There’s probably something to be said for using your senior travel card to attend a protest rally and given that more than half of the 522 people arrested in Parliament Square on Saturday were over 60 no doubt some of them did.
They were detained under section 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000, the majority for displaying pieces of cardboard stating “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.”
You can oppose genocide, you can support Palestine and protest at the grotesque and inhuman suffering its people are facing at the hands of Netanyahu and his butchers but by supporting Palestine Action, you are now supporting a proscribed terrorist group.
Palestine Action is a nasty organisation, it advocates and supports violence. it has caused millions of pounds’ worth of damage to a range of UK defence-related businesses and research organisations whose work is vital to Britain’s national security. PA activists have threatened people with sledgehammers and attacked Jewish businesses in the UK. It manipulates and encourages supporters to take extreme action, and some of them have shouted ‘death to the IDF’ outside a court in Bristol. When calls for ‘death to someone or something ’ become a chant it is dangerous,
The right to peaceful protest is fundamental to a healthy democracy and we saw the appalling attempts by Suella Braverman to ban such events while there are those who claim the police operate double standards when dealing with protesters from across the political spectrum.
Peter, now Lord Hain, a leading figure in the anti-apartheid movement and the Anti-Nazi League in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s, voted against proscribing PA and is damning in his criticism of the government’s decision to do so which effectively means that those who joined the rally at the weekend are equated with al-Qaida and Hamas.
In Germany, counter-extremism law allows police to monitor groups believed to be likely to move to outright violence, to then negotiate and limit their behaviour rather than banning the group completely. That process is of course riddled with questions and concerns but the government could examine such measures.
It seems that, just as with the Online Safety Act, legislation well-meant but poorly designed is a clunky sledgehammer with unintended consequences. A conviction for terrorism would have a huge impact on people’s ability to travel, to work, to study, to access financial and other services – for holding up a placard which had it read I support Palestine, presumably would not have sparked arrest.
The real tragedy is that the vitally important arguments for supporting Palestine are going to going to get lost in a legal battle over supporting a banned and violent protest group. The current legislation and subsequent arrests do nothing to help the Palestinian people.
