No Action

In March 2000, the UK Parliament debated the Labour government’s new counterterrorism bill. Some MPs expressed concern about the inclusion of “serious damage to property” as a defining example of terrorist activity, in the case that that damage is inflicted with the intention of influencing the government and advancing a cause. Alan Simpson, then the Labour MP for Nottingham South, argued that “almost all Labour members” would have “a long catalogue” of movements they had supported which would qualify under that rubric. He pointed to the miners’ strike and the Grunwick Dispute. “It would be wrong for us simply to presume that what was missing at the time was the ability of the government of the day to redefine those activities as acts of terrorism,” he said. Others were in favor of a property provision. Conservative MP David Lidington foresaw, without it, the “lunatic situation in which an attack by the Provisional IRA on an empty office block, a railway junction, an airport building or Westminster Hall should somehow fall out with the scope of anti-terrorism legislation because it had taken care to ensure that no human being would be at risk.”

The bill passed with the clause intact, and for twenty-five years it remained largely theoretical. This summer, on July 5, Palestine Action (PA) became the first group to be proscribed as a terrorist organization with property damage given as the government’s primary justification. PA, as Essex University reader (associate professor) Brian Phillips noted in The Conversation, “has never killed anyone, or apparently attempted to do so,” meaning its designation represents “a substantial change in how anti-terrorism law is applied.”

The proscription followed an incident at an Royal Air Force (RAF) base, Brize Norton, on June 20. PA members broke in and sprayed red paint into the jet engines of two aircraft, which the group later said was intended to interfere with the surveillance flights Britain flies over Gaza. “The UK’s defense enterprise is vital to the nation’s national security and this government will not tolerate those who put that security at risk,” Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, told Parliament while announcing the proscription order. Ten days later, an investigation by the Telegraph reported that some RAF bases in Britain are protected by “hedges, wooden fences or nothing at all.”

Before Brize Norton, Palestine Action had mostly targeted sites associated with arms manufacturers and their subsidiaries, particularly the Israeli firm Elbit Systems. Some people have been charged with assaults alleged to have taken place in the course of those attacks, and a 2022 action in Glasgow involved the use of smoke bombs. PA has also vandalized businesses in London and Manchester whose owners have denied any link to Elbit. But the group’s signature moves include occupying factory floors and roofs, throwing red paint, and smashing windows and machinery. It was these kinds of tactics that resulted in the closure of an Elbit factory in Oldham in January 2022 and the sale of its Tamworth site in 2024, as well as the loss of profit elsewhere. Elbit’s chief executive Bezhalel Machlis told Reuters in March 2024 that the company’s annual sales to Israel alone were worth about $1.2 billion. He added that the firm expected that figure to rise, due to the expanding war on Gaza, by another $500 million annually.

Proscription, as a political measure, goes back to ancient Rome under the dictator Sulla. Pre-Magna Carta, monarchs in Britain used the declaration caput gerat lupinum—“may he wear a wolf’s head”—to remove legal protections from their enemies. Like animals, those enemies could then be killed without consequence. Professor Tim Legrand, a global security expert at the University of Adelaide, has pointed out that extrajudicial killing is still a feature of counterterror practice.

The UK’s modern protocol retains what Jonathan Hall, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, has called “a tempting degree of executive fiat,” although at the end of last year Hall believed ministers had thus far “avoided” the urge. The home secretary is the only individual with the power to propose proscription, and the orders before Parliament often list multiple organizations. Parliament can only vote to pass or reject the whole list; it cannot amend it. As one lawyer told leading legal scholar Keith Ewing, this meant, in an earlier case, that “if you wanted to proscribe al-Qaeda, you had to proscribe [other organizations] as well. If you wanted to keep [a particular organization] off the list, you were accused of not wanting to proscribe al-Qaeda.”

Parliament has never failed to pass a proscription order tabled by the home secretary, and only four groups—of more than eighty—have ever been de-proscribed. Legrand and his coauthor professor Lee Jarvis have asked, given this foregone conclusion, whether the parliamentary debates that preface the voting “may be thought of as debates at all.” Palestine Action’s order listed it alongside two far-right groups, the Maniacs Murder Cult and the Russian Imperial Movement, and passed by 385 votes to 26. Proscription is indefinite.

Anyone “affected” by the decision can apply for a group’s de-proscription, meaning that, in Hall’s words, “it cannot be illegitimate to disagree with the Home Secretary’s decision to proscribe.” The consequences of proscription are sweeping enough to make the clarification necessary. It’s an offense to “invite support for a proscribed organization” or to “express an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organization” while being “reckless as to whether a person to whom the expression is directed will be encouraged to support” it. It’s also an offense to “glorify” the commission of acts of terrorism (according to the government’s definition) if the statement could be interpreted as encouraging members of the public to emulate those acts, and to wear, carry or display an article “in such a way or in such circumstances as to arouse reasonable suspicion that he is a member or supporter of a proscribed organization.”

Applied to Palestine Action, Amnesty International has warned that these rules put “at risk the free speech rights of many other activists who are deeply concerned about the plight of Palestinians in the context of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.” In mid-July, a woman in Kent was threatened with arrest under the Terrorism Act for waving a Palestine flag and displaying signs saying “Free Gaza” and “Israel is committing genocide.” This outcome was foreseeable: back in 2012, Hall’s predecessor, David Anderson, reported with concern that Tamil, Baluch, and Kurdish “flags and symbols” were “in practice not used at demonstrations or pictured in community newspapers, because the police [had] refused to clear their use in advance” following the proscription of separatist groups.

Critics of this proscription—who include the United Nations and Yvette Cooper’s own staff—have emphasized the fact that PA members were already being prosecuted under normal laws. “Whatever MPs may think about whether Palestine Action’s tactics are appropriate or not, existing criminal laws, accompanied by human rights protections, were more than capable of responding to them,” Amnesty’s UK CEO said. This statement centered practicality; others drew on rhetorical weight. An editorial in Rupert Murdoch’s theTimes argued PA’s members are “qualitatively different from those of al-Qaeda”, and that politicians “should not do them the service of taking them as seriously as they take themselves.”

The distinction seems to speak to something subconscious as much as legalistic. Crime refers to a man-made category, one we might understand as geographically, temporally, and politically contingent, one that can be perverse or even ridiculous. Terrorism is named for the animalistic response it produces. Accusations of terrorism are automatically serious because our capacity for terror is intrinsic.

The government is aware of this gap and its potential consequences: if the category of “crime” is decided by the people, they might choose not to apply it. In late 2023, six PA members were acquitted of nine of the thirty-two charges leveled against them, with the jury unable to decide on the remaining twenty-three. In April 2024, three activists who had occupied a Wrexham factory were ordered to pay lenient fines by a judge who expressed approval of their characters. A month later, two activists were acquitted after arguing their occupation of a Leicester site was necessary to protect the lives and property of Palestinians.

Others have been convicted, of course, but the right of British juries to acquit in this way— according to their conscience—is a principle enshrined in British law and celebrated on a plaque at the Old Bailey. Under terror law, however, the argument that an action was morally justified is not a defence. “The terrorism definition,” Hall has written, “applies just as well to the anti-Apartheid actions of Nelson Mandela and the revolutionary battles of Scotland’s William Wallace . . . as to the terrorist attacks on 7 October 2023,” on which basis he recommended against “prohibiting all reference to terrorists or terrorist acts at public marches.” “Terrorism is terrorism whatever the motives,” a judge in the precedent-setting case said. This standard now applies even to actions in which bombs and bomb-carrying equipment are the targets, not the tools.

I’m sometimes wary of going too far in my criticism of counterterror measures. Their potential for abuse doesn’t render an attack any less serious for its victims. It doesn’t mean there aren’t people who want to use bombs and guns and knives, or that I don’t fear their potential to force their way into my life. But to feel that fear is to know the capacity of other human beings to feel it too, including those for whom violence of this kind is not an abstraction but a daily reality.

In the debate preceding PA’s proscription, Security Minister Dan Jarvis cautioned MPs not to confuse the group’s widespread publicity with legitimacy, or a group formed in 2020 with “the legitimate campaign for Palestinian rights and statehood, which has existed in our country and in this House for more than five decades.” He seemed to miss the irony in commending a campaign for basic dignities for its longevity, or in using that longevity as a basis on which to condemn the emergence of more confrontational methods. Jarvis shouldn’t confuse lack of progress with lack of passion. Hundreds of people have since been arrested for holding signs that read “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action” many as part of mass demonstrations, raising the prospect that this proscription could simply become unenforceable.

Modern-day proscription has been commended as the ability to demarcate between acceptable and unacceptable political activity in a liberal democracy—as society’s ability to signal its collective rejection. Its own supposed reasonableness is part of its credentials. In Parliament Jarvis lauded its ideological neutrality, its aptitude for judging an organization based “on its actions and the actions that it is willing to deploy.” But reports of government meetings with Elbit or conflicts of interest among those tasked with scrutinizing PA contradict his assurances and suggest, instead, power consulting itself, a specter of the grip that lined up heads on the Roman Rostra.

By raising that specter, the government has itself prompted criticism of proscription’s other less-than-liberal qualities. As Dr. Suthaharan Nadarajah, an international relations lecturer at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, has observed of the proscription of Tamil groups, the simple distinction the state makes between liberal and illiberal consists of a more calculated, shifting analysis of variously “non-liberal” projects. In Legrand’s words, proscription is “a serious challenge to the core principles of a free society” and “an ex ante interruption of, at least, freedoms of association and freedoms of expression,” depending as it does—as he and Jarvis write— “upon an understanding of terrorism as an identity rather than a tactic.”

Periodically, throughout history, those powers have been stretched too far for the public’s comfort. In Australia in 1950, the High Court overturned the proscription of the Communist Party, which had been justified in part on the basis of the CP’s willingness to engage in strikes “to disrupt production in industries vital to Australia’s security and defence.” “You cannot have punishment that is preventive,” Justice Frank Kitto said at the hearing. “You can’t remove his tongue to stop him speaking against you. That is wide open to a totalitarian state.”

Contradictions like this—repression in the name of freedom—are a feature of the political tradition to which Keir Starmer belongs. They are becoming a feature of his government. Labour promised to deliver “change” from Conservative immiseration and then tried to cut fuel allowances for the elderly and social security for disabled people. Its ministers claim respect for international law but insist on their right to sell jet parts to a state being investigated for genocide. Starmer himself once defended a man who had broken into an RAF base and vandalized a plane destined for Iraq on the basis that his actions sought to interfere with an illegal war, and before the proscription vote, Yvette Cooper and other female MPs attended an event commemorating the suffragettes, who enacted all kinds of property damage. Both want us to believe that they consider Palestine Action’s moves deserving of the same descriptor as that applied to people who blow up Tube carriages full of commuters.

Liberals are right, I think, when they talk about the importance of shared values like accountability and decency. The problem is in their application, which is so willfully inconsistent that certain statements and positions become indistinguishable—both rhetorically and morally—from lies. The credence given to Israeli justifications for airstrikes on Iran earlier this year, the repetition of stock phrases about Israel’s right to defend itself as it sought out a new front after more than sixty thousand Palestinian deaths, are proof of how arbitrary and unsubtle the distinction has become.

Academics have been warning about a breakdown in shared reality for years. Social media and news source echo chambers shoulder plenty of blame, but we must also consider the lack of integrity at the core of the very bodies we are told we can trust, the ones meant to be working to deliver our democratically expressed desires. British people overwhelmingly support an arms embargo on Israel: 45 percent also “almost never” trust governments to put the needs of the nation above that of their party, and 58 percent “almost never” trust “politicians of any party to tell the truth when they are in a tight corner.” That mistrust is a record high. The paranoid atmosphere it produces, the unstable nature of what is and is not the case, of who is and is not the enemy of the people, is being exploited by forces that terrify me. Palestine Action does not.