{"id":329152,"date":"2025-08-08T23:56:24","date_gmt":"2025-08-08T23:56:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/329152\/"},"modified":"2025-08-08T23:56:24","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T23:56:24","slug":"will-palestine-action-break-britain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/329152\/","title":{"rendered":"Will Palestine Action break Britain?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today in Westminster, over 500 people plan<\/a> to announce themselves as terrorists, all in full view of the police. Their methods are less molotovs-at-dawn and more Year 8 art project. All the protesters need to do is display a placard emblazoned with the words \u201cI support Palestine Action\u201d. This immediately invites arrest for an offence under the Terrorism Act 2000, with Section 13 outlawing the \u201cwearing or displaying an article indicating support for a proscribed group\u201d.<\/p>\n

After passing legislation, you then have to apply it. This duty typically falls to beleaguered police services, who are blamed for laws conjured by their thoughtless political masters. Yet, if the issue at hand is Palestine Action\u2019s proscription, after activists vandalised a pair of aircraft at RAF Brize Norton, the Terrorism Act 2000 is about so much more than the politics of Gaza. It speaks, rather, to 25 years of government failure, and how over-powered laws and under-powered cops collide to push Britain towards all-out chaos.<\/p>\n

From a personal perspective, I\u2019m sympathetic to banning Palestine Action. Whichever way you split it, breaking into an RAF base and deliberately disabling military aircraft isn\u2019t just criminal damage, it\u2019s a shameless assault on the armed forces. And besides, June\u2019s attack came before the group\u2019s campaign of industrial sabotage on companies it linked to Israeli interests. Reports suggest<\/a> the total costs here could hit \u00a355 million.<\/p>\n

In practice, however, arresting hundreds of would-be \u201cterrorists\u201d is easier said than done. After all, the sentence for the offence detailed in the Terrorism Act is anything from six months to 14 years. It hardly helps that the police are refusing to back down, simply saying offenders will be dealt with. But even the Met, Britain\u2019s biggest police service, will struggle with 500-plus public-order arrests. There simply isn\u2019t the custody space, without creating emergency holding and charging centres anyway. On the other hand, though, not arresting offenders will invite more allegations of two-tier policing, especially when London\u2019s mayor seems dubious about proscribing the group to start with.<\/p>\n

The upshot, then, is that the Met will be made to look impotent, and the law an ass. Such a scenario is every radical activist\u2019s dream, and every public order commander\u2019s nightmare. And that\u2019s before you consider the broader problem. State legitimacy bleeds away when it proves unable to uphold the rule of law. That was clear enough when Extinction Rebellion activists blocked roads with impunity \u2014 but terrorism? With the Westminster system already creaking, it\u2019s easy to see how the Palestine Action debacle could spiral.<\/p>\n

To understand how policymakers could have ended up in this mess, we must first appreciate how the Terrorism Act appeared. Passed by New Labour in its pomp, it offered the UK\u2019s first statutory definition of terrorism, described as \u201cthe use or threat of action designed to influence the government or to intimidate the public\u2026 for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause\u201d. If that sounds flexible, it\u2019s because the Act was intended to be a permanent solution to older ad hoc legislation.<\/p>\n

Drafted after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, and the end of the Cold War, legislators identified the old Prevention of Terrorism Act as ripe for replacement. Introduced in 1974, in the aftermath of the IRA\u2019s Birmingham pub bombings, the PTA was annually renewed by Parliament. From its introduction, indeed, it was always known as \u201ctemporary provisions\u201d, such was their severity. Fair enough: it permitted the state to detain suspects for up to a week longer than usual before charging them, while also allowing for the proscription of Irish Republican and Loyalist terror groups.<\/p>\n

Crucially, the term \u201cterrorism\u201d was never defined in the 1974 Act. At the time, it seemed quite obvious what terrorism was: blowing things up, especially people. That, of course, still left other radical groups, not of the bomb-making variety but still skating the edges of legality. Prior to 2000, the Government again preferred a fairly impromptu approach. Echoing the tactics of communist groups during the Cold War, it tolerated, engaged and influenced fellow travellers while disrupting hardcore activists. This lead investigators, eventually, to genuine terrorist suspects.<\/p>\n

The period after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 was pivotal here \u2014 existing laws were piecemeal and besides framed around the sensitivities of Irish terrorism. Especially with the rise of international jihadism in the late Nineties, the Government decided to enact permanent, overarching legislation.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith the rise of international terrorism in the late Nineties, the Government decided to enact permanent, overarching legislation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 2000 Act was passed just seven months before 9\/11. Since then, it has been continuously amended, introducing new laws responding to the ever-evolving chimera of terrorism. That encompassed everything from banning the glorification of terrorism to creating Prevent, effectively replacing the traditional police monitoring of extremists. And, up to a point, this proliferation makes sense: who, in the naive digital world of 2000, could have predicted the vicious intersectional politics of today?<\/p>\n

All the while, the thrust of the Blairite legal revolution was distinctly European, favouring statute over common law. Slowly but surely, with its focus on procedural fairness and (ironically) human rights, the law shaped the police response to terrorism and extremism. Many of the practices resulting from this approach, from Control Orders to Prevent, have subsequently been found wanting. Extremism as a shared social problem, rather than one of law enforcement, saw the police withdraw from swathes of counter-extremism: the sort that often presages actual terrorism.<\/p>\n

No wonder, then, that the Terrorism Act 2000 is today the legislative equivalent of Frankenstein\u2019s monster, applied to a dizzying range of social and technological problems. Deployed on the margins of extremism, it targets those shadowy slices of the Venn Diagram where radical politics, criminality and disorder all intersect. Indeed, had the often-violent<\/a> Animal Liberation Front (ALF) not lost momentum by the late 2000s, it would almost certainly have been proscribed.<\/p>\n

Why, then, wasn\u2019t Palestine Action banned sooner, especially when the list<\/a> of proscribed organisations reveals any number of neo-Nazi grouplets which exist mainly on the internet? Whitehall\u2019s slowness here arguably hints at another issue: Labour\u2019s confusion over Palestine. The party\u2019s Left flank, especially in seats with significant Muslim communities, is under siege by \u201cGaza Independents\u201d. Its grassroots are instinctively sympathetic to Palestine too. The party\u2019s Right flank, however, is painfully aware of its funny bone around extremism: hard on what it considers the \u201cpopulist\u201d Right, but fuzzy around progressive protests over environmental issues, trans rights and Palestine. As and when a radical anti-immigration group appears, I predict it will receive harsher treatment.<\/p>\n

This will simply accelerate our seemingly unstoppable cycle of discontent, one in which the Government finds itself increasingly trapped. It isn\u2019t often I feel sorry for Keir Starmer or Yvette Cooper \u2014 but on this issue they\u2019ve tied themselves into something of a Gordian knot. Arguably, they would have best been served by tackling Palestine Action as the Blair-era authorities dealt with the Animal Liberation Front. But that would have involved intrusive intelligence-gathering and Cold War infiltration. Instead, and especially given policing\u2019s retreat from the wider field of extremism, anti-terrorism legislation is all that\u2019s left. As the saying goes, when you only have a hammer, every problem is a nail.<\/p>\n

Today, the police face 500 potential nails, from retired clergymen and elderly librarians to bright-eyed students, marching on the side of the angels. I\u2019m not sure this was the intention of the Terrorism Act\u2019s centrist architects, during those long-lost Blairite days. But policymakers\u2019 errors are bread and butter for riot cops. And, if the proscription of Palestine Action tells us anything, it\u2019s that our strange new world, one of endless, inchoate rage, defies containment by conventional politics. Only totalitarian regimes try to arrest their way out of social atomisation and dissent, and even if our Government wanted to try this, it\u2019s unlikely to succeed. Yes, Whitehall needs hammers \u2014 but also other, subtler tools.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Today in Westminster, over 500 people plan to announce themselves as terrorists, all in full view of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":329153,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5018,3,4],"tags":[748,393,4884,1144,529,285,18744,2300,712,13466,16,15,103712,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-329152","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"category-uk","9":"category-united-kingdom","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-england","12":"tag-great-britain","13":"tag-northern-ireland","14":"tag-police","15":"tag-politics","16":"tag-protest","17":"tag-raf","18":"tag-scotland","19":"tag-terrorism","20":"tag-uk","21":"tag-united-kingdom","22":"tag-unrest","23":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114995854462500112","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=329152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329152\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/329153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=329152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=329152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=329152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}