Martha Spurrier: Proscribing Palestine Action is a dangerous shift in the law

The sun shone in Parliament Square on Saturday, and the police arrested 857 protesters under the Terrorism Act. While the Met Police complained of “violence”, Defend Our Juries claimed that 1,500 people “holding signs in quiet dignity” had sent a “clear and powerful message”, and promised that “mass acts of defiance will continue”.

The placards bore the words “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action” – a direct-action protest group proscribed by the government in July as a terrorist organisation. That proscription is based on £7m of damage the group caused by spray-painting war planes at RAF Brize Norton in June. It’s the first time proscription has been used for a direct-action protest group advocating damage to property rather than violence against people – a dramatic and dangerous shift in the law.

Since the proscription order was made, hundreds of people have been arrested under terrorism powers. The police have made protesters take off T-shirts reading “Free Palestine”, stopped people at the border for wearing Palestine solidarity badges and arrested a man for carrying a placard of a Private Eye cartoon that read, “Unacceptable Palestine Action: Spraying military planes. Acceptable Palestine Action: Shooting Palestinians queueing for food”.

The public support for Palestine Action illustrates that this dramatic shift in the law is out of step with what many people think: criminal damage may be a crime, but it’s not terrorism. Politicians steering the Terrorism Act through Parliament in 1999 reassured MPs that proscription would only catch groups engaged in “serious violence” and the then home secretary, Jack Straw, clarified that direct action groups like Greenpeace would be excluded. Four years earlier Greenpeace had occupied two nuclear production sites and caused serious damage by filling a waste pipe with cement. Criminal, but not terrorist.

But terrorism powers are broad and vague. They criminalise some types of behaviour – including speech and thought – that are ambiguous and not always demonstrably harmful. That’s why counter-terror law has been an effective cover for coercive powers being used against people who haven’t been convicted of any crime, like lengthy detention without charge and suspicion-less stop and search. Promises made by politicians about how the law will be applied are false reassurance when the wording of the law leaves room for interpretation. Greenpeace might not have been terrorists for Jack Straw in 1999, but we now know that in 2025 Shabana Mahmood takes a different view. This is the danger of a body of law whose meaning can be interpreted by politicians, spooks and police chiefs. It doesn’t matter whether the British public or the United Nations human rights chief thinks protesters who spray paint planes are terrorists, UK law allows for them to be and that’s all that matters.

And the infrastructure of suppression has flourished in the last 20 years. The police have all they need: the facial recognition technology that will take a biometric fingerprint of every person in a crowd of protesters, the sweeping new stop and search powers under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts and Public Order Acts, the Prevent duty that will require teachers, social workers and doctors to report on people who express support for Palestine Action, the wording of terrorism offences that make it so difficult for jurors to acquit people accused of them, the very long prison sentences, and the lifelong impact of a terrorism conviction on someone’s ability to travel, work, get a mortgage and so much more.

Palestine Action is due to challenge the proscription order in November. But there too the government has the whip hand. The national security material supposedly justifying the proscription order is shielded by closed hearings held in secret. Palestine Action’s special advocates can see that material and challenge it, but they can’t tell Palestine Action what it says or take instructions on how to refute it. And case law grants the government an enormous amount of discretion to act as it sees fit when national security is (allegedly) in play, meaning that the courts are prevented from challenging much of the government’s thinking. And the government is fighting the High Court ruling that allowed the case to proceed. Now it looks like it may not even get that far. In the end, we may all have to take to the streets.