The Starmer regime’s attitude to the law, both domestic and international, has been diseased by the doctrine of unquestioning support of Israel.

This morning the Handala became the second vessel flying the Red Ensign to be illegally seized by Israel, without a single word from the UK, which has a duty to protect its vessel in international waters. Indeed British law applies upon the vessel and the Metropolitan Police should be investigating domestic law kidnap of the passengers.

That is in addition to the international crime of seizing the vessel.

Uniquely the UK has declared itself unable to judge whether war crimes have been committed by Israel, absent a decision by an international court. That position has never been taken before, is notably not taken over Ukraine, and is at odds with Starmer’s self-declared ability to judge that there is no Genocide in Gaza.

It also ignores the fact that the International Criminal Court cannot judge, while Netanyahu ignores their arrest warrants. The International Court of Justice case on Genocide is in very slow process, but Starmer has no difficulty in pre-empting the court by denying Genocide.

Volker Turk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, has very roundly condemned the UK’s proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, and called on the UK government to lift the proscription.

He also has called the UK to amend its Terrorism laws to bring its over-broad definition of terrorism in line with international law standards. Turk stated:

I urge the UK Government to rescind its decision to proscribe Palestine Action and to halt investigations and further proceedings against protesters who have been arrested on the basis of this proscription. I also call on the UK Government to review and revise its counter-terrorism legislation, including its definition of terrorist acts, to bring it fully in line with international human rights norms and standards

This is a remarkable development because nobody could ever accuse Volker Turk of being anti-Western. In fact his passivity, as freedoms are extinguished across the western world in order to stifle protest against the Genocide, has been a source of frustration to the human rights community.

It is a sign of just how absurd is the proscription of Palestine Action, that even Volker Turk has now decisively spoken out against it.

Let me give you a plain example of just how absurd the law now is.

The three young women from the Shut Down Leonardo group, who drove a van into the security fence of the Edinburgh weapons factory which makes parts for the Israeli military machine, were brought to court on Monday.

They were charged with Malicious Mischief – a Scottish common law offence of serious vandalism – aggravated by terrorism.

This reduces terrorism from the gravest of crimes, to merely an aggravating factor. The driver of the van has even been charged with dangerous driving aggravated by terrorism, which when you think about it is a hilarious concept.

To further underline that nobody really believes this is terrorism, all three have been released on bail. Can you imagine accused who had carried out a genuine terrorist attack being released on bail?

I don’t want to downplay too far the dangers. Malicious mischief is a dangerous charge – being common law, there is no limit to the possible jail sentence it might carry, and furthermore lengthy jail sentences for it can be imposed by a judge without a jury.

I am unsure that this offence should meet the bar of malicious mischief anyway. The Crown Office charging guidelines state that damage must be in the thousands of pounds and damage must affect others. They read:

Malicious Mischief should only be recorded where widespread damage is caused, where the value of the damage is considerable, or where there is disruption of power supply, flooding or similar. There is no specific monetary amount where Vandalism stops and Malicious Mischief takes over but any value of damage would require to be significant (several £000s) before a crime of Malicious Mischief is recorded.

The example given is deliberately damaging power lines and cutting the power to people’s homes. I am not sure a slight dent in a fence meets the bar.

But I also want to look at the women’s treatment as an example of the pernicious treatment of protestors since the proscription of Palestine Action.

The three are not accused of membership or support of Palestine Action. Yet they were arrested under the Terrorism Act and treated as terrorists. They were taken to the specialist terrorist detention and immigration centre in Govan and held there without charge for six days.

Today, @CraigMurrayOrg informed a protest outside Govan police station that three women had been assured this morning that they would be charged only with non-terrorism offences. Yet, by 3pm, terrorism charges had been made. What, he asks, is going on?https://t.co/ClyoJdtUE9 pic.twitter.com/1DpGtCdskH

— GGEC (@ggectee) July 20, 2025

That means that some authoritarian judge must have twice secretly signed off on the continuation of their detention. Why?

They were held strictly incommunicado. I helped organise the best legal support for them, and for six days their parents, supporters and I tried to get a message to them to ask for this legal team, but we were not permitted to reach them.

The women’s parents phoned and asked the police to pass on to them a message about the lawyers organised for them. The police refused. The brother of one of the women went to Govan police station, and was also refused permission.

The lawyers we had organised phoned the police, and said they had been instructed by the families, but again the police refused to pass on any message.

The women had to make do with the bog-standard duty solicitor service. Now the police do not normally have the power to hold people without charge for six days and to keep people completely incommunicado during that time.

The Terrorism Act gives the police those powers. But it does not mean they are obliged to use them. It is extraordinary that they refused all requests to tell the women about legal support, and was plainly gratuitous victimisation, designed to prevent the women from mounting the best possible legal defence.

Yet it appears that – from a conversation with one of them – within detention the women were kindly treated, and they had the impression the police also did not think they should be there. Questioning was neither harsh nor particularly probing, and apparently by identifiable Scottish police officers.

That is consistent with the decision to grant bail – they are caught up in a system of terrorist legislation, but none of those operating the system really believes in the narrative.

On 19 July I was present at St Giles Cathedral as eleven people from Defend Our Juries held placards identical to those which have led to mass arrests across the UK, stating “I Oppose Genocide – I Support Palestine Action.” They were there for half an hour in plain view of police, but nobody was arrested.

After the demonstration, a group of demonstrators in front of the Scottish First Minister’s office held various signs and wore various T shirts identical to those which have caused arrest elsewhere, but again nobody was arrested.

In the week since, three people have been arrested and charged with terrorism offences, in relation to the above. One, Mick Napier (in the centre with the microphone in the second photo) was arrested as he left the protest on Monday 21 July outside Edinburgh Sheriff Court, for the bail hearing of the Leonardo 3.

Mick actually came up to me and said he thought he was about to be lifted, as policemen were following him around. Five minutes later he was. Since then, plain clothes policemen have been to his home three times in a campaign of intimidation.

While the Leonardo 3 are out on bail, they too are suffering from various methods of state intimidation, including the freezing of bank accounts and loss of access to money.

One distinct possibility is that the state is suspending the full implementation of legal action over the proscription, until the hearing for a judicial review of proscription is concluded, as the key argument in the judicial review is the disproportionate consequences for free speech of the ban.

Judge Chamberlain had said in his refusal to stay the proscription that the fears for suppression of free speech were being exaggerated.

I reported on these attempts to suspend the proscription of Palestine Action pending the application for a judicial review. I could now not be simultaneously at the Edinburgh Sheriff court for the Leonardo 3 case and at the High Court in London for the proscription case, but fortunately Mohamed Elmaazi was on hand to cover the High Court.

Here is Mohamed’s report, slightly modified for context:
BEGINS

“I think what you’re doing is, you’re saying, you predicted this,” Mr Justice Chamberlain told Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh KC – representing Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori the morning of 21 July at the High Court of Justice – “and what you’re doing now is sharing evidence that they have happened.”

The judge’s remarks were in response to Ghrálaigh describing example after disturbing example of pro-Palestine and anti-genocide protesters being threatened with arrest — or actually arrested – across the country, ever since Palestine Action was banned as a terrorist organisation.

Ammori’s lawyers, Raza Husain KC and Ghrálaigh, made the oral arguments advancing the Claimant’s request to appeal the ban.

Before one can appeal a governmental decision – such as the Home Secretary’s order banning Palestine Action – they require permission to appeal.

Only two and a half weeks prior, on 4 July, Ammori’s lawyers unsuccessfully attempted to persuade the same judge to temporarily delay the ban from coming into effect until they had a chance to fully make their appeal – should he grant them one.

They argued that, given the both predictable and boundless implications for freedom of speech and association, the court should stay the Home Secretary’s ban to avoid irreparable harm from occurring.

They warned of dire consequences; not only for Palestine Action and its members but wider members of the public as well.

Husain and Ghrálaigh had explained at the 4 July hearing that labelling Palestine Action a terrorist organisation would result in a “grossly disproportionate interference with the rights to freedom of expression and assembly” not only of its members but also for potentially hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people across the UK.

But Chamberlain largely dismissed the more serious of the concerns as “hyperbole”.

“In my judgment, some of the consequences feared by the claimant and others who have given evidence are overstated,” Justice Chamberlain wrote in his 4 July judgment rejecting Ammori’s request to temporarily prevent the ban from taking effect.

“It will remain lawful for the claimant and other persons who were members of [Palestine Action] prior to proscription to continue to express their opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza and elsewhere, including by drawing attention to what they regard as Israel’s genocide and other serious violations of international law,” the High Court judge wrote.

“They will remain legally entitled to do so in private conversations, in print, on social media and at protests” he insisted before adding that therefore it “follows that it is hyperbole to talk of the claimant or others being “gagged” in this respect (as the claimant has alleged). They could not incur criminal liability based on their past association with a group which was not proscribed at the time.”

Two weeks later, Chamberlain’s tone was somewhat modified. He appeared to accept that he may have been wrong. In fact, he actually reminded the parties of what he wrote by reading out part of his decision refusing permission.

Ghrálaigh told the court that the situation is “even worse” than even they had predicted.

One of the key arguments made by the Claimant is that it could not have been Parliament’s intention to grant the Home Secretary the power to ban a direct action protest network such as Palestine Action. This is partially why they emphasised, as strongly as they did, the actions of the police across the country since the ban took effect.

Members of the public “with flags, badges, t-shirts, and posters that support Palestine, oppose genocide and/or satirise the Government’s position on the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza” have been subjected to “heavy” policing and “other enforcement”, the Irish-born barrister explained.

“None of those had any relationship with Palestine Action” she emphasised. The examples Ghrálaigh outlined included:

1. Police stopping and asking protesters outside BAE systems factory to remove shirts reading “Free Palestine” because they may “breach the proscription order,” on 5 July.

2. An individual stopped whilst travelling through Dover by counter-terrorism police at the border for wearing a hat with “Palestine Solidarity badges” to ensure that they “weren’t a part of Palestine Action,” on 7 July.

3. A 55-year-old man arrested in Glasgow for wearing a t-shirt with the words “Genocide in Palestine, Time to Take Action” printed on it, on 12 July.

4. A 68-year-old man, also arrested in Glasgow, for holding a sign with the same text, reportedly charged and bailed under section 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000, on 18 July.

One of the examples that Ghrálaigh spent some time on was the case of Laura Murton – engaged in a solo protest on 14 July in Canterbury – who was stopped and threatened with arrest by two armed police. Murton was holding a Palestinian flag and had cardboard signs that said “Free Gaza” and “Israel is committing genocide”.

The incident was recorded and a transcript was provided to the court. But Ghrálaigh thought it worthwhile to read out part of the exchange.

Officer: “What’s your intention here today?”
Murton: “My intention is to wave this flag and keep Palestine in the public consciousness right now.”
Officer: “So, do you support any prescribed group?”
Murton: “I do not I do not support any prescribed group. I support a free Palestine and the end of genocide.”
Officer: “Can I get your details?”
Murton: “Am I required to give them to you?”
Officer: “Well, you may be committing offence at the moment. So, I just need to make sure that you’re legit.”
Murton: “What offence?”
Officer: “Well, as you’re aware, it’s now become an offence to obviously support a proscribed group like Palestine Action”
Murton: “Yeah, but I don’t I am not I don’t have anything on which says that.”
Officer 2: “I appreciate that. But the way you behaving at the moment would lead me to believe that you maybe. Giving me suspicion or grounds to believe you could be.
Murton: “What suspicion? That I’ve got a sign that says free Gaza. Holding a Palestinian flag and I have a sign that says Israel is committing genocide?”

“She has never been part of Palestine Action,” Ghrálaigh told the court.

Chamberlain noted that the police were overstepping because they simply don’t understand the law.

“My Lord may say that the officer doesn’t understand the law” Ghrálaigh said. “Canterbury Constabulary has not issued an apology. The Secretary of State [for the Home Department] hasn’t said that this is a misapplication of the law.”

Chamberlain responded saying that “there will be cases where the police get things wrong”.

“There is no indication that they are getting this wrong because no one has said they are getting this wrong,” Ghrálaigh insisted, noting that the armed officers later told Murton “we could have jumped out, erased you, dragged you off in a van”.

The ban creates a “Conundrum of doubt” as to application of terrorism laws.

“I think what you say is that if you proscribe a group like this, then it creates a sort of conundrum of doubt, and that affects all law enforcement agencies who themselves have got to take decisions, some of which may be right some of which may be wrong, but it casts a shadow over a number of things which may be…fall under the scope of the offence?” Chamberlain asked Husain. “You would say that that effect is one of the things that would need to be taken into account when deciding whether the proscription is proportionate?” he added.

“Indeed” Husain responded.

Although the Claimant’s grounds of appeal are too extensive to outline in a single article, it is worth briefly visiting some of them. This is especially the case as they help explain the relevance of how anti-genocide protesters are being targeted and arrested since the ban came into effect.

The Claimant’s request for judicial review of the Home Secretary’s decision to ban Palestine Action was based on eight grounds.

They include that:

1) The decision was made for an “improper purpose, insofar as she exercised the discretion conferred by Parliament for the purpose of banning a civil society dissent group”.

2) Banning Palestine Action represents “an unlawful interference” with the Article 9 (freedom of thought, conscience and religion), 10 (freedom of expression), 11 (freedom of assembly and association) and 14 (prohibition of discrimination) rights in the European Convention of Human Rights “of the Claimant, of Supporters of Palestine Action, and of members of the general public who advocate for Palestinian rights”.

3) The Home Secretary “erred in law in concluding that: (i) Palestine Action committed acts designed to influence the UK Government; and further or alternatively (ii) Palestine Action was concerned in terrorism, in circumstances where those acts that may (quod non) satisfy the section 1(1) TA 2000 definition are isolated and peripheral to the organisation’s methods and aims”.

4) The Home Secretary acted “irrationally in taking into account considerations irrelevant to the decision before her (whether to proscribe Palestine Action); and in failing to take into account matters that were plainly relevant to that decision”.
Irrelevant considerations include her assessment as to whether Palestine Action’s protest is “legitimate” in her subjective view and whether their protests “caused loss of revenue”. “Lost revenue is irrelevant” to assessing whether a group should be banned, they argue.
Relevant considerations the Home Secretary failed to take into account include the fact that Palestine Action “seeks to prevent conduct which it and large sections of the public reasonably consider to be genocide and breaches of international law”.
The Home Secretary also failed to consider the impact the ban would have on free speech “in favour of direct action against arms companies supplying Israel” and on “low-level direct action and civil disobedience against arms companies by persons not associated with (or no longer associated with) Palestine Action.”.
She also failed to consider the availability of other civil and criminal options apart from a banning order.

5) The Home Secretary breached her own policy “which requires that a decision to proscribe be ‘proportionate’”. No adequate proportionality assessment was undertaken.

6) The Home Secretary “violated the principle of natural justice by failing to give Palestine Action the opportunity to respond to adverse findings prior to her making the decision” to ban them.

One key document government document referred to repeatedly by the Claimant is the “open” version of the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) assessment. The JTAC document, which was obtained by the authors of this article, was repeatedly referenced by Ammori’s lawyers.

Ghrálaigh noted that the JTAC assessment, as part of its determination that Palestine Action has been involved in terrorism, focused on the August 6 2024 action targeting a key drone and surveillance facility for Israel’s largest weapons firm Elbit Systems, in Filton, Bristol.

The JTAC assessment notes that none of the activists, known as the Filton 18, have been charged with terrorism offences for the August action. Yet, in a truly Orwellian development, the Crown Prosecution Services have concluded that they should nonetheless be “considered by the court as having a terrorist connection.”

JTAC then considers that Palestine Action have “promoted terrorism” simply for “sharing footage” of the Elbit action in Filton, an action for which nobody has been charged with terrorism.

“JTAC has asserted that that was a terrorist incident and therefore that supporting it has become terroristic, it’s entirely circular,” Ghrálaigh exclaimed, in a clearly exasperated voice.

“They’re just looking at the statutory definition which includes ‘serious damage to property’” Chamberlain responded.

“Indeed” Ghrálaigh noted before raising an equally disturbing point.

Underneath the subhead “promotion of the 6 August attack” JTAC refers to Amnesty International and UN reports “about the Flinton 18 and their treatment and JTAC referring to references of those statements of concern, by Palestine Action, as evidence of them fitting the definition of terrorism”.

“We’re completely through the looking glass if sharing statements from Amnesty International and the United Nations can be construed as promoting terrorism” Ghrálaigh exclaimed.

“Well once again, JTAC is just looking at the statutory definition [of terrorism]” Chamberlain insisted.

“Well, my lord, the statutory definition cannot include sharing expressions of concern from Amnesty International and the United Nations… That cannot be any basis for determining whether an individual or organisation is concerned with terrorism!”

Significantly, even the JTAC assessment repeatedly states that Palestine Action “primarily uses direct action tactics, the majority of which would not constitute an act of terrorism” as defined under the Terrorism Act.

The JTAC document notes that it is “not the original document” but rather a “gisted version of the original” with “sensitive material removed or gisted”.

Blinne stated that any JTAC finding that Palestine Action has committed or promoted terrorism is not a legal finding and cannot supersede any decision by any jury or judge.

There are clearly many issues with how the authors of the JTAC report describe the overall context of Palestine Action’s behaviour, including by placing “Israeli genocide” in scare quotes.

The idea of criminalising an entire network as terrorist because, allegedly, at most three or four out of literally hundreds of actions could arguably be defined as terrorism – against property – is manifestly disproportionate, unjust and unlawful, the lawyers argued.

By JTAC’s own case, Ghrálaigh noted, there have been at most “four incidents out of 500” which even arguably satisfy some prohibited act under the UK Terrorism Act.

Even Chamberlain noted at one point that the JTAC “go out of their way to say” Palestine Action did not publicise or glorify violence against a person, in the one occasion in which it allegedly occurred.

A big part of the government’s argument against the High Court granting Ammori permission to appeal on Monday was that the courts were not the correct venue for the ban to be legally challenged. This is known as the “alternative remedy” argument.

The Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission (POAC) is made up of a senior judge and two other people, including potentially someone from the security services.

“Judicial review is a remedy of last resort and permission will generally not be granted where a claimant has an adequate alternative remedy,” the Home Secretary’s legal submissions state. “In the present case, there plainly is an adequate alternative remedy available to the Claimant. Parliament has created a bespoke process, which includes a right of appeal to a specialist tribunal.”

The Home Secretary’s legal team argued that Ammori’s “attempt to challenge the proscription of Palestine Action by way of judicial review at this stage subverts this process.”

Sir James Eadie KC, lead counsel for the Home Secretary, argued that the correct procedure would be for Ammori or anyone else to go to POAC.

The problem is, unlike a judicial review which can be expedited, POAC could take months or even years to come to a decision. Unlike the High Court, POAC cannot “stay” the banning order and thereby prevent further harm from occurring.

Furthermore, judicial review could potentially impact hundreds if not thousands of current and future cases by providing legal certainty as to what the law is, Ammori’s lawyers noted.

POAC on the other hand can’t make a determination about any of the arrests occurring now and in fact it can only make a decision as to whether Palestine Action should be deproscribed.

Chamberlain challenged Sir James to explain what would happen to all the different people currently being arrested if the High Court refused to hear an appeal and make a determination as to whether the banning order reflected a disproportionate interference with fundamental human rights of the public.

Many defendants could be brought before Magistrates’ Courts, possibly to face a jury in a Crown Court.
“What about them? What if one of those people want to say ‘well, the proscription is disproportionate?’” Chamberlain asked Sir James “Either they can or they can’t.”

“The problem is that either of those answers is a problem for you. If they can take the point we are saying that POAC isn’t exclusive. If they can’t you then have an even bigger problem… because the proportionality of the proscription never gets considered by any [authority]”

POAC should be the exclusive place to challenge the banning order, Sir James insisted, even if that meant in the meantime people were unjustly arrested, charged or convicted.

“Whatever deleterious consequences flow from that flow because that’s the judgement of Parliament that they flow that way” James argued.

Chamberlain asked “If I am thinking in terms of discretion, surely it would be much better for the proportionality of the order to be considered in judicial review proceedings rather than for them to be considered in a Magistrates’ Court?” the judge asked.

“The difficulty with my Lords’ inclination” St James responded “is that it risks unravelling the statutory regime. If you put in a human rights challenge everything that we’re discussing flows, which is intensely problematic because it would tend to undermine the statutory regime.”

Ghrálaigh had began her oral submissions in the morning leaving the court with no doubt as to what was actually at stake.

“Israel has killed at least 28 children. A classroom of children killed every day for 653 days [since 7 October 2023]. Israel has done this while damaging or destroying every single hospital in Gaza. Israel is starving the population of Gaza…. People are literally, medically, wasting away. They are starving to death.”

“1,000 people have been killed, including by bombs, while attempting to access humanitarian food” she said. There is near consensus in the human rights field “that Israel is now committing genocide as well as other war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

“Israel is doing all of that with arms that are being provided” including parts for the F35 fighter jet “ by arms firms in Britain”.

“Direct action protest is not unlawful. It is certainly not terrorist. This proscription renders it so” Ghrálaigh asserted towards the end of the hearing, “even when it does not amount to criminal damage.”

Monday’s hearing lasted from 10:30am to around 17:00.

From around 15:30 to 16:30 the hearing became “closed” so that “closed” (i.e. secret) evidence and arguments could be presented by the state.

Ammori would not have been permitted to hear the closed arguments.

A special advocate was present on her behalf – not part of her regular legal team – and would have to do their best to challenge the closed arguments without consulting the applicant on whose behalf they are allegedly acting.

Members of the general public, including the press, had to leave the court and returned at 16:30 for the judge’s decision.

Chamberlain stated that, because of the complexity of the case and the fact that he heard “closed” evidence and arguments, Chamberlain’s decision as to whether he will grant permission for Ammori to appeal the ban will be made on Monday.

However, it must first be reviewed by the security services to ensure that he doesn’t improperly reference closed arguments.

The next hearing is scheduled for midday, Wednesday, 30 July. That is when we will discover whether Mr Justice Chamberlain will allow the appeal to be heard or not.

ENDS
Plainly this is yet a further example of how far into fascism the UK has gone. Chamberlain reviewed “intelligence material” for an hour provided by the security services, which almost with 100% certainty will include material provided by Mossad. This very likely will be fabricated and claim links between Palestine Action and Iran.

Huda Ammori, the Palestine Action co-founder who is seeking the legal review, will never be allowed to know the contents of this “intelligence” in order to challenge it.

Furthermore on Monday and Tuesday the security services will get to vet and amend Chamberlain’s judgment.

In the meantime, persecution is at a lower level until after Chamberlain’s ruling, but there continue to be outrageous acts by the police. I leave you with this one as an example of Starmer’s Zionist Britain: a wheelchair-bound man is lifted away by six policemen for wearing a T-shirt supportive of Palestine Action.

6 cops arrest & drag wheelchaired disabled man for Palestine Action t-shirt

Real felons roam free? pic.twitter.com/vzeaWCaIob

— Middle East Today🇵🇸 (@shekelazzam) July 27, 2025

I am now heading down to London for Chamberlain’s ruling.

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Nestlé and Cadbury are not the same organisation. They both have exactly the same purpose and extremely similar methods of achieving that purpose. Their chocolate products, retail technique, marketing, manufacturing process and ingredients are in essence the same kind of thing.

Not the same organisation

Police Scotland and the famously corrupt Crown Office (the Scottish prosecution service) are treating the Leonardo 3 as terrorists, on the grounds Shut Down Leonardo must be Palestine Action because it has similar aims and methods. That is the Nestlé/Cadbury fallacy.

[Note for pedants. I am using familiar competing brands with different ownership. The ultimate ownership of Cadbury is irrelevant here.]

The young women are being treated appallingly. They are held in the terrorism interrogation centre at Govan police station. The police have repeatedly refused the request by their families to pass on to them the name of the solicitors briefed to represent them, and have also knocked back that solicitor.

It appears that at least one of the women has had access to the local duty solicitor. That is a lottery but this particular solicitor does appear to be well motivated and doing their best.

All this for three young women who have never harmed anybody nor expressed any intention to hurt anybody, who slightly damaged a fence and sat atop a minibus. That anybody involved – judge, prosecutor, policeman, MI5 officer – goes along with the fascist absurdity of calling this “terrorism” is truly shameful.

That the crushing powers of the Terrorism Act and full panoply of state repression are being visited on innocent, unarmed, young, female protestors is a historic shame on Scotland.

The Lord Advocate sits in the Scottish Cabinet. The SNP should step in and stop this now.

I once again refer you to the decision in the London High Court of 4 July in refusing to delay the proscription of Palestine Action. This explicitly stated that direct action is not aggravated to terrorism.

Underpinning Chamberlain’s judgment of course is the repudiation of the Nestlé/Cadbury fallacy. Not all direct action for Palestine is by Palestine Action, just as not all chocolate is Nestlé.

It is the organisation, not the activity, which is proscribed.

To be terrorism, the Crown Office would have to show it is the same organisation as the former Palestine Action. As Chamberlain states, even involving former members of Palestine Action would not show that. It would need to show it is actually the same organisation active since the proscription of Palestine Action on 5 July.

By choosing to hold the women without charge under the Terrorism Act, reporting restrictions are not in place. I can therefore tell you there are no such links. Shut Down Leonardo is a distinct, and Scottish, organisation.

The Scottish Government has to wake up and shut down fascism in Police Scotland and the Crown Office. Otherwise the whole fabric of our society is changing and fundamental freedoms are being lost.

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My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

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Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

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The three female activists arrested on Tuesday for the direct action against the Leonardo weapons factory in Edinburgh are being treated as terrorists. They have been held now for 40 hours, without either being charged or being brought before a judge, under Section 41 of the Terrorism Act.

They are from the organisation Shut Down Leonaproprdo, which targets the firm which makes parts for the F-35 jets that massacre children in Gaza.

I spent all yesterday trying to organise their legal defence. By 8am I had found the right solicitor and briefed them on the case, including the crucial judgment by Judge Chamberlain in London’s High Court on 4 July.

Chamberlain’s judgment stated explicitly that future direct action protest, even where allegedly criminal, would not be aggravated to terrorism. It was Palestine Action, not the act of protest, which was proscribed.

But the three women are being held incommunicado in Govan police station, and there is simply no way to get information to them to ask for the solicitor I had briefed. The solicitors themselves went to the police station in Edinburgh and were blanked.

The solicitors were told they would be informed once the police knew what was happening. The police never got back to them, and did not even tell them the women had been moved from Edinburgh to Glasgow.

What has almost certainly happened is that the women have been allocated the duty solicitor. This solicitor will not know of Lord Chamberlain’s judgment of 4 July nor any of the background.

Equally crucially, it is extremely improbable that the duty solicitor would sit alongside the women during 48 long hours of interrogation. Frequently those arrested never see the duty solicitor at all, and just get a brief telephone consultation.

Once the duty solicitor has been assigned, another solicitor cannot get access, except at the direct request of those arrested. Who are held incommunicado.

This is crucial, because today they have to be brought before a judge – which will almost certainly be in Court 3 in Edinburgh Sheriff Court in Chambers St. They will very likely be charged with terrorism. That means they will almost certainly not get bail, and could disappear into prison on remand for well over a year.

AMENDMENT – I have since been advised by lawyers that the detention has to be extended today by judicial warrant, but under the Terrorism Act this can be done by a judge in secret without the girls being brought to court. They can still be kept in the cells in Govan.

But terrorism is an incompetent charge, following Chamberlain’s High Court ruling. That was under a fortnight ago and this is the first case. It is very probable that the judge, solicitor and procurator do not know that aspect of the ruling, and there is at the moment no means to put it before the court.

This should be treated as a case of criminal damage – from which many activists have been acquitted by juries – as stopping genocide is seen as ethically more important than very minor damage to a fence.

This photo of the “terrorism” in question makes abundantly plain that Starmer and Cooper are acting as fascists. Nobody could argue in good faith that these women are committing “terrorism”.

If properly charged, there is no sensible reason why the women should not be granted bail.

Everything Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh and Raza Husain stated would happen following the proscription of Palestine Action – for which they were pooh-poohed by Judge Chamberlain – is happening. As given above, Chamberlain stated that:

some of the consequences feared by the claimant and others who have given evidence are overstated.

But he specifically then states that direct action will not be aggravated to terrorism; yet here we have those engaged in the very first direct action after his proscription, being treated as terrorists.

Furthermore the proscription of Palestine Action is indeed causing the police to treat simple criticism of Israel as illegal, again directly contrary to Chamberlain’s judgment.

This video shows Kent police threatening to arrest a protester under the Terrorism Act – leaving them facing up to 14 years in jail – simply for waving a Palestinian flag and calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide.

The direction of travel under Starmer is now clear. pic.twitter.com/qKz23CCtPq

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) July 16, 2025

Now, it does not matter whether the police follow through with these threats against free speech. The very fact they are making such threats – and are widely disseminated on social media making such threats – will have a severe chilling effect on many people’s right of free expression.

There is also a great deal of “concern trolling” in progress from fake left outfits like Novara Media, telling people to suppress protest in case they are prosecuted.

Today I am going to resume my efforts to get the Leonardo Three a proper defence.

On 21 July, Judge Chamberlain hears the case for a judicial review of the proscription of Palestine Action. We will then learn, given the now-unequivocal evidence of the chilling effect on free speech, whether his denial that the proscription would chill free speech and protest, was due to a Panglossian view of our police and prosecutors, or a malevolent and disingenuous device to enforce the proscription.

UPDATE 2 It appears they currently have no legal representation and the police refuse to inform the women of the lawyers arranged for them. This is an outrage. The parents of one have also been told they have now been taken from Govan police station, but will not say to where.

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On Friday 4 July I headed back to the Royal Courts of Justice for the hearing brought by Huda Ammori, a co-founder of Palestine Action, on an application for relief from the proscription order against Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.

Huda had applied for judicial review of the legality of this order. There is to be a hearing on whether a judicial review will be granted in the week beginning 21 July. What Friday’s hearing was about, was whether the proscription should be suspended until that hearing on whether permission will be given for judicial review.

This is called interim relief.

The legal precedents on interim relief are that this question should depend on three points.

The first is the probability that a full judicial review might ultimately succeed, in other words a preliminary assessment of the merits of the case.

The second is whether irremediable damage will be done to anyone in the meantime if the order is not suspended, should the result of the process eventually be a successful judicial review.

If those two hurdles are passed, the third is whether on a “balance of convenience” the irremediable harm that might be done if the Order is not suspended but ultimately is set aside on review, is worse than the irremediable harm that the public might suffer from losing the benefit the government intend by the Order in the interim, should the judicial review be denied or eventually confirm the legality of the Order.

At this stage I presume you are deciding whether to bother to read that six times until it makes some sort of sense, or whether this is going to be an impenetrably dull article full of arcane legal nonsense and you would rather browse something else.

I do sympathise.

On Thursday I had spent the train journey down from Edinburgh trying to get my head round all this; at one stage I had a lovely tourist couple from Hungary, who had the bad luck to share the train table with me, each kindly holding sheaves of documents and using their thumbs as placeholders.

I rose at 6am on Friday to ensure I would get into the courtroom. I was anticipating that, as with the Assange hearings or the ICJ hearings on Genocide, there may be a long queue waiting to enter. In fact there was nobody at all at 7am except me and a great many policemen.

I had a coffee opposite the court building, and a constant stream of policemen came into the coffee shop to buy coffee and doughnuts. By 07.45 there was not a doughnut left within a mile of the Strand.

Anthropologists should study this. British policemen have no history with doughnuts. They never occupied any place in Metropolitan Police culture. However a continual barrage of American films and television programmes portray policemen as doughnut-eating; so presumably British police think this makes them cool. In fact it makes them fat.

I shall not be paranoid about the fact the police kept photographing me as I hung round waiting for something to happen. They had nobody else to photograph. I tried to think of things I might do that look suspicious, to make their morning more interesting, but I don’t think my imagination had managed enough sleep.

I am not going to sugar coat this. I kept going to the cafe loo to vomit. In fact I kept having to go and order coffees in various establishments to have somewhere to vomit. I had been up most of the night being sick. I hadn’t eaten anything suspect, and I assume it was a virus. This continued into the afternoon, and once court proceedings started I would race away at less charged moments to be sick.

At 8.30am I went down the Strand to Boots to buy some medicine. On my return ten minutes later, I saw an entire fleet of police vans arrive and park up around Arundel Street, about 150 metres from the court but out of sight.

I counted 16 vans and 11 cars. The vans appeared to have 12 to 15 policemen in each. That was only around one side of the court. It was a stern reminder of the issues at stake, and that proscription as a terrorist group gives colossal police-state powers. There are penalties of 14 years in prison should you merely “appear to” support a proscribed group, or be “reckless” as to whether you say something that may cause someone else to support it.

This is the Terrorism Act 2000 as originally passed, by the horrible combination of Jack Straw and Tony Blair. It has since been amended to be even worse and make plain that no intent is required – if you “appear” to support, “recklessly” a proscribed organisation, you can be liable for 14 years imprisonment.

For some reason the amended version is not available on the official government website.

At 9am I entered the Royal Courts of Justice. I have spent many more days here than I would wish, and have described the place before:

“The architecture of the Royal Courts of Justice was the great last gasp of the Gothic revival; having exhausted the exuberance that gave us the beauty of St Pancras Station and the Palace of Westminster, the movement played out its dreary last efforts at whimsy in shades of grey and brown, valuing scale over proportion and mistaking massive for medieval. As intended, the buildings are a manifestation of the power of the state; as not intended, they are also an indication of the stupidity of large scale power.”

Well, here I was again. Previously I had only been in the more prestigious courtrooms, off the main hall, courts 1 to 15. This case was to heard in court 73. It was in the East Wing. This required an extremely complex feat of navigation through endless corridors where your footsteps echoed from the vaulted stone ceilings, through uncountable pointed arches, passing open courtyards and cloisters, up stairs and then down.

With every stage the arches got lower, the architraves shallower, the corridors narrower, as you receded from the show of pomp to the mundane exercise of power. By the time you were in the cramped L-shaped corridor outside court 73, you might have mistaken it for a 1950s unemployment benefit office in Solihull.

I was first there but other people started to arrive for the hearing and the corridor became crowded and uncomfortably hot – it was one of the hottest days of the summer. At one point I felt about to faint, and Deepa Driver came to my rescue with a bottle of water.

We were told the court would open at 10.15am. In the ensuing hour I twice lost my place in the queue as I had to leave to go vomit. This did enable me to have a quick chat on the stairway with Gareth Peirce about the prospects for the case.

I managed to get back towards the front of the queue each time, either because of immense personal charm or because people got out of the way as I smelt faintly of sick, you decide. But in the end it availed nothing as only accredited media were allowed into the courtroom.

I am famously not a journalist in the UK, as ruled by Lady Dorrian in the High Court of Scotland – it’s a long story – so I was not admitted. I was sent instead to an overflow room in court 76 on the floor above, where proceedings could be watched on live screens.

So for this section of proceedings I was not in court. While sound and picture quality were excellent, this was not the same as being in the court itself in terms of picking up the atmosphere and all the little things which the camera does not show. It has never happened to me before in all my reporting.

The hearing was before Justice Chamberlain. He has a liberal reputation. In a case earlier this year, he stated that he had no confidence in statements by MI5.

In cases involving secret intelligence, British “justice” has an extraordinary procedure whereby the defendant is not allowed to know the evidence against him, but can be defended on that point in a closed court, without the defendant, by a court-appointed barrister known as a “Special Advocate”.

Martin Chamberlain was such an advocate for ten years, and it is impossible for anybody with a slightest modicum of honesty to view a large quantity of intelligence reports without understanding that a high proportion of it is simply inaccurate.

I speak as someone who read an average of perhaps twelve secret intelligence reports every day over a 22-year career.

This is hopeful because the Secretary of State had indicated that in the substantive hearing, there will be intelligence reports on which the government will rely in its evidence against Palestine Action.

It has been widely leaked to the press that this includes intelligence reports that Palestine Action receives funding and backing from foreign states – which really is nonsense.

Justice Chamberlain also ruled against the legality of certain British arms exports to Saudi Arabia if they would be used against the civilian population in Yemen. He has argued for the strengthening of the freedom of speech provisions of the European Convention of Human Rights.

It was therefore not a shock that he was prepared to annoy the legal Establishment by agreeing at least to hear the case as to whether there should be a judicial review of the proscription. He might be the only High Court judge who would have agreed.

Proscribing Palestine Action had been an extremely high profile action by Starmer and Cooper in facing down mounting public anger at the Gaza Genocide, and seeking to restore the Zionist narrative that Palestinians and supporters of Palestine are terrorist.

For the court to prevent the proscription from taking effect subject to legal proceedings, would be massive news and a further blow to Starmer’s authority.

So the stakes were very high. Chamberlain gave no indication of this. He appeared enthusiastic to engage intellectually with the subject. He was eager and inclined to muse aloud in his discussions with the lawyers, interrupting sometimes almost out of excitement. He was like a slightly less annoying version of Robert Peston.

Raza Husain KC opened the case for the claimant, Huda Ammori, in the standard form by introducing both teams of bewigged barristers. This took some time as the teams were large – six barristers on each side, while Huda had in addition two firms of solicitors. It was one of the few immediate indicators of the gravity and import of what was happening.

But another was the demeanour of Raza Husain. Normally the smoothest of operators, he rather stuttered into his opening. This struck me throughout the case: Huda’s lawyers sounded slightly detached, not because they did not believe what they were saying, but because they could not believe that we were in a situation that required them to stand there and say it.

Husain opened by stating that civil disobedience has a long and honourable history in the UK. Very often people who had broken the law had been vindicated by history, such as the suffragettes. This was the first time in that long history that a civil disobedience group not advocating violence had ever been branded in law as terrorist.

Five UN Special Rapporteurs had written to oppose the proscription of Palestine Action, including Professor Ben Saul, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, who had asked to intervene in the case.

The special rapporteurs identified three fundamental flaws in the UK legislation. There was an overbroad definition of terrorism, an overbroad definition of a terrorist organisation and an overbroad definition of what constituted support for a terrorist organisation.

The overall effect of deprivation of liberty was characteristic of an authoritarian state.

Husain referred to the evidence of Andrew Feinstein. He had experience of the liberation struggle in Southern Africa and had become an ANC MP. Feinstein testified that Nelson Mandela himself had been designated a terrorist by the British state for decades, and that the anti-apartheid movement used all of the direct action methods used by Palestine Action.

Husain then turned to the evidence of Huda Ammori, who stated that in founding Palestine Action she had been directly inspired by the long history of civil disobedience movements in Britain and the many instances where courts had found such methods, including direct action against the arms industry, to be lawful.

Palestine Action had never included or targeted any violence or injury to persons. Their actions were focused on Elbit, an Israeli state-owned enterprise which was fundamental to the Israeli military system. Elbit themselves referred to their staff as “civilian soldiers”.

Husain continued that the proscription of Palestine Action was ill-considered, discriminatory, authoritarian law. It was contrary to both the common law and the Human Rights Act.

For 20 months the Israeli military had been committing acts which most genocide scholars and experts consider to be genocide. The population was now being starved, and the very distribution of humanitarian aid had been turned into a killing field, according to UNRWA.

To say that Palestine Action were committing terrorism was the precise opposite of what they were doing. They were rather seeking to prevent terror and genocide.

At this stage Judge Chamberlain interposed what appeared something of a non sequitur. He asserted that he would have the power to create an order suspending the operation of the proscription to a later date, and that this was accepted by the Secretary of State.

Chamberlain continued that this could be done one of two ways. He could issue a statutory injunction, or the Secretary of State could submit a fresh order to Parliament. The proscription Order also proscribed two other organisations, including the Maniac Murder Cult, so the suspension would need to be crafted to benefit only Palestine Action.

Judge Chamberlain stated that the need was to do justice or to cause the least injustice to persons affected in the interim should the case be decided the other way. The Secretary of State had not evidenced a national security reason for the proscription to be introduced immediately.

After this apparently heartening judicial intervention, Husain continued that the definition of Terrorism in the Act referred to serious damage to property. “Serious” in this case must be read, as argued by Professor Saul, in relation to international law standards. That was not a measure of financial loss, but damage that threatened further consequences such as to nuclear facilities or civilian aircraft.

The powers of the Secretary of State must be exercised proportionately within (ECHR) Convention rights, such as Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Assembly. Therefore it could be that even if an organisation fell within the overbroad definitions of the Act, it still could not be proscribed.

Judge Chamberlain countered this by citing a Supreme Court ruling in another case (Gould) that overbreadth in legislation can be mitigated by prosecutorial discretion.

[To translate this into plain English, this means that because a law gives the state far too broad a power, it does not mean that the state will choose to exercise that power in all cases. Which gives of course power to the state selectively to prosecute only its chosen “enemies” using overbroad legislation.]

Husain countered that when the legislation was passed through parliament, the then Secretary of State had given a categorical assurance the power of proscription would never be used against domestic direct action groups. Yet here we are.

Judge Chamberlain responded that to reverse the proscription on the grounds Husain proposed, he would have to demonstrate that it led to an absurdity, citing another case (Hunt).

Husain replied, “It is absurd. It is absurd to pronounce a non-violent group terrorist.”

Judge Chamberlain said that what counted was whether if fitted the statutory definition of terrorism, not “some colloquial definition of terrorism”.

Husain said the statute specified that terrorism was designed to induce a climate of fear, influence the government or intimidate the public. None of these applied to Palestine Action.

Judge Chamberlain asked what was the purpose of the attack on RAF Brize Norton if not to influence the government? Palestine Action’s own submissions claim that Brize Norton supplies RAF Akrotiri which is supporting the Genocide.

Husain said that one isolated or sporadic incident did not define the purpose of the organisation, which was to disrupt Elbit and the arms industry. Palestine Action has a non-hierarchical nature. Ascribing responsibility for individual actions was complex.

Judge Chamberlain stated that in December 2024 the UK government had suspended arms licenses to Israel. Could it not be inferred that Palestine Action was attempting to attain this end?

Hussain replied that was not the design of the organisation. It is designed to disrupt the arms supply chain.

He then attempted to make further ground with his next point: documents showed that the Government had engaged both the Israeli government and Elbit Systems in the decision making process to proscribe Palestine Action.

Judge Chamberlain noted that some of these documents were heavily redacted. It was not plain what some of them meant.

Raza Husain referred to a document which involved the phrase “act of vandalism” and reference to “a certain person” intervening. It appeared this process had taken place in March. The decision had therefore been taken before the Brize Norton incident.

Judge Chamberlain asked why it would be unlawful to take into account the views of the state of Israel?

At this point Raza Husain dropped his papers and stared at Judge Chamberlain in incredulity. “Israel to interfere? In our criminal law? In our domestic process?”

Chamberlain responded that the government took a range of views into account. Why should it be unlawful to listen to Israel? Husain replied that interference by another state in domestic criminal matters was unconstitutional.

Chamberlain stated that there was nothing in the legislation that precludes taking Israel’s views into account.

Husain again asked incredulously, “To decide if it is terrorism?”

Chamberlain responded, “They are the victims. They suffered criminal damage.”

Husain said that does not go to the definition of terrorism. Chamberlain countered they could evidence the seriousness of the damage. Husain said he returned to the international definition underlined by Ben Saul. The damage to property had to go to the level of endangering nuclear installations or civil aviation. We were not in that territory.

Husain continued that while both Israel and Elbit were consulted on the decision to proscribe, no pro-Palestinian group had been consulted. Judge Chamberlain replied that the statutory basis may preclude any common-law right to due process. The Secretary of State had stated that pro-Palestinian groups could not be consulted, because in effect that would give Palestine Action 21 days’ notice of proscription, in which period it might take pre-emptive action.

Husain responded that may be a claimed reason, but how does it apply the law?

Chamberlain had rather destroyed the flow of Raza Husain’s argument. He now handed over to his colleague Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh KC. Readers of my blog last encountered Blinne when she held spellbound the International Court of Justice in the Hague, speaking for South Africa in the Genocide case against Israel.

There the world stopped and held its breath, and the dramatic architecture of the great hall of the Palace of Justice matched the occasion. Here Blinne stood in the much more modest circumstances of court 73.

A plain, three-tier dais of utilitarian wood occupied one long side for the judge and clerks. It is the kind of unnatural wood finish that you get on steel-legged stacking tables, a peculiarly dark reddish brown with unbroken black lines of grain running straight across.

The bench seats for the lawyers were in the well of the court, four rows of those, and then there was a small platform at the back for the public gallery, containing fourteen seats – occupied by the press, as was the jury box. Everything was the same kind of wood or veneer. Fitted bookshelves covered the walls around the court, and a very few contained cloth-bound tomes of law, but it appears that someone had forgotten to buy any books for most of them.

Judge Chamberlain was perched on the top dais of the bench, in a rather austere black gown with a neat pressed linen collar known as “court bands” around his neck, which featured two long tabs of about six inches hanging down in parallel at the front. He rather resembled a Danish Lutheran preacher.

I was in court 76 watching the large screens, as though in the world’s dullest sports bar. The construction was identical to court 73, of the same wood, only the entire thing was three times the size. We observers occupied the well of the court. There was a public gallery of 48 seats which was almost entirely empty.

Had the hearing been held in court 76, everybody could have been in the actual courtroom itself. Why the large courtroom was the overspill court and the proceedings were in the tiny courtroom is an interesting question in itself. The result was that no members of the public were in the actual court, despite their right in law to attend.

I raced out to be sick again before Blinne started, so for her first three minutes I am grateful to the whispered advice of my neighbours.

Blinne was addressing the irreparable harm that would be caused in the next two weeks were the proscription not to be set aside pending the next hearing.

She said that the context of the situation in Gaza was that the Palestinian people there faced annihilation and genocide. The UN Secretary General himself had described what was happening as “A stain on our common humanity”.

The explosive force that had been landed on the tiny area of Gaza was the equivalent of six Hiroshimas. There was firm evidence that Israel was now conducting daily massacres of those Palestinians attempting to obtain food for their families.

Judge Chamberlain interposed that, since December 2024, it is not permissible for the UK to provide any arms to Israel save for F-35 parts. Blinne replied “That’s a big “save” when people are being massacred”. There was much evidence of continuing arms supply and other forms of military support.

This massacre is what Palestine Action have been attempting to disrupt and prevent.

If the proscription goes through, how will you differentiate between Palestine Action supporters and other people who hold similar views and take similar actions?

Irreparable harm will be done to protestors. Some will carefully follow the law. Some will attempt to walk the invisible tightrope on what expressions of support for Palestine are permitted and what expressions are not, and will fall off. Some will openly defy the proscription as an act of civil disobedience – and some, such as Sally Rooney, live in other jurisdictions.

This was all the unprecedented impact of the unique proscription of a grassroots protest group.

Three key offences would be created immediately upon the order coming into effect.

It would be an offence to belong, or profess to belong, to Palestine Action

It would be an offence to invite, or to recklessly encourage, support for Palestine Action

It would be an offence to arrange a meeting to support Palestine Action or to hear from a member of Palestine Action.

All of these carry a sentence of up to 14 years in prison.

Wearing clothing or a badge associated with the organisation were offences of strict liability, bringing a six-month prison sentence.

Any person convicted would be branded a “terrorist”. A policeman could arrest at any time on suspicion of these offences. They could stop and search. They could enter and search people’s homes and remove property. All of these without a warrant from a court.

Any refugee convicted of any of these offences is deemed a danger to the community, justifying expulsion from the UK.

All of this will chill free speech. Those who have supported Palestine Action in the past will fall under suspicion for actions which were perfectly lawful at the time.

Judge Chamberlain interrupted to say that this would not happen; the general principle of non-retrospectivity would apply.

Blinne said that Palestine Action was a non-formalised body. How did you become a member, and how do you stop being a member? How can you prevent being suspected of being a member if you take direct action on behalf of Palestine without any connection to Palestine Action?

Direct action and civil disobedience were not necessarily against UK law. A great many of those charged for direct action by Palestine Action had in fact been acquitted by the courts, and therefore their actions had been perfectly legal. There had been few actual convictions. The basic activity was not illegal.

Any organisation, for example one called “Yvette Cooper”, could be “suspected” by the police of being Palestine Action. [A new pro-Palestine direct action group has been announced named ironically after the Secretary of State.]

How would the police decide what symbols showed support for Palestine Action? Were red boiler suits now banned? Judge Chamberlain attempted to pooh-pooh these questions, and Blinne retorted that people had already been arrested for carrying Palestinian flags and wearing keffiyehs. There had been an actual trial for carrying a banner showing a palm tree and two coconuts.

What about republishing? What of those who had Facebook photos wearing a Palestine Action T-shirt that might still be seen? How could you argue for deproscription of the organisation if any mention were likely to bring you under “reasonable suspicion” of support?

Judge Chamberlain replied that in due course he would like to hear the government KC, Mr Ben Watson, address the question of the legality of arguing for deproscription.

Blinne said that the harm caused during proscription would be irreparable.

Palestinians will continue to be killed while the efforts to disrupt the arms supply to kill them would be banned.

The chilling effect on free speech would be extreme. There were hundreds of thousands of supporters of Palestine Action on Twitter and other platforms. There would be mass mobilisation. Over forty organisations opposed the proscription, including Liberty and Amnesty International (both had representatives in court).

This was a fundamental attack on free speech. Judge Chamberlain responded that they would be able lawfully to advocate for deproscription. Blinne replied that they would not, because this would give rise to the offence of appearing to give support.

Judge Chamberlain asked her to specify which offence was that? Blinne replied that under Section 12, giving intellectual support to the organisation and appearing to support the organisation were both covered.

Judge Chamberlain persisted, asking how arguing for deproscription can be confused with this. Blinne responded that the answer is that nobody knows how it will be applied, and therefore it will chill free speech. The definition of support for terrorism is really widely drawn. It is therefore certainly capable of being interpreted in that way.

What would be the consequences of simply saying “I think Palestine Action did the right thing in protesting the Genocide”? The consequences of straying the wrong side of the invisible line were potentially extreme.

Furthermore what would be the position of lawyers acting for Palestine Action in future? Would they be permitted to take instruction? How could they be paid?

In addition to violating Article X of the ECHR on freedom of speech, there was a clear violation of Article XIV on non-discrimination due to the discrimination in selecting a pro-Palestinian direct action group for proscription, when similar direct action groups concerned with other subjects of protest, such as climate change, had not been proscribed.

According to the Human Rights Act it was unlawful in domestic law to violate the European Charter of Human Rights. Articles X, XI and XIV were all engaged. [Freedom of Speech; Freedom of Assembly; Non-Discrimination.] There was clear Strasbourg case law that neither violence nor financial loss can abnegate Article X and XI rights.

Judge Chamberlain replied that the Secretary of State stated that there was “significant damage to key national infrastructure” affecting “components that supply UK and allied forces” and “damage that amounts to hundreds of millions of pounds”.

We broke for lunch, and I reacquainted myself with the bathroom. The sound of my dry retching reverberated around the vast, unflinching stone vaults and halls of the Royal Courts. I trust it was not taken as an expression of support for Palestine Action.

I emerged into the sunlight, and for the first time I saw the large demonstration outside. I did a number of interviews for media all around the world. I had intended to give a quick speech to the crowd explaining what was happening inside, but the protest was extremely lively and involved bare-chested young men rapping and a great deal of dancing, so I figured nobody would want to hear from a fat old man in a suit.

Was at Pal Action protest at the Royal Courts of Justice, and surprise surprise who comes out?@craigmurray pic.twitter.com/j4gcAvO8o9

— Matt Ó Branáin #PardonAssange (@MattOBranain) July 5, 2025

There was a massive police presence, and I witnessed two instances of young men being dragged from the fringes of the crowd by the police and searched – for no reason I could discern, other than an attempt by the police to provoke a violent reaction that would discredit the protest.

When we restarted at 2pm, Raza Husain noted that the Secretary of State had submitted no argument as to why the proscription had to enter into force immediately.

He continued that the Statutory Instrument proscribing Palestine Action was not to be viewed as having the same authority as primary legislation, and had undergone a very truncated parliamentary procedure. Amendment had not been possible.

It was more properly characterised as an executive instrument subject to parliamentary veto.

Judge Chamberlain agreed, and noted it had also included the Maniac Murder Cult and it had not been possible for Parliament to separate the groups.

Ben Watson KC then rose to argue for the Secretary of State. He stated that the proceedings amounted to a substantive challenge to the proscription itself. But it showed no serious issue to be heard.

Parliament’s intentions are very plain in the Terrorism Act. It sets out clear procedures to add organisations to the list. These had been followed.

The legislation sets out at section 5 the method for appeal against proscription, to the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission (POAC). The route for appeal is, in the first instance, to the Secretary of State, and in the second instance to POAC.

Judge Chamberlain intervened that when the legislation had been passed, there had been no mechanism by which a court could see secret intelligence. [The inference being this is why POAC was established]. Such a mechanism now existed. At this stage, it was ambitious for Watson to argue that there is no serious issue to be tried by the court.

Watson responded that there is fundamental uncertainty as to whether the court can do this. Chamberlain responded that fundamental uncertainty means there is an issue to consider. The kernel to be addressed today was, are the grounds arguable? If so, what is the balance of convenience?

Watson responded that this case is still narrower than the PKK case. Here there are no fundamental grounds to claim that the order is wrong. Yet the court in the PKK case still concluded that proscription was an issue for Parliament.

This was a constitutional point. Any appeal must go to the Secretary of State first. The issues are precisely the same as in the Tamil Tigers case. All of this is finally in the territory of POAC. If interim relief were granted, the organisation would not currently be proscribed, and so POAC would not be able to look at the case.

In instituting POAC as the route for appeal, parliament had made no provision for interim relief pending appeal, so it plainly was not parliament’s intention that such relief should be possible. This court has no power of judicial review of proscription. Parliament had provided an adequate route in POAC. The first appeal is to the Secretary of State.

Watson was working on the basis of boring the court into submission by repetition. He resembled an insufficiently trained yoga teacher.

Judge Chamberlain asked Watson to confirm that his argument was that if an organisation that clearly does not fall within the definition of terrorism were to be proscribed, they would have no remedy other than to appeal through the Secretary of State, and would remain proscribed while they appealed?

Watson concurred, and went on to argue that if there is an unassailable case that you are doing serious damage to property, then Article X freedom of speech protection is much diminished.

Judge Chamberlain asked whether the chilling effect on Article X and XI of proscription – including on people not involved in criminal damage – might be serious. Watson replied that in the Tamil Tigers case it was ruled that the chilling effect on speech on Tamil self-determination does not have substantial weight against the suppression of terrorism.

Watson said that it was difficult for Palestine Action to argue they were not trying to influence government, when they had targeted an RAF base. There was no evidence that consultation with Israel and Elbit Systems by the Secretary of State had amounted to improper influence.

Judge Chamberlain concurred, stating that it was necessary to consult with the victims to assess damage. Watson agreed: it was important to take into account the views of foreign governments in the fight against terrorism. Any argument that the public consultation provision had not been properly enacted could not be sufficiently strong to void the proscription.

Watson said that the fundamental kernel, that Palestine Action is engaged in terrorism as defined in the Act, had not been challenged by the claimant. You cannot grant interim relief on the basis that the definition in the statute is too broad.

The Secretary of State has no obligation to consider the interests of the organisation that is being proscribed. There are no rules on who can make representations to the Secretary of State nor when they should be heard. Parliament did not put in any judicial controls on the Secretary of State. This was deliberate.

Judge Chamberlain remarked that if the justification stands for not giving notice of proscription, that this would allow Palestine Action to make preparations to continue, then the same justification stands for not consulting on the question.

Watson replied that the grounds for objecting to proscription are not substantial anyway, so there could never have been any worthwhile representations on behalf of Palestine Action in any consultation.

Watson said that there was secret intelligence evidence about Palestine Action that could be tackled at a later stage through the Special Advocate process. In the meantime what they had was the Secretary of State’s evidence and her statement to parliament.

The police need to be able to implement the law of the land. The courts must not trespass on the rights of parliament, nor appear to do so.

Judge Chamberlain, for the first time, seemed annoyed. “I am not going to worry about that” he said, “you have conceded that this court has jurisdiction”.

Watson said that this was a grave matter of national security, where the courts conceded to the judgment of the executive.

Judge Chamberlain backed down immediately. He said that national security consideration weighs heavily in the scale. “I cannot say that this does not impinge on national security if the Secretary of State says so and that belief is rational.”

Watson continued that POAC is the statutory scheme for appeal,. The public interest represented by the Secretary of State outweighs any private interest of groups or individuals.

Judge Chamberlain agreed. He said the Order exists because the Secretary of State believes it will provide the public with certain protections. If the Order is suspended it will be denied that protection.

The Secretary of State had said that people will be able to continue to oppose Israel’s actions; they will be able to continue to describe those actions as Genocide or other breaches of international humanitarian law.

Judge Chamberlain then suggested that if someone who had once been a member of Palestine Action decided to spray paint on something, that would not make it any more or less lawful than it had been before.

This time Watson refused to agree. He asserted that there can be no private right to do something criminal.

Judge Chamberlain was now enthusiastically strolling around his own fantasy world where the police and prosecutors are kindly and reasonable. “There is no reason for anybody to regard somebody’s past association with a now proscribed organisation as blameworthy”, he suggested.

Watson replied that the government’s determination is that the organisation is terrorist. So the existence of stigma is irrelevant. It already exists. The priority is national security. In conclusion, Watson spoke the chilling words that made me jump in my chair.

Watson said precisely: “We accept of course that it is Draconian: and deliberately so.”

[Say that to yourself out loud, and consider what kind of state it is where the government can openly say this in court.]

Blinne then rose to rebut. She quoted Andrew Feinstein, that the methods of Palestine Action were identical to those of anti-apartheid activists. Feinstein stated that the majority of Palestine Action activists he had encountered were not terrorists, but pacifists. All of the actions were capable of being protected under Article X and Article XI.

Not every act of damage to property is criminal. There are many examples of Palestine Action activists being acquitted. Judge Chamberlain interjected that they will only in future be illegal if under the aegis of Palestine Action. Blinne retorted that Palestine Action protest outside arms factories regularly. If the same activists turn up to protest, they will be accused of being Palestine Action.

The case of the Tamil Tigers is not apposite, she continued. The Tamil Tigers were engaged in armed action. The Secretary of State had said that all actions of the Tamil Tigers had an axis to violence. That is absolutely not the case here.

Statements in favour of Palestine Action before proscription would be interpreted by the police as giving suspicion of continuing support. What is Palestine Action, other than a loose network of people who want to see Elbit shut down?

The Secretary of State says that somehow people’s Article X and XI rights will magically be protected. This will not be the case. Palestine Action is not being proscribed on the grounds that it rejects the tenets of a democratic society. It rather opposes corporate complicity in fundamental breaches of international law.

There is clear Strasbourg case law that you do not lose protection of the ECHR because of any violent act by another member of the same organisation.

Timing and context are key. Palestine Action are attempting to prevent the most serious crime of all in the middle of a Genocide. In the case of the Christian Democrat Party of Moldova, the Strasbourg court had found it was wrong to ban them without notice just 21 days before an election. Context and timing are important.

People were today protesting outside this court. Those continuing to protest this proscription in the next two weeks would be branded as terrorists, were interim relief not given now.

Ben Watson now interjected – I am not sure on what basis – to say that the correct appeal against proscription was through POAC.

Raza Husain then closed for the claimant. He stated that Palestine Action were a group of people who put their bodies on the line between genocide and its planes and weapons.

The Secretary of State had been granted extra time to give evidence of what harm would arise if the interim relief were granted, and she had given nothing. The harm might be the deprivation of liberty to literally thousands of people.

Arrests were foreseeable. This was a civil disobedience movement. There will be an I Am Spartacus wave. Civil disobedience is not illegal but has a long and honourable history in British society. It will carry on.

The public interest is indeed engaged. It does not all fall on one side. Hundreds of thousands of people support Palestine Action. There was real and lasting damage to the right of the public to freedom of speech and to protest.

That closed the hearing. It was now 3.15pm on Friday 4 July. Judge Chamberlain said that he would attempt to return with his decision by 5.30 pm.

Outside the drummers were still drumming and the dancers were still dancing. I gave a few more interviews. I really wasn’t feeling well at all at this stage.

At 5.30pm we were back in the court for Chamberlain to give his decision. He started that he had considered the likelihood of success of the appeal for judicial review, and had decided that the only ground where there was arguably a strong case to be heard was that of disproportionate interference with Article X and Article XI rights under the ECHR.

Some of the other grounds may be plausible, but he was not in a position to judge that today.

However, he considered that the claimant had not demonstrated that irreversible harm would be caused if interim relief were not granted. Therefore he was not suspending the proscription, which would come into force at midnight according to the Secretary of State’s order.

He assumed that the claimant would seek leave to appeal to the Court of Appeal. He would not grant leave to appeal. However the claimants could try to ask the Court of Appeal for leave to appeal, this evening before the proscription came into force.

Chamberlain then disappeared through the door behind his chair. The legal team were left staring at his detailed judgment.

His incredibly detailed judgment. It is 24 pages long, and runs to 104 paragraphs, many of which have sub-paragraphs.

Let me try to offer a perspective. I have a reasonable claim not to be stupid. I topped the civil service exams in my year and became the UK’s youngest Ambassador. It has taken me eight solid hours to write this article to this point, not including probably twice that in thinking time.

Chamberlain’s judgment is over twice the length of this article so far. Produced in two hours, at the rate of almost one paragraph per minute? Plainly the bulk of it was written before the hearing – or written by somebody else. Just a thought.

With the disturbing insight that this was all a charade, I joined the Palestine Action legal team who were having to digest this judgment and work out how to launch an appeal to the Court of Appeal after 6pm on a Friday evening.

Otherwise the proscription took effect on the stroke of midnight.

Despite being extremely experienced, nobody on the team had ever been through a similar procedure. Judges are not given to hanging around the courts out of hours, and indeed are strongly inclined to find reasons to wrap up proceedings in trials and hearings early on a Friday. And this was in the middle of both Wimbledon and a Test Match…

Having such a large legal team finally made sense, as they all, including four barristers who had not spoken, scanned through the judgment looking to find grounds of appeal.

Raza gave instructions to telephone the duty clerk of the Court of Appeal and find out if the duty judge were available. The question then was whether the duty judge would be prepared to sit and hear an appeal as a single judge, or would want a panel of three.

The call was made, while we several times had to fend off security guards who were attempting to clear the building. Huda had been giving instructions via videolink, and it was only now that I discovered there was in fact someone from Palestine Action present with the team.

One of the legal team said to me mischievously “If they ask you to leave, we can ask Huda to say that you are with Palestine Action – pause – she had better add until 11.59pm”.

Within five minutes of the call being made, a security guard came to us and told us we were to move to Court 4, the court of the Lord Chief Justice. We had to gather up all the files and move there, a long trek through the bowels of the building, and at one stage diving off on a shortcut up a staircase that nobody in the team knew existed (there are over 100 staircases in this extraordinary building).

We entered Court 4 at around 7pm. We were now in the grandest area of the building. Forgive me if I recycle a description of this courtroom I have used before:

“It is very high, and lit by heavy mock-medieval chandeliers hung by long cast iron chains from a ceiling so high you can’t really see it. You expect Robin Hood to suddenly leap from the balconied gallery and swing across on the chandelier above you. The room is very gloomy; the murky dusk hovers menacingly above the lights like a miasma of despair; below them you peer through the weak light to make out the participants.

A huge tiered oak dais occupies half the room, with the judges seated at its apex, their clerks at the next level down, and lower lateral wings reaching out, at one side to house journalists and at the other a huge dock for the prisoners, with a massy iron cage that looks left over from a production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

This is in fact the most modern part of the construction; caging defendants in medieval style is a Blair-era introduction to the so-called process of law – as indeed is the Terrorism Act.

All the walls are lined with high bookcases, housing thousands of leather-bound volumes of old cases. The stone floor peeks out for one yard between the judicial dais and the storied wooden pews, with six tiers of increasingly narrow seating. The back of each bench has a little ledge for those behind to place their papers. Watching people attempt to balance laptops on a five inch shelf is quite amusing.”

Gareth turned to me and said that we were honoured to be in such a historic spot, which had already witnessed some of the world’s greatest miscarriages of justice.

As we sat ourselves down, out of the door at the back of the dais appeared in all her majesty the Lady Justice of England and Wales, Lady Carr, who was flanked by Lord Justice Lewis and Lord Justice Edis.

Evidently these three had just been hanging around the court at 7pm on a Friday evening, and happened to be available to hear the request for permission to appeal. I had a moment of crystal clarity. I had spent the whole day participating in a charade, and even the wonderful legal team around me were at base also just participants in that charade.

Lady Carr opened by grumbling loudly that there was very little time, they had not seen the supporting evidence, they had only just received Chamberlain’s judgment, and had no idea what were the purported grounds of appeal. She asked Raza Husain if he had grounds of appeal, and what were they?

She reminded us that an appeal was not a rerun of the case but had to find specific errors in law by Judge Chamberlain. “Where do you say that he erred?”

Raza Husain evidently had not been expecting to present the grounds of appeal instantly, and the team had only just finished reading the judgment and started thinking about how to appeal it when we had been called to Court 4. He was now instantly standing in front of the Court of Appeal.

He extemporised that there were three grounds of appeal at least. The judge had erred in law in that he had failed to take into account the weight of mass arrests in assessing the balance of convenience argument. He had failed to insist upon evidence of the urgency of immediate imposition. He had failed to accord due weight to the failure of the Secretary of State to consult before proscription.

Lady Carr said that the court would hear an application for permission to appeal. Skeleton argument for the appeal must be submitted in one hour, by 8:15 pm, and the court would hear oral arguments at 9pm and endeavour to deliver judgment before midnight.

This was somewhat confusing. They were granting a hearing for permission to appeal, not agreeing to hear an appeal. So if they granted permission, there would have to be a further stage of the actual appeal hearing. How could that be done if their decision on permission to appeal were not given much before midnight?

There being no time to retire anywhere else, the legal team starting beavering away immediately on the benches. At 9pm we were listening to the appeal.

Raza Husain said he would make five very brief points.

1) Civil disobedience had a long and honourable history in the UK.

2) This was the first time a non-violent direct action group had been proscribed as terrorist.

3) Five UN special rapporteurs had written opposing the proscription.

4) Huda Ammori had been inspired by the suffragettes.

5) Andrew Feinstein compared the methods of Palestine Action to the liberation struggle against apartheid.

And there were five grounds of appeal

1) The judge had erred in law in saying that there would not be substantial irreparable harm if the proscription were not delayed. There were undisputed consequences of arrest for expressing support for Palestine Action – this harm was deprivation of liberty, loss of employment and stigma.

2) The judge had afforded insufficient weight to the up to 14-year prison sentence for simply stating “I support Palestine Action”.

3) The judge had given undue weight to national security considerations, where no evidence of urgency had been given.

4) Blinne took over for Ground 4. Chamberlain had erred in law in failing to take proper account of the impact of Articles X and XI of ECHR.

Lady Carr interjected that Chamberlain did say there were Article X and XI grounds for the application for a judicial hearing against proscription. Blinne responded that however he had failed to give this sufficient weight against national security in the balance of convenience exercise, and that he had erred in saying that future evidence on this will be forthcoming from the Secretary of State. He had to do the balance of convenience exercise on the evidence before him, today.

If the proscription order came into account, it would have a chilling effect on protests outside Elbit factories, even from people unrelated to Palestine Action. It would chill free speech on Palestine. Any action for Palestine might be claimed by the police to be support for Palestine Action, and people would be jailed on remand.

Palestine Action was an extremely loose organisation. What constituted support was extremely unclear in such a case, and there could be hundreds of arrests.

5) Raza Husain took over again for ground 5. The availability of an appeal to POAC does not oust judicial review. There were consequences for the common law right of free speech and for articles V and X of the ECHR.

Ben Watson stood to respond for the Secretary of State. He said Chamberlain’s judgment was measured and detailed. The claimant in this appeal had not challenged Chamberlain’s finding that the Secretary of State had rightly designated Palestine Action as concerned with terrorism.

They had not appealed against the crucial argument of the public interest in allowing the law of the land to take effect. Their criticism of the judge’s decision goes only to weight afforded to varying factors, on only one of the strands which the judge was balancing.

The court could not give weight to the threat of mass flouting of the law. The claimant was merely attempting to relitigate matters which had been properly considered by the court.

Chamberlain said that there was a serious issue to consider under Article X and XI. That is not the same as saying there was a strong case. The judge was not depending on future evidence, he was merely indicating that further evidence might come.

Lord Justice Edis asked Watson how he responded to the argument that not all members of an organisation should be held responsible for the actions of an individual. Watson replied that Palestine Action were responsible for a long pattern of criminal activity.

On rebuttal, Raza Husain said there had been no denial that the judge had failed to weigh the correct counterfactual against Article X and XI. Political speech on Palestine is protected speech. It attracts significant Article X protection and must continue to do so.

Blinne added that the appeal is not about what will happen to people engaging in unlawful conduct, it is about what will happen to people who are engaging in conduct which would be perfectly lawful were it not for the proscription. That is how the effect on Article X must be measured.

This was the first ever proscription of a non-violent movement. The harm was that it would criminalise the Article X protected actions of law-abiding people.

That concluded the appeal, at about 9:30 pm.

In less than an hour the judges were back with their verdict. Again it was available in writing, and despite Lady Carr making a point of fussing about typos due to the haste, I quite simply do not believe that it was produced in under an hour. It contains 52 paragraphs, some of which have many sub-paragraphs.

It is possible to make an argument that Judge Chamberlain had pre-written most of his judgment based on the documents and skeleton arguments that had been submitted in advance and only had to make some amendments to reflect the oral hearing.

But the Court of Appeal were supposed not to have known they even had a case until 10 minutes before they sat. I simply do not buy the speed with which these judgements were produced.

Lady Carr set about delivering the judgment. She said that these remarks were just for information; the written judgment was the actual judgment and anything she said did not vary that.

The proscription had followed an attack on RAF Brize Norton. The Order had been passed by each House of Parliament.

Judge Chamberlain had refused to grant a stay of the proscription and had refused to give permission to appeal and had refused any stay pending an application to appeal.

The merits of the decision to proscribe are not a matter for the Court of Appeal. Nor is the court looking into the claims of Palestine Action. The Court of Appeal is only considering whether Judge Chamberlain erred in law.

On the principle of balance, Judge Chamberlain was right that the court must give great weight to national security and the executive’s approach to it.

Judge Chamberlain was entitled to the view that individuals must obey the order while it was in force.

It will remain lawful to express opposition to Israel or to Israel’s actions in Gaza.

“No person will be prosecuted in relation to conduct before proscription”.

There was no prospect of a successful appeal and permission to appeal was therefore refused.

Raza Ali rose to request permission to appeal to the Supreme Court. Lady Carr responded that plainly that could not happen before midnight. A written application should be submitted by 2pm on Monday.

There followed a horrible display by Lady Carr of sickly congratulation. In response to a correction by Blinne to the accents on her name in the judgment, Lady Carr gushed about her “lovely name.” She congratulated all the lawyers effusively on being brief and helpful, and said the case “upheld the best traditions of the bar”.

What it upheld, of course, was a further step into authoritarianism. This was the next morning: an 83-year-old priest arrested for supporting Palestine Action.

———————————

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The political Right throughout the Western world is baying to lock up all opponents of genocide. The very notion of free speech is under fundamental attack. We need to take a long hard look at the question of imprisoning people for saying things.

Lucy Connolly, a 41-year-old mother of a 12-year-old, was imprisoned for 31 months on 17 October 2024 under the Public Order Act 1986 for publishing material intended or likely to cause racial hatred. There is no doubt that she did this. In an immediate reaction to the stabbing to death of three young girls in Southport, she published a tweet calling for the burning down of hotels housing asylum seekers, specifically with the inhabitants still inside. This is a textbook example of hate speech directed at a vulnerable group.

Connolly’s remarks were part of an emotionally charged social media storm in the immediate aftermath of the murders, which included false allegations about the killer’s status and religion. There is no doubt that Connolly crossed a line of incitement to violence. She is an avowed racist – she has a history of racist tweets – but I do not think she should be in jail.

PRISON DOES NO GOOD

My first argument is that prison does no good whatsoever, and it will likely reinforce Connolly’s racism.

When imprisoned for four months for publication myself, I learnt that our overcrowded prisons are chock full of the left-behind members of the working class – 80% of them addicts by official reckoning, and still higher in my experience – born into poverty and addiction, and ill educated.

Many were there for domestic violence yet they were now locked into a community which supported and reinforced their violence. I personally witnessed inmates recounting their crimes against women to other prisoners, who sympathised and told them the world was crazy when you could be locked up for keeping women in their place or punishing them for infidelity. The general consensus was that women needed to be kept down more so they would not go to the authorities.

We punish people by locking them into the one community which is guaranteed to support and encourage their wrongdoing: then we are alarmed at re-offending rates. Over 50% of prisoners who serve sentences of less than three years, are caught re-offending within six months. I have no doubt that Lucy Connolly has found the company of those who are fuelling her racism and hate. What good is this doing to anybody?

Our system of criminal justice, with massively overcrowded jails and the highest proportion of our population in prison in all of Europe, is a Victorian abomination, a senseless retributive regime. Anything that you have ever heard about education or rehabilitation in jails is a lie. In practice no such functioning schemes exist.

The authorities are concentrated entirely on ever-greater movement and living-condition restrictions for prisoners, to keep a lid on the overcrowding powder keg and try to staunch the flow of drugs into jails. To give one example, books were forbidden to criminal prisoners in my jail lest their pages be soaked in drugs.

Prisons are themselves a form of institutionalised violence. The beds made from solid iron sheet and two-inch-thick non-resistant foam mattresses are a deliberate corporal punishment – I am left with permanent back pain.

This is an inappropriate, worthless and brutal regime. In Lucy Connolly’s case, I make no apologies for saying that when you separate a mother from her child, you are also punishing the child, and imposing an anguish upon the woman which men can only partially comprehend.

Imprisonment should be a last resort to protect society from those who otherwise pose a definite risk of physical violence to others.

A rational society would find far more useful means to punish Lucy Connolly.

Community service would let her still be with her child and provide an element of restorative justice. She should also be made to spend a substantive amount of working time – as in several months – in the company of immigrants and learning about their lives, perhaps in some of the Mosques that play a large part in our communities. She should meet asylum seekers and hear their stories.

Education and restoration should be central to any form of justice. The irony is, of course, that Lucy Connolly’s supporters are, by and large, the last people who would support such reform in general. That should not deter us.

THE LIMITS OF FREE SPEECH – IMMEDIATE HARM

The classic position in western jurisprudence is that free speech should be limited where it is liable to cause immediate harm, which cannot be countered in reasoned debate by other arguments because there is no time. That is the basis of the famous judgment by Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1919 that

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic

Here it is not stating a falsehood which is the problem. It is doing so (assuming knowingly) in circumstances which may cause immediate physical harm through the effects of panicking a crowd. This judgment established the “clear and present danger” test.

Which is the same principle as set out by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty:

No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions. On the contrary, even opinions lose their immunity, when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act. An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.

Here it is plain that immediacy and context are important. Saying something in one circumstance may be acceptable but the same words may not be acceptable in another circumstance. It separates debate from direct incitement to violence.

This nuance is completely lost, for example, in the UK’s Terrorism Act. The proscription which is in train will make it illegal to argue, even in calm debate, that Palestine Action is engaged in legitimate protest and ought not be banned. Just expressing that opinion, even in an academic setting, might get you imprisoned. Mill would be appalled.

Superficially, Mill’s example may seem to indicate that Lucy Connolly is indeed highly culpable. She was urging people to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers, and right-wing rioters did in fact attempt to do just that. But it is not quite that simple. Lucy Connolly tweeted on the day of the murders. No mobs had yet gathered and the attacks on hotels were still several days away.

Hindsight is wonderful. It is not plain that there was a “clear and present danger” that this would come to pass, at the time she wrote – and she deleted her tweet after a few hours. She actually put out tweets against the violence once it started some days later.

Furthermore, to compare Mill’s 19th-century circumstance with a 21st-century social media post requires care. Mill was imagining someone in the position of a leader – able to access the platform as an orator to the mob, or alternatively to get an article or letter published in a newspaper. In the melee of social media, Lucy Connolly is perhaps more akin to a member of Mill’s mob than the person urging it on to action.
Connolly probably did not envision at the time of her tweet that mobs actually attacking hotels was likely to arise some days later. She deleted her tweet after three and a half hours, once she calmed down, and did not repeat it when actual mobs existed. Once they did, she put out other tweets including “I know people are angry, but violence is not the answer” and “Protest yes, violence no”. She also apologised for having spread disinformation.

Connolly’s initial tweet was an incitement to violence, and goes beyond contribution to public debate on the role of immigration in events like the Stockport media. It is culpable and I think on balance does rightly fall foul of the law on those grounds. But I think it is rather marginal on the clear and present danger test. The evidence is non-existent that any member of the mobs who went out a few days later were in fact critically motivated by Connolly’s tweet. This lack of clear causality should be given more weight (which is not a necessary step in the legislation).

My conclusion: the conviction is correct as it was incitement to violence, but the sentence is disproportionate to the seriousness of the offence.

Let us then compare this to the statements by the group Bob Vylan at Glastonbury, which are under investigation by the Police and which the entire British Establishment has rushed to condemn.

This is entirely clear: “Death, death to the IDF” chanted to a live crowd at Glastonbury clearly does not pose an imminent threat. There is no clear and present danger. Nobody in the Glastonbury audience was in a position immediately to attack the IDF, and I can see no serious argument that anybody in the TV or online audience would immediately attack the IDF, who was not already in a position and of a mind to do so.

The argument that attacking the IDF is a legitimate aim I cover below.

There is simply no case to prosecute the members of Bob Vylan on the basis of imminent threat or “clear and present danger” from their speech.

HATE SPEECH

The classic liberal defence of all speech which does not pose imminent danger has been replaced in much of the Western world in recent years by a tendency to ban “hate speech”, generally defined as speech expressing hate towards a protected group defined by gender, race, sexuality or other qualifications.

That intellectual shift against free speech has been broadly driven by the “Left”, particularly by anti-racist and feminist groups. However the incorporation of this principle into the Public Order Act of 1986 was enacted by the Thatcher government. Thatcher had a thorough understanding of the dynamics of hard political power.

I am generally not in favour of the banning of “hate speech”. I agree with Mill that the answer to an incorrect opinion is to engage with it and refute it, not to ban it. Banning it is often counter-productive as it both glamourises the opinion and prevents its proper deconstruction.

This is where I shall part ways with much of the Left, which will believe that Lucy Connolly should be locked up for hate speech. But here we encounter the problem of who defines what is hate speech?

The Right is screaming that “Death to the IDF” is hate speech that indicates a generalised hatred of Jews. There are several answers to that, including that the IDF is a military force committing Genocide and is by no means supported by all Jews.

But in a real sense, once you have got into the argument of why Lucy Connolly’s hate speech is wrong and Bob Vylan’s speech – characterised by the political Establishment as hate speech – is right, you have already lost. You are making distinctions of geopolitical analysis. Essentially you are arguing as to whether the political value judgments of the left or the right are correct.

With the state as, literally, the judge, that argument will only be resolved one way in the real world.

It was in fact the push from the left for hate speech laws which destroyed the western consensus in favour of freedom of speech which does not initiate immediate physical harm. Which was extremely stupid of the left, because it should be blindingly obvious that once you hand the state the power to imprison for speech, it is the left who will be the primary target.

Most foreseeable of all was the use by the Zionist lobby of its power in the state to seize upon the criminalisation of “hate speech” to conflate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism and attack pro-Palestinian sentiment. The Left made this rod for their own back when they led the charge against freedom of speech
In my view, political opinions, even ones I find hateful like racialist attacks on asylum seekers, ought not be criminalised but ought to be tackled in Mill’s field of debate. An opinion with which we disagree should be countered by argument and refutation, not by banning its expression.

At present, the toxic mix of culture war and criminalisation of speech is giving far too much power to a state which I in no way trust.

PRACTICAL EFFECTS

We are currently facing a unified neoliberal political Establishment which is introducing more and more restrictions on protest and speech and which delights in locking up its opponents.

This same Establishment has used, throughout the world, the tools of state control of economies to massively increase the wealth gap between the billionaires who are actually in control, and the 99.5% of society who are reduced to helots.

As a result of the social tensions thus unleashed, there has been a fracturing of support for the traditional political parties, which have all been captured by this neoliberal agenda. However the Establishment has managed to defend itself by the use of media and social media to channel popular discontent at popular poverty and loss of status into hatred for immigrants. Scapegoating has been simple but deadly effective.

The factors of social alienation which drive support for right-wing movements like Reform are the same factors which, more properly understood, motivate the Left to campaign for greater social equality. Excessively punitive actions against the misled foot soldiers of the right simply feed in to the right-wing narrative of dispossession and unfair treatment.

In short, the imprisonment of Lucy Connolly has been the best recruiting tool that alt-right leaders like Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson have been given.

We should not fall into this trap.

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