By David Renton

On Monday, the House of Commons will vote for the proscription of Palestine Action. The House of Lords will follow later in the week. By July 4th, the group will be named on the list of proscribed organisations, alongside Al Qa’ida, Hamas and Hizballah.

Once a group has been added to the list, the police can do what they like: suspected members may be searched and fingerprinted without their consent, their property seized, they cannot open a bank account. The British state has gathered in its hands so many emergency laws it can used against suspected terrorists. I represented a client who had been put on trial and found not guilty of supporting a terrorist group. As punishment for his innocence, the government subjected him to “terrorism prevention and investigation measures”, under which he had to leave his home, travel 200 miles, abandon his family. He was subject to five years’ house arrest – no mobile, no computers. The only softening of the regime was that he was permitted to leave the building for 30 minutes a day for exercise. Even that concession depended on him not being caught covertly phoning his lonely child.

This is the first time that the British government has sought to add a group to the list which does not use violence against people. A typical action of theirs involves going into an arms factory, breaking one or another machine, then climbing to the roof where they hope people will see them. It is an organization without guile or guilt, without blood on its hands. Its activities do not scare anyone, it makes no-one afraid. Its members are not, no matter how far you stretch the meaning of the word, terrorists.

Once the proscription takes effect, those who remain members of the group will face jail : two to three years for the majority of those prosecuted, up to 14 years for the leaders. By adding Palestine Action to the list, Keir Starmer is saying that Labour would have imprisoned Nelson Mandela. It would, like the bigots of imperial Britain, place iron chains around Mahatma Gandhi’s wrists.

While, as for Martin Luther King, this is what he said about those who damaged property in protest against racism: “Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on; it is not man.” Under cop-king Keir Starmer, that will be a breach of section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000: “A person commits an offence if the person expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organization.” In two weeks, quoting King’s words in support of Palestine Action will earn you two years in prison, with 14 years again as the maximum.

I doubt the Labour MPs who vote for this legislation will understand the line they are crossing; how the police will use this precedent, or how they are making everyone in Britain who stands for the survival of people and the planet into their enemy. I doubt their reasoning will go further than that banning Palestine Action is a chance to kick all those protesters who stand outside their MP’s offices with placards saying that those inside, by continuing to sell arms to Israel, are guilty of genocide. Jail us all, remove our banners, and maybe Emily Thornberry will sleep easier at night.

And if the next Reform government, whose path Labour is so desperate to ease, should extend this proscription to Stop the War, to the unions, to every cause which has funded Labour through good times and bad – don’t expect any contrition from those MPs.

So what are you going to do about proscription: will you support the fund for its legal campaign? Or will you do what the usual suspects are demanding of the British left, that we condemn the group and its activities – even as we make some muted pleas for its de-proscription? Will you talk about Palestine Action in such vague and general terms that you protect yourself from prosecution, while doing nothing of any use to guard those facing jail?

What the group need is people speaking out with such a loud, shared, voice that the state does not dare use the powers it has taken. Will you say it with me? *I am Palestine Action, I am a member of the group. I am its supporter. I want other people to support Palestine Action alongside me.*

No matter how many prisons Labour builds, there will never be space for us all.

David Renton is a barrister and the author of Against the Law: Why Justice Requires Fewer Laws and a Smaller State, which was published by Repeater in 2022 and of Horatio Bottomley and the Far Right Before Fascism, which was published by Routledge in November 2022. This article was taken from his blog Lives; Running and was originally published here.

Image: c/o Labour Hub.