The [UK] government’s plan to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation is a hugely significant step in the steady erosion of civil liberties.

This decline began under Tony Blair’s premiership, was advanced by the last Tory government and is now pursued enthusiastically by Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer.

His home secretary, Yvette Cooper, will be applauded by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which said the protestors who spray painted aircraft at RAF Brize Norton should be charged with treason.

The government also knows the move has the added approval of the Israeli government, pro-Israel lobbies and arms companies. 

Palestine Action’s trademark is damaging machinery at factories in the UK that make weapons for Israel’s military. 

Cooper said several acts of serious damage by Palestine Action since its creation in 2020 had cost “millions of pounds”, unintentionally driving home the point that the alleged crime is financial loss and damage to property, as opposed to mass murder. 

The aircraft painted by Palestine Action at Brize Norton are from the Voyager fleet, which the RAF used to refuel US jets during Donald Trump’s bombardment of Yemen this year in sorties that killed hundreds of civilians.

Ministers might well assume the move would be welcomed by Trump, who called Palestine Action “terrorists” that should be “treated harshly” after they defaced his Scottish golf resort.

The Terrorism Act 2000, under which Palestine Action looks set to be proscribed, gives police enormous discretion.

They can question an individual for up to six hours “whether or not” there are “grounds for suspecting” the person has been involved in terrorist activities.

People convicted of “supporting” the group could face 14 years in prison. 

Counter-terrorism laws have long been the first refuge of governments anxious to promote a climate of fear and insecurity. 

Between 2000 and 2018 successive governments introduced 13 separate statutes designed to catch more and more people in the “anti-terrorism” net. 

Earlier this year, Starmer, said people-smuggling should be seen as a security threat “similar to terrorism”.

Stella Rimington, a former head of MI5, many years ago criticised politicians for trying to outbid each other in their opposition to terrorism. 

“National security has become much more of a political issue” she told me. “Parties are tending to use it as a way of trying to get at the other side. You know, ‘We’re more tough on terrorism than you are.’ I think that’s a bad move, quite frankly.”

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, another ex-head of MI5, has warned the government risked banning “non-violent extremists” from speaking at universities. 

Similarly, Max Hill KC, when he was the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, warned the government about trying “to criminalise thought”. 

Then in the wake of calls that last year’s Southport killer should be treated like a terrorist, Hill’s successor Jonathan Hall warned the definition of terrorism should not be expanded or changed as it could lead to “the prosecution of people who by no stretch of the imagination are terrorists”.

He said this week that to his knowledge the ban on Palestine Action would be the “first time that a group has been proscribed on the basis of serious damage to property” in Britain rather than because of the use of, or support for, serious violence.

But he added that targeting the Brize Norton base had moved the group’s activities into “the zone of national security” and that had acted as “a tipping point” for the government.

In his introduction to the government’s new National Security Strategy, published on June 24, Starmer said: “We must strengthen our approach to domestic security, where threats continue to grow in their scale and complexity. Not just in terms of terrorism as traditionally understood…”

So the message from this Labour government is clear: protestors will face unprecedented jail sentences and fines for actions never before considered to be akin to terrorism and for crimes that involve no violence against individuals.

This should concern everyone, especially Starmer himself. When he was a human rights lawyer in 2004, he defended a man who broke into a Nato airbase in Gloucestershire and tried to burn down a warplane in protest at the Iraq war.

https://www.declassifieduk.org/palestine-action-ban-threatens-all-our-civil-liberties/

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         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.