Will the ban on Palestine Action terrify enough people into silence?

The proscription is part of a wider push to stifle dissent in an increasingly authoritarian Britain

~ Kevin Blowe ~

The repression of political dissent in Britain has been escalating for years: first against Black Lives Matter and environmental campaigners and now the Palestine solidarity movement. Throughout the last 20 months, campaigners have been demonised, accused of ‘radicalisation’, placed under increasing police surveillance and subjected to a toxic and invariably racist discourse in both Westminster and the mainstream media. All of this has been deliberately designed to undermine the legitimacy of calls for action on Gaza and to encourage the public, especially Jewish communities, to feel fearful of Palestine protesters.

The recent proscription of Palestine Action therefore represents a new low point, within a growing understanding that Britain is slipping into a state of repression. However, the real danger is what happens over the next few months. We do not know if the police intend to vigorously pursue any trace of sympathy for Palestine Action, conflate any form of direct action as ‘connected to terrorism’, or go after other pro-Palestinian groups.

As Netpol said in our statement, we are likely to witness increased surveillance, more police raids, more doxxing by apologists for Israel demanding arrests and a greater willingness by the police to comply. It is also possible that venues, universities or even banks become nervous about any mention of “Palestine”. What remains impossible to predict is how this dissuades campaigners from protesting at all.  That is why we want to make sure the movements we work with understand the dangers we face and prepare for the worst.

Meanwhile, Westminster continues to exist inside a bubble: one where fringe groups like ‘We Believe in Israel’ and loud partisan cranks like Lord Walney are heard, where expressing words like ‘genocide’ or ‘apartheid’ or criticism of Israel is punished, but where the anger and resentment across Britain about the massacre of children in Gaza, every night on our television screens, is ignored. Our worry is that this insularity encourages ideas about banning even more groups: some lobbyists are already openly talking about this.

But the greater fear is that we are back to the period of the so-called “war on terror” in the early 2000s, where more groups are targeted by the police, where Muslims are treated as ‘suspect’ communities and where even more new police powers and new criminal offences are introduced. Those who lived through this before remember the huge damage it caused to the social fabric of the country.

Over a quarter of a century ago, the then Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw was challenged, as he presented the second reading of what would become the Terrorism Act 2000, on its expanded definition of terrorism. It was, assured Straw, the “threat or use of serious violence for political, religious or ideological ends”, that “aims to create a climate of extreme fear”. The legislation would not, he insisted, “focus on demonstrations, which are a normal activity in a democracy” but rather on “the opposite end of the spectrum. It is about deterring, preventing and, where necessary, investigating heinous crime—heinous because terrorism seeks to destroy not only lives, but the foundation of our society”. Later in the debate, Home Office minister Charles Clarke was keen to tell MPs that that the ability to proscribe organisations “is a heavy power; it will be used only when absolutely necessary”.

There was one very prescient moment in these parliamentary debates, when Straw was asked about the possibility that a government in the Middle East might exert pressure on British ministers to take action against a militant group, using terrorism laws, to protect major defence contracts. Straw dismissed this as impossible, insisting that even if “holders of my office, regardless of party, are completely venal”, the police and prosecutors were independent of political influence. Yet in August 2023, it was revealed that Israeli embassy officials were exerting precisely this kind of pressure.

None of these promises and reassurances remain even remotely true, now that another Labour Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, has banned a protest group in circumstances Straw and Clarke insisted were impossible.

The immediate impact on Palestine Action of using the “heavy power” of proscription is that it no longer exists. It became an illegal organisation at midnight on 4 July. Regardless of Cooper trying to portray the group’s sensible security precautions against police infiltration as a sinister ‘cell’ structure, it seems extremely unlikely that the group will now decide to ‘go underground’—it had always been a popular movement that prioritised ordinary people from working-class communities choosing to take action against the presence of Israel’s Elbit Systems in their towns and cities.

However, what will not change are the reasons why the group existed in the first place. We will still have a government invested in the idea of defence industries saving the British economy, that continues to arm Israel and is heavily influenced by arms trade lobbyists. Politicians will remain unmoved, even contemptuous of pleas to end the genocide in Gaza. Some people will, as a result, continue to want their solidarity for Palestinians to actually make a difference, by using direct-action tactics as the only remaining option. 

What Yvette Cooper evidently hopes is that labelling this as “terrorism” will terrify enough people into silence. But no-one really knows, including her, whether this will work—and as long as the suffering in Gaza continues, it seems unlikely.

Yesterday we remembered the 20th anniversary of those who died on 7/7, the result of actions that were unquestionably intended to terrorise and to create a backlash from the state. Many also mourned the subsequent police killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, the victim of that backlash. Yet here we are, with the government insisting criminal damage is ‘terrorism’ and packaging a ban on Palestine Action together with two violent far-right overseas groups, telling MPs they must vote to ban them all, or none of them. It was so incredibly cynical and frankly, but it also feels like an insult to the loved ones of those who died in London in 2005, the victims of genuine acts of terrorism.

Britain’s extraordinarily broad counter-terrorism laws make this possible. What little credibility these laws ever had, or the platitudes offered in 1999 by Jack Straw and others that the Human Rights Act would provide protections against this kind of authoritarianism, have been fatally undermined.

Photo: Alan Stanton on Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

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