More than 500 people were arrested at a demonstration in London’s Parliament Square on Saturday – the largest number of arrests at a single protest in at least the past 10 years. While some arrests were for assaulting police officers and for public-order offences, the overwhelming majority were for mere speech. Since July, it has been a criminal offence to express support for Palestine Action, an anti-Israel direct-action protest group. Simply holding a supportive placard is enough to fall foul of the Terrorism Act 2000, which can be punishable by up to 14 years in prison. This marks a frightening escalation in the British state’s attempts to police what we say and think.
There is no doubt that Palestine Action is a grotesque organisation and its supporters are not the paragons of virtue they imagine themselves to be. The direct-action group uses sabotage and vandalism to promote the Israelophobic lie that there is a ‘genocide’ in Gaza. Most infamously, some of its members were charged on suspicion of breaking and entering an RAF military base and damaging aircraft. Others are accused of assaulting police officers – in one case, with a sledgehammer. Members are also alleged to have smashed up a Jewish-owned business in London’s Stamford Hill – an incident police are treating as racially aggravated – and activists have been filmed tearing down ribbons memorialising the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas, claiming they represent ‘Jewish supremacy’.
Clearly, Palestine Action is not the ‘peaceful’ protest organisation its supporters claim it is. Its crankish, conspiratorial beliefs must be challenged. And those who are directly involved in its acts of sabotage and vandalism should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. The ‘right to protest’ obviously should not extend to otherwise illegal activity, including causing millions of pounds of damage and compromising national security.
But the ban on Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act does far more than curtail the obviously illegal activity of some of its activists. It criminalises any expression of support for the proscribed organisation. This is why simply holding up a sign can now lead to arrest.
The insanity of this policy was laid bare on Saturday when peaceful protesters were arrested en masse. Some 600 or 700 of them sat in silence on the lawn of Parliament Square with blank placards. At around 1pm, they got out their marker pens and began writing the sentence that could land them in prison: ‘I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.’ Met Police officers took them away, one by one, read them their rights, and said: ‘I am arresting you under the Terrorism Act.’ They have all since been released on bail.
Police figures show that half of those detained last weekend were aged 60 or above. This is not to suggest that they should be given a pass for breaking the law, but do we really think it likely that these elderly protesters are would-be threats to national security? That they should be punished under the same laws used to ban ISIS and al-Qaeda?
Still, those on the pro-Palestine Action left are hardly in a position to complain about this. The same types now crying foul at the infringement of their free speech will have, at best, downplayed or ignored the censorious turn of the British state in recent years. They will have turned a blind eye to the scores of arrests that are made every single day for supposedly offensive speech. At worst, they will have cheered all of this on, by urging the expansion and harsh enforcement of so-called hate-speech laws or by promoting a vicious cancel culture. The Palestine Action ban is an absurd, if logical outgrowth of a culture, fanned mostly by the left, that seeks to shut down and criminalise offensive or disagreeable speech.
Unable or unwilling to make a case for free speech for all, most opponents of the Palestine Action ban instead resort to special pleading. The protesters count ‘doctors and architects’ among them, cries the Observer. One of Saturday’s arrestees was former Labour adviser Jonathon Porritt. Another was award-winning poet Alice Oswald. These are moral, worthy people, we are being told. Apparently, their views must be heard and heeded, unlike the kind of riffraff who are usually arrested for speechcrimes – say, the types who might have gender-critical beliefs, or concerns about migrant hotels, or watch GB News.
For free speech to mean anything, it must include the right to say things that some might find unpalatable. Most of today’s battles for free speech involve mainstream views being criminalised because they offend a woke minority. But we must also stand up for the right to express fringe views that offend the decent majority. Those expressing support for Palestine Action, no matter how vile its alleged crimes and ideology, are as deserving of free speech as anyone else.
Censorship is never the answer to tackling views we might disagree with. It can only ever have perverse and authoritarian consequences. Seeing pensioners carted off in police vans for supporting Palestine Action is an all too stark reminder of that.
Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.
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