Labour’s plan to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation is a disgraceful assault on the right to protest and the latest illustration of the UK state’s authoritarianism.
Palestine Action’s tactics are justified. They draw on long traditions of non-violent direct action used in the anti-war, climate justice and alter-globalisation movements, and have exposed the Starmer government’s deep and unforgivable complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
UK governments, under both Labour and the Conservatives, have been reluctant to acknowledge their crucial military backing for Israel, much less justify it in the public arena.
The brave infiltration of RAF Brize Norton by Palestine Action has not only disrupted British military activities, but has also brought more attention to the hundreds of RAF surveillance flights carried out over Gaza than the mainstream British media has for over a year-and-a-half of Gaza’s bombing, starvation, displacement and mass murder.
Labour’s resort to the extreme measure of proscription is testament to the power of this action. It is a desperate, craven attempt to deflect from what this government does in our name.
The Kneecap trial and the pressure on festival organisers and broadcasters to deplatform a popular Irish band for taking a clear moral stand is straight out of the same playbook.
Across much of Europe, governments have resorted to police, courts, prisons and state censorship to defeat the grassroots Palestine solidarity movement – behaviour which shows they have lost the will or ability to secure democratic support for their actions.
This same impulse has been displayed in recent years against the climate justice movement. It will be extended to all mass movements which mount a meaningful challenge to the status quo.
If Palestine Action is proscribed under the UK’s draconian anti-terror laws – most of which were instituted by previous Labour governments – the door will be kicked open for the proscription and criminalisation of other entirely non-violent social movements.
This threat was clear last month when the UK’s independent reviewer of security legislation stated outright that movements for trans liberation, against racism and for Scottish independence were forms of “extremism or subversion” in need of a state response.
In Scotland, this dire situation of course highlights the urgent need for independence, which remains our best route to deepening democracy instead of its systematic dismantling by the British state’s increasingly worthless and corrupt institutions.
The Republican Socialist Platform today salutes all the “actionists” and wider activists who have taken great personal risks to disrupt and expose the UK’s role in the Zionist campaign to eradicate Palestine.
We express our solidarity with all those who have been assaulted, arrested, charged, fined and imprisoned in pursuit of a just peace based on Palestinian self-determination.
We condemn the UK’s drive towards the criminalisation of protest and urge the trade union and social movements to unite against this dangerous trend.
We charge the government with extremism – not the people!
Main photo credit: Martin Pope / Palestine Action