Court review granted on Palestine Action ban

The High Court has granted Palestine Action a judicial review on their proscription. The review will take place over eight days in November. Until then the proscription remains in effect.

Though it was likely on the cards for a while, the proscription came after Palestine Action activists broke into RAF Brize Norton in June and sprayed red paint on a military plane.

Over 200 people have been arrested since then for expressing support for Palestine Action. None so far have been charged with an offence, or remanded to prison.

Retired headteacher and Workers’ Power supporter Jon Farley was arrested and later released without charge at a protest in Leeds after holding a placard showing a graphic from Private Eye.

A number of groups led by Open Rights Group and Index on Censorship have written to media regulator Ofcom voicing concerns about the proscription of Palestine Action — and the recent Online Safety Act — posing a risk to freedom of speech. Ofcom published advice to social media companies effectively encouraging them to “play safe” by aggressively over-enforcing the law and preventing any expression of support for Palestine Action. This will almost certainly result in over-policing or pre-emptive censorship of posts expressing support for Palestinians more broadly, which would encroach on freedom of speech.

The Online Safety Act overlaps here because it has been applied in circumstances that seem politically motivated — users must now verify their age through a third-party application before accessing the page “r/IsraelExposed” on the forum website Reddit, for example.

Anti-terrorism acts have proved something of a Labour government tradition. The first laws were introduced in 1974, to allow police to search individuals travelling from Northern Ireland to Britain after the first wave of IRA bombings in the early 70s. The next major updates were in 2000, then again in 2005, with the Blair government introducing much more punitive rights to arrest individuals and proscribe organisations beyond Northern Ireland.

In proscribing an organisation for peaceful protest, Starmer is severely exacerbating these laws’ application, and in doing so, following in a sordid party tradition. Palestine Action is an organisation with a number of political flaws, but proscription for peaceful actions is an attack on the freedoms of the activist left in Britain. Socialists should defend the right to freedom of speech and the right to protest.