Pouring paint on a plane is hardly 9/11, notes Richard Norton-Taylor. Non-violent protesters are not terrorists.
Sign at a pro-Palestine demonstration in the U.K. earlier this month. (Palestine Action)
By Richard Norton-Taylor
Declassified UK
The government’s plan to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation is a hugely significant step in the steady erosion of civil liberties.
This decline began under Tony Blair’s premiership, was advanced by the last Tory government and is now pursued enthusiastically by Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer.
His home secretary, Yvette Cooper, will be applauded by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which said the protestors who spray painted aircraft at RAF Brize Norton should be charged with treason.
The government also knows the move has the added approval of the Israeli government, pro-Israel lobbies and arms companies.
‘Treated Harshly’
Palestine Action’s trademark is damaging machinery at factories in the U.K. that make weapons for Israel’s military.
Cooper said several acts of serious damage by Palestine Action since its creation in 2020 had cost “millions of pounds,” unintentionally driving home the point that the alleged crime is financial loss and damage to property, as opposed to mass murder.
The aircraft painted by Palestine Action at Brize Norton are from the Voyager fleet, which the RAF used to refuel U.S. jets during Donald Trump’s bombardment of Yemen this year in sorties that killed hundreds of civilians.
Military planes at RAF Brize Norton, taken by a direct-actionist’s video cam. (Palestine Action)
Ministers might well assume the move would be welcomed by U.S. President Donald Trump, who called Palestine Action “terrorists” that should be “treated harshly” after they defaced his Scottish golf resort.
The Terrorism Act 2000, under which Palestine Action looks set to be proscribed, gives police enormous discretion.
They can question an individual for up to six hours “whether or not” there are “grounds for suspecting” the person has been involved in terrorist activities.
People convicted of “supporting” the group could face 14 years in prison. [On Friday, four people were arrested in connection with spraying the planes, the BBC reports.]
‘Bad Move’
Counter-terrorism laws have long been the first refuge of governments anxious to promote a climate of fear and insecurity.
Between 2000 and 2018 successive governments introduced 13 separate statutes designed to catch more and more people in the “anti-terrorism” net.
Earlier this year, Starmer, said people-smuggling should be seen as a security threat “similar to terrorism”.
Stella Rimington, a former head of MI5, many years ago criticised politicians for trying to outbid each other in their opposition to terrorism.
“National security has become much more of a political issue,” she told me. “Parties are tending to use it as a way of trying to get at the other side. You know, ‘We’re more tough on terrorism than you are.’ I think that’s a bad move, quite frankly.”
Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, another ex-head of MI5, has warned the government risked banning “non-violent extremists” from speaking at universities.
Similarly, Max Hill KC, when he was the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, warned the government about trying “to criminalise thought.”
Calling Property Damage Terrorism
Cooper and Starmer during the Interpol General Assembly in Glasgow in November 2024. (Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street/Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Then in the wake of calls that last year’s Southport killer should be treated like a terrorist, Hill’s successor Jonathan Hall warned the definition of terrorism should not be expanded or changed as it could lead to “the prosecution of people who by no stretch of the imagination are terrorists”.
He said this week that to his knowledge the ban on Palestine Action would be the “first time that a group has been proscribed on the basis of serious damage to property” in Britain rather than because of the use of, or support for, serious violence.
But he added that targeting the Brize Norton base had moved the group’s activities into “the zone of national security” and that had acted as “a tipping point” for the government.
“We must strengthen our approach to domestic security, where threats continue to grow in their scale and complexity. Not just in terms of terrorism as traditionally understood…”
So the message from this Labour government is clear: protestors will face unprecedented jail sentences and fines for actions never before considered to be akin to terrorism and for crimes that involve no violence against individuals.
This should concern everyone, especially Starmer himself. When he was a human rights lawyer in 2004, he defended a man who broke into a NATO airbase in Gloucestershire and tried to burn down a warplane in protest at the Iraq war.
Richard Norton-Taylor is an editor, journalist, playwright and the doyen of British national security reporting. He wrote for The Guardian on defence and security matters and was the newspaper’s security editor for three decades.
This article is from Declassified UK.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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When the USA and the UK use the terms “democracy” and “freedom”, the response should be widespread laughter. Both are now nations where governments with only minority approval firmly tell the majority in the populace exactly what they must believe and feel. Leaders, who are scared to death of their own people, and who need massive propaganda channels to claim even 40% support, sit and issue decrees on what their people must believe. And send out the police to fill the prisons with those who do not believe exactly what the State commanded them to believe. Thus, when these fakes use the words democracy and freedom, the world should fall over laughing and roll on the ground.
LOL. but we’re commanded to believe it’s the communists we must revile and beware of. Those heathens imprison people who disagree with the government don’t you know.
The open letter concludes: “The real threat to the life of the nation comes not from Palestine Action but from Home Secretary Yvonne Cooper’s efforts to ban it”.
In addition to the joint statement, Brian Eno said: “On the one hand, 60,000 dead. On the other, a splash of paint on a plane. Which one are you most troubled by?”
Poet Alice Oswald commented: “Thank goodness for those who break minor laws in an attempt to uphold Law itself.”
A spokesperson for Artists for Palestine UK said, “Never before has a decision like this been challenged so immediately by artists and so widely across the country. If the Government persists with this ban, it will face anger and opposition on a massive scale.”
(Source: Artists for Palestine UK | See: hxxps://artistsforpalestine.org.uk/category/all/ )
Its an old lawyer’s maxim not to ask a question where one does not want to hear the answer. Because the answer to your question is that to today’s Elites and their Authoritarian rulers, a splash of paint on a plane troubles them a whole lot more than more than 60,000 deaths of actual human beings. Especially when one of their loyal corporate partners is doing the killing, and telling the Elites that ‘those people’ are really only animals. Since the English Upper Class has always felt this about their own lower class, there is no doubt that they are more concerned about a splash of paint. The English Elites are certain to feel that if this isn’t crushed immediately, ‘those people’ might even object to the kind suggestions that they can eat cake when they are starving after the cuts to pay for all the new weapons.
We are all Palestine.