The Home Secretary reacts to the High Court decision on Palestine Action

When former Home Secretary Yvette Cooper proscribed the "Palestine Action" campaign group under anti-terrorism legislation, the comment I made at the time was that banning a group which had organised the deliberate sabotage of RAF aircraft was entirely justified but I wasn't certain that the use of Blair-era anti-terror legislation was the best way to do it.

Jake Symons wrote, 

"In a recent episode of The Brink,"

(Link to that episode below at

‘We are deeply compromised’: Security Experts Expose Britain’s Intelligence Crisis)

"Lord Walney, the former Independent Adviser on Political Violence and Disruption in November – and a Labour figure – revealed that he had suggested a solution that would have restricted Palestine Action without having to resort to terror legislation.

That was the obvious solution. Yes, they broke into Brize Norton and caused significant damage to our national security infrastructure, but to lump them with Islamic State and Al Qaeda felt counter-intuitive, even to someone on my side of the argument. Why was Lord Walney ignored?"

What a good question. 

Today the High Court ruled, not that Palestine Action was innocent of  acts of terrorism - the presiding judge, president of the king’s bench division, Dame Victoria Sharp, described Palestine Action as an organisation “that promotes its political cause through criminality and encouragement of criminality” - but because “The court considered that the proscription of Palestine Action was disproportionate." as only a small proportion of the organisation's activities "amounted to acts of terrorism within the definition of section 1 of the 2000 act."

Nobody disputes that Palestine Action activists did millions of pounds of damage to RAF aircraft. Following the failure of the first jury to agree, six Palestine Action activists are awaiting retrial on charges relating to their attack on Elbit Systems which include hitting a policewoman in  the back with a sledgehammer and injuring her spine. The co-founder of Palestine Action who brought the case today boasted after the decision that Palestine Action attacks on Elbit "cost the corporations millions of pounds."

It is clear that there are a group of people in this country who think that, because they strongly disapprove of the way in which a foreign government three thousand miles away whose people were the victims of a vile mass murder has responded, that gives them the right not just to peacefully protest about it - they absolutely do have that right - but to break laws essential to the maintenance of a stable society.

The laws that say you can't break into someone's home or business and smash up their property, you  can't deliberately sabotage the country's defences, that you can't hit a policewoman in the back with a sledgehammer, that kind of thing.

This is a problem - people who advocate that kind of lawbreaking are creating an existential threat to Britain as a peaceful and law-abiding democracy and advocating such crimes does not fall within the scope of "free speech within the law."

My problem with the government's actions is not that they took action against Palestine Action, it is that the action was absurdly badly targetted and used an inappropriate legal mechanism.

As Hake Symons was arguing, "The government’s incompetence has turned the very worst people in society into martyrs and free speech icons."

That doesn't mean we can  just do nothing.

This is what the current Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said today:

 

She has every right to appeal, but I hope she has ordered her officials to work on a backstop, possibly along the lines suggested by Lord Walney, to assist the police and courts to take action against the criminal elements of Palestine Action and similar groups in a more proportionate way which only criminalises those who are a threat to society.