at historical lows. Last month it was revealed that just 19 per cent of the public think the British political system needs little or no improvement, while only 12 per cent trust governments to put the country's interest before their party's.
The rot started long before Starmer's premiership. As Dominic Cummings, hardly a left-wing populist, has repeatedly and correctly stressed, one of the long-term factors in this was the absence of any institutional accountability for those behind the 2008 financial crisis. The shadow of 2008, long and ever darker, stretches across the contemporary social and economic landscape. We still live in the world made by the crisis. Yet repeated governments, both Labour and Conservative, have failed to face squarely the damage it has caused, let alone those who caused it.
This government has acted most aggressively against the 'working people' it claims to serve. Being responsible, knowingly, for the false prosecution of over thousand people gets you just 15 minutes of televised infamy, while those who spray red paint on a few airplanes, not to mention those who do no more than wear the name of a now disbanded organisation on a t-shirt, face prosecution and jail terms of up to 14 years. It is clear evidence of a government that doesn't know who it represents, and deserves every ounce of scorn poured on it.
[See also: Welcome to hot Palestine Action summer]
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