Labour wants the repression of Palestine Action to serve as a blueprint for politics. Why not lock up opposition party leaders and any constituents who protest government policy?
Minister for Migration and Citizenship Mike Tapp, center, with Border Force officers at London’s Gatwick Airport in February 2026. (UK Home Office/Flickr/CC BY 4.0)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
Mike Tapp, a minister in the British Home Office, recently posted on X a “gotcha” response to Green Party leader Zack Polanski’s criticism of the Labour government’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.
In the wake of the Court of Appeal ruling this week to uphold proscription, Polanski noted the government’s authoritarian assault on civil liberties. Thousands of grandparents — retired lawyers, doctors, vicars, army veterans — he pointed out, had been arrested on terrorism charges simply for holding a placard saying: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”
In response, Tapp asked Polanski: “Do you support the Palestine Action group?”
This was Tapp’s attempt at entrapment. If Polanski answered in the affirmative, he could be jailed for up to 14 years — because of the unprecedented decision Tapp’s own Home Office took to declare Palestine Action a terrorist organisation.
No direct action group in the U.K.’s history has ever before been designated a terrorist group, on a par with Al-Qaeda and Islamic State.
Tapp clearly thought he was being clever. But all he was really doing was further exposing the ugly, patently authoritarian nature of the government he serves in and its complicity in Israel’s endless atrocities in Gaza.
Tapp is not some disinterested party in all this. He is a vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel, the genocide-compatible wing of the Labour Party that dominates the cabinet.
Investigative journalist Paul Holden noted on X:
“Tapp has taken money and benefits from Labour Together, Labour Friends of Israel and Stuart Roden, who founded the Israeli-based VC company Hetz Ventures with Judah Taub. Taub is a former IDF Special Forces operative who served as an IDF reservist in Gaza.”
The Labour government is stuffed with compromised individuals like Tapp, who serve as Israel’s cheerleaders in the U.K.
In addition, or more likely as a consequence, many of these ministers, from Prime Minister Keir Starmer down, receive large donations from the Israel lobby.
Polanski replied to Tapp:
“The fact that your government has made it illegal for me to answer yes is a damning testament to your flagrant disregard for civil liberties.”
The Joe McCarthy-emulating Tapp is not some outlier in the Labour Party. He is its beating heart. It was his wing of the party, at the behest of the Israel lobby and working covertly through the unlawful activities of Labour Together, that helped confect an imaginary “antisemitism crisis” in the party in the second half of the 2010s.
The fact that your government has made it illegal for me to answer yes is a damning testament to your flagrant disregard for civil liberties.
This may be targeted at those taking action against the genocide, but it sets a very dangerous precedent that puts everyone at risk. https://t.co/KoC3TX2pXL
— Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski) June 15, 2026
Their goal was to use anti-democratic means to drive Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters out of the Labour party and put corporate donors and the Israel lobby firmly back in charge of policy.
While Tapp was seeking to jail the only Jewish leader of a major British political party this week, it emerged that another Labour MP, Peter Kyle, had reported a female constituent of his in Brighton to the police. She was arrested and charged after writing to him in protest at the government’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Kyle apparently believed that, in writing to him — her MP — the woman had committed a crime under the Communications Act by “causing him annoyance.” Presumably, Kyle finds it annoying to be reminded of his party’s collusion in genocide.
And presumably he imagines too that, in his version of democracy, MPs should never be questioned by those they represent on ethical matters, such as complicity in a genocide.
Shockingly the Crown Prosecution Service agreed to pursue Kyle’s case through the courts, proving once again that it is nothing more than an adjunct of the executive branch.
In a rare sign of the independence of the judiciary — at least at its lowest levels — a local magistrate threw the case out this week.
There is, of course, a connecting thread in these two cases: both Labour MPs hoped to use the law to crush criticism of their party’s continuing support for Israel’s genocide.
They imagine their authoritarian repression of Palestine Action can serve as a blueprint for British politics. Why not lock up opposition party leaders and any constituent who dares to write protesting at their criminal behaviour?
This is how Starmer’s Labour Party conducts its politics: through intimidation, disinformation and show trials.
And they do it not for our benefit or, as they keep proclaiming, in the interests of “national security.”
No, they do it for the benefit of a foreign government viewed, even in Israel, as the most extreme in its history, one that includes self-declared fascists who Israel’s former top general, Moshe Yaalon, this week compared to the Nazis.
The Starmer government is tapping deep into its own — and the British state’s — fascist instincts. And with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party nipping at its heels, there is little hope that the situation is going to improve any time soon.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East(2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.
This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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If anyone appreciates what democracy promises, then one has to understand that filial to Netanyahu’s vision of Israel is contrary to everything democracy promises.
It finds ways to use any means to achieve means. Morality? Forget it?!Human rights? forget it!
The UK Labour party, and what’s remaining if the Conservative party are neo-Fascist organizations, and controlled by the Zionist/Israeli lobby.
Briton enables Israel to conduct genocide in Gaza, bomb and invade Lebanon, and anyone who stand in their way in Briton are fair game for incarceration
At some point it might just be easier for these genocide-loving politicians in the U.S. and UK to simply put up fences around the entire perimeters of both countries, since a majority of both populations are so resistant to pledging their eternal loyalty to Israel. (Such impudence!) Clearly this minister and the rest like him would love to see most of us languishing in dungeons. Mega-fences would also dispense with that pesky idea of due process. Problems solved!
I think we are living through the long term plans of the colonial West post WW2. They are attempting to change the outcome of the last world war. Russia and China must be fully aware by now this is the original desired outcome. The West’s troops and populations clearly had no idea what their rulers were really up to. They fell into the trap of believing all the Cold War propaganda designed to get us to this point. No wonder the Western governments are sticking with Israel’s genocide. It was always the corporatists’ system of choice. Now they have the technology to force it on humanity. May the BRICS system bury the billionaires’ sick fever dreams for good.
“Why not lock up opposition party leaders and any constituents who protest government policy?”
Like the EU is supporting in Armenia? Maybe Sir Daily Stormer is using this as a way to make nice with the EU’s Prussian leadership?
Like the EU is also supporting in Ukraine?
I’m looking forward to the backlash against the savages currently illegally occupying Palestine.
The UK is exiting “the free world.”
I see no ‘free world’ anymore. Not since the 70s.
With severely eroded civil & human rights, rapidly increasing surveillance and censorship, not to mention frequently manipulated elections, total lack of transparency & accountability, and now open government support for genocide and other crimes against humanity, the West is now on a par with the fascist dictatorships of the last century. I should know; I lived in two of them!
I am taking the opportunity of providing a link to an article by Geoffrey Robertson KC regarding a further recent utterly shocking miscarriage of justice in the UK regarding anti genocide protesters. Truly frightening stuff.
hxxps://www.theguardian.com/global/commentisfree/2026/jun/20/elbit-four-law-jurors-criminal-damage-terrorism
Tis the final battle…
Fascism didn’t die at the end of WWII. Its spores flew out across the globe and they are flowering now.
Both the UK and the USA had many business people and other elites who supported the rise of Adolf Hitler. Some UK firms were happy to do business with Hitler before 1939, and then reluctant to cut those ties when the war began. The same in America, with Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Herbert Walker and Prescott Bush and many other opponents of FDR all backing Hitler and saying that ‘he’s doing things right.’ Prescott Bush got an official DOJ ‘cease and desist’ letter in 1943 about his ‘trading with the enemy.’ Later, those spores flowered into his son, named George Herbert Walker Bush becoming President.
The soft on fascism approach after Victory Day in Europe clearly did not work, and after the coming Victory Day, the people of the world must do much better to eradicate the evil of fascism. Its time to be Tough on Fascism.
Please don’t forget Canada was in on it too. We are no innocents in the global rise of fascism. We just elected a banker as our PM who had a big smile on his face all the while tearing up environmental protection legislation, curtailing freedom of speech with new legislation to combat anti semitism (same is in the UK criticizing Israel is anti semitic), gouging the federal public service, and pushing massive investment in AI, to name just a few things PM Goldman Sachs has done in his first year.
Henry Ford’s links to Hitler are even worse than most people realise.
I saw a documentary which said that Ford donated to Hitler in, I think, 1922. This seems quite plausible because of this:
“Berlin Hears Ford Is Backing Hitler—Bavarian Anti -Semitic Chief Has American’s Portrait and Book in His Office,” New York Times, December 20, 1922.
hxxps://www.nytimes.com/1922/12/20/archives/berlin-hears-ford-is-backing-hitler-bavarian-antisemitic-chief-has.html
So, it is not simply a question of forging links after he came to power. It is a question of actually helping him into power in the first place.
Not just fasism, but conservatism, too – the fascists only get power when the Cons give it to them.
“Country first” is a slogan that Starmer uses from time to time.
To be fair, he never actually named that country.
Tricky question for the monarchy that claims four countries in the World Cup and Olympics. Which country indeed, England, Scotland, Wales, the colony of Northern Ireland, or perhaps Israel?
Not forgeting that the germanic (Saxe-Coburg) monarchy were great supporters of hitler until someone pointed out that they had been allocated to be the baddies for a few years.
OTOH, recall that the monarchy circumcises its male heirs, which is claimed to have nothing to do with jews or muslims, obviously just a fun thing to do to your children !
A weirder bunch of inbreds would be difficult to find.
If true, at least they only mutilated the males.