Compliance won't protect you from the UK's witch hunt

Protesting genocide is now an act of terrorism in the UK

Last week, the British government passed a law branding Palestine Action, a protest group, as terrorists. The “draconian” law, which civil society groups warn is a huge overreach of the state which threatens to undermine democracy, means that any member of Palestine Action can be charged as terrorists and sentenced up to 14 years in jail. Also, anyone who expresses support for the group, can be charged under the same Act.

Here is a part of the legislation in question:

Support:

(1)A person commits an offence if—

(a) he invites support for a proscribed organisation, and

(b) the support is not, or is not restricted to, the provision of money or other property (within the meaning of section 15).

[F1(1A) A person commits an offence if the person—

(a) expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation, and

(b) in doing so is reckless as to whether a person to whom the expression is directed will be encouraged to support a proscribed organisation.

Let’s dance.

George Monbiot warned decades ago when the Terrorism Act was introduced that it could be used as an anti-democratic coup on Britons’ freedom of speech and freedom to protest. It is the latest in a series of moves by both Conservative and Labour governments to effectively illegalise protest in the United Kingdom for certain groups. Just Stop Oil activists have been jailed for attending Zoom calls; Defend Our Juries campaigners arrested for holding up placards. Palestine Action typically took non-violent direct action which targeted Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit and, more recently, a UK military base to stop the flow of weapons and support to Israel’s government.

The group successfully shut down multiple weapons manufacturing sites permanently and forced multiple companies to cut ties with Israeli weapons manufacturers. Problematically for those in power, many of the group’s members have been acquitted by juries because their actions have been taken as protest against Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. Their trials have, by proxy, put Israel on the stand. Proscribing them as terrorists ensures focus is taken away from that which inspired the group to form and take action in the first place.

I interviewed one member of Palestine Action, lisa minerava luxx, in 2023. Listen to it here.

In Silvia Federici’s astounding book, Caliban and the Witch, she compares the charge of terrorism to the witch hunt of the Middle Ages, arguing their similarity is defined by the very vagueness of the accusation. The witch hunts were a cornerstone in the creation of capitalism, exterminating hundreds of thousands of women across Europe who, by the late 15th century, had become critical to peasant revolts against feudalism. The power these women had over their own bodies, choosing the sizes of their families, also threatened the elite’s primitive accumulation who, at that time, had come to realise labour power was the source of wealth. They actively targeted women’s bodies to subjugate them as a political force. By the end of the witch hunts, women had been relegated to the home, stripped of their voice, position and intergenerational knowledge.

In the UK we are witnessing the beginning of a true witch hunt. Sending dissenters to jail is akin to enclosing women’s bodies in the home. Threatening dissenters with jail provokes the same compliance which forced women to police their own behaviour in order to escape the stake. This is what power does when people become ungovernable—it creates the conditions which demand self-governance if we want to survive.

Over the weekend, an 83-year-old priest was arrested for holding up a placard in support of Palestine Action. She, along with 28 others, faces 14 years in jail. No matter what you think of the actions undertaken by the group, the British government has abused their power in order to curry favour with a foreign government slaughtering civilians en masse. Multiple pro-Zionist think tanks and lobbies have had repeated access to the top tiers of British government, and a report published earlier this month by a pro-Zionist think tank was markedly similar to the ministerial statement made by the home secretary when proscribing Palestine Action. Not a single anti-genocide group was given the same access or voice.

Keir Starmer’s government has made a heavy-handed shift to the right, driven largely by the Tony Blair Institute (TBI), the think tank spearheaded by the former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. The Financial Times today reported that a TBI document said the war in Gaza has “created a once-in-a-century opportunity” to create a “Gaza riviera”. This disgusting proclivity for justifying violence with opportunity also undermines the climate movement, whose direct action has been undermined by legislation suggested by junktanks belonging to The Atlas Network, a global group of right-wing think tanks who have had climate activists in their crosshairs for decades.

The UK government sends more climate protesters to jail than any other Western country. How long will it take them to proscribe Extinction Rebellion as a terrorist organisation? Particularly if activists choose the path of Palestine Action and begin to actively target the infrastructure which undermines our collective future?

What happens next is critical. Already, a new group has taken action under the name “Yvette Cooper”. This is smart. The terrorist proscription only marks out those belonging particularly to Palestine Action. To catch any other groups within the web of terrorist legislation, the UK government will have to update the law to include them. Forcing them to chase their tails reveals the insipid nature of Labour’s power.

Equally, further groups can only be proscribed if their actions are “designed to influence the government” for the purpose of “advancing a political, religious [racial] or ideological cause” according to the legislation. If people continue to take similar direct action but do no directly claim what for and instead claim mindless vandalism, their actions can never fall under the current form of the Terrorism Act.

The major loophole in our legal system is it expects society to behave as a loose group of competitive, self-interested individuals. I recently asked a lawyer what would happen if, at trial for a crime committed by one person, twenty witnesses called for the defence said they, individually, were the guilty one. What would happen if they all insisted? Could they all be convicted? The answer: No. If there was no way of proving which person was guilty, and if there was evidence that it had been committed by less people than claim it was them, this would provoke a mistrial. The court could not be satisfied that “the rule of law would be upheld” by convicting one or two or three when ten or twenty or fifty claim to be guilty. It’s legal Spartacus in a system which expects us to defend our individual interests above all else.

Centralised power demands we police ourselves. We need to overwhelm the system by refusing to do their police work. We need our solidarity to look like collective responsibility for what they consider criminal. We need to show that we will never be silent, and we will never stop taking action. We need to show them we can continue to do so without being caught in the web of their anti-democratic legislation.

Labour have overplayed their hand by going to such extreme lengths to silence the public. If enough people collectively refuse their dystopian definition of protesting the first live-streamed genocide in the history of our species, the illusion of the State’s power will begin to crack. We, the people, may find the vestige of our power, not in the courts or on the streets or in Westminster, but in our own minds.

Netanyahu’s government is a regime of terror, exterminating women, children, men, by dropping bombs, shooting guns, blocking aid, denying food and destroying hospitals. Those protesting it are brave civilians whose moral clarity gives them the strength to face their own country’s complicity in genocide. Millions have marched and millions have been ignored. What happens in a country when a government willingly turns a blind eye to both genocide and legal protest? We refuse to self-govern for leaders who refuse to govern.

The witch hunt forced women to self-govern. After it ended in Europe, women were a second class citizen, described as both prone to evil and intellectually inferior. They became the property of their fathers and husbands, were denied the right to work, own land, participate in public life. They were demeaned, abused, erased. This was the reward for their compliance. It took over 400 years for them to win just some of their rights back in Europe.

Compliance may spare us the stake, but it tightens the screws.

---