19th September 2025
A disclosed MI5 document indicates that the basis for proscription may be weak, by me over at Prospect.
The “open” MI5 assessment document can be read here.
You can comment below (though note comments are pre-moderated and may not be published).
I read the open assessment document yesterday and felt that the barrel had been scraped a bit. Glad I’m not the only one!
I’m still a little nonplussed why some individuals seem to want to be arrested & risk a terrorism record for the sake of a placard when the real issue of the plight of Palestinians is being sidelined; likewise and especially MI5’s reluctance to publish a more explicit summary.
In the meantime we have a wholesale waste of judiciary & police time & money with individual reputations down the pan for nothing, & the state looking overbearing & somewhat ridiculous. I’m obviously missing something
The only thing we seem to learn from MI5 is that the word “gist” is also a verb and an adverb
The idea is to demonstrate the ridiculous consequences of the proscription order has as currently worded. Simply displaying the words Palestinian and Action on a placard was made illegal.
Yes it wastes police and judicial time. That’s the point. To show how farcical the proscription order is.
From an Irish perspective, it would be interesting if a hypothetical Irish person (an author, say) were to be charged with a terrorism offence for financing Palestine Action, and extradition requested. The “political offence” exception, combined with Irish Constitutional and ECHR rights, would make for quite the High Court hearing in Dublin.
The telling comment was the worry about damage to property rather than danger to people in the documents that I was able to access. On the scale of terrorist harms property damage is a ways below harm to people and animals.
It was ever thus with our legal system where the harm to property appears to rate more highly than that to the populace, a hangover from serfdom and Magna Carta days.
I have for some time suspected that the police have corporately become enthralled by self-importance: that they should not trouble themselves with minor offences, because they have to concern themselves with a higher calling, and in particular the prevention of terrorism. The mass arrests of protesters under the Terrorism Act 2000 from my perspective underpins that view. The police are not obliged to arrest, or even challenge, every person committing a criminal act (and it usually would be absurd to arrest someone for, say, displaying a non-compliant vehicle registration plate or dropping a cigarette butt, when the matter can be addressed by a caution, FPN or summons), but they do seem to feel they must arrest every protester who wears a pro-Palestine Action t-shirt — why? Is it because they perceive the purpose of counter-terrorism legislation to be so momentous that they do not feel able to ignore the protesters, even though there is no perceptible cause of harm?
One of the core problems is that the 2000 Act is a blunt tool. Palestine Action has been added to Sch.2 to the 2000 Act by statutory instrument, for which (it being an affirmative-action instrument) Government MPs vote (with honourable exceptions) without much thought. As such, it now ranks alongside the IRA, Hamas and the Wagner Group as a proscribed organisation, and the entire panoply of the 2000 Act now applies to it, and those who ‘support’ it. It is reminiscent (with much more serious consequences) of the Destructive Imported Animals Act 1932, which made it an offence for the occupier of land to fail to give notice to the Secretary of State of the presence on that land of musk rats, or of any other prescribed non-indigenous mammalian species. Fair enough: until the Grey Squirrels (Prohibition of Importation and Keeping) Order 1937 made it an offence for any occupier to fail to notify the presence of grey squirrels. This absurd offence, committed by almost every householder in the country, was abolished only in 2015. Applying a one-size-fits-all legislative scheme is not necessarily good government.
I thinks that’s a little unfair to the police. They are responding fairly predictably to pressure put upon them by Politicians and the Media, where the problem truly lies.
I think it may well be a bit of malicious compliance by the police. They surely know it’s absurd to be arresting grannies for holding up a placard, but Parliament has told them to do so. This diverts resources from other necessary police work. By arresting 800 people they can maybe fore the government to give them proper direction as to the priorities the police should have.
Surely you can’t mean that our vast policing services are being managed by people who think a strategy, thrillingly-new to most eleven-year-old children then abandoned at twelve, is the best to use in these circumstances? Really?
A question for those with more access and insight into policing and parliamentary affairs; When will the adults arrive to restore a little sense, please? We can’t wait much longer.
Re:- “I’m still a little nonplussed why some individuals seem to want to be arrested & risk a terrorism record for the sake of a placard”
Many of us perceive continuous, co-ordinated and distinctly unwelcome pressures by both the state and non-state bodies to shrink the general public’s civil rights and repress and silence us on a whole variety of political issues. The battle over the proscription of Palestine Action seems only one of the conflicts – eg climate change protests – flaring up over the last 10 years between increasingly authoritarian and deliberately deaf “leaders” and the cynical, resentful and powerless masses of the “led”.
The clash between government and people over Gaza is particularly vicious because the government has consistently refused to act in line with public opinion (from Nov 2023 onwards pro-ceasefire, developing later into deep-seated outrage about Israel’s conduct).
All the conventional ways the public can use to change government thinking – writing to MPs and the media, starting petitions, resigning from the political party, etc – have been tried and haven’t worked. Now the public is trying a new tactic – showing the “leaders” the limits of their power to act … and simultaneously assuaging their own deep grief over and fear for the Palestinians.
Very many people, thank goodness, prefer to take the risks of going to jail than to follow the example of their government – passively allowing the ongoing extermination of up to 2.3 million people -without doing everything they can to stop it.
The government has over-reached in this case. Arresting the protesters for criminal damage would have been sufficient. They were not terrorising anyone. Using terrorism laws for political purposes is not acceptable.
I think it is in the public interest to know why a group is classed as terrorist, given the drastic nature of the consequences. If we are to have draconian laws against terrorism it is vital that the use of them is transparent. Otherwise a government can simple silence opposition protests and hide the reasoning used. The extension to supporting a terrorist group being a crime is concerning. In this case it potentially widens criminality to simply expressing support for action in the Palestinian cause.
I think the answer to the question, “Has the government overreached in using terrorism law against Palestine Action?” has two answers: the legal and the pragmatic. Legally, the answer would be “No”, because terrorism law includes reference to what I’ll paraphrase as “actions of intimidation”, thereby allowing the government to argue that the criminal damage caused during the protests was de facto intimidation and therefore the application of that law was sound.
Morally and pragmatically, the answer would be “Yes”, but I think the reasons here are more nuanced.
If you think about the “day to day” relationship between citizen and state in the UK, then for the vast majority of the time and for the vast majority of people, that relationship is one in which the state has total power [exercised or enforced or not] and the citizen has none. As a result, the citizen will meekly go about their business of doing their work and paying their taxes and the government is content.
In this case, however, we see a topic of such moral clarity that it is inconceivable to us as rational human beings that our government would do anything other than condemn the Israeli government and Israeli Armed Services, would cease all aid, would impound all assets and would do everything in our collective power to stop the genocide and bring perpetrators to account. This has generated both a moral and active response – and the government is frightened.
When the government applies laws – and in particular sentencing – to actions of citizens, there are a variety of motives that can guide the application of those laws and the sentencing that may be handed down in the event of a successful conviction.
– Sometimes a sentence is issued as a warning [do this again and you will be punished much more severely]
– Sometimes the sentence is issued as a warning to others [this extremely punitive sentence will be applied to you, too, if you do the same thing…]
– Sometimes the sentence is issued to protect others by restricting the freedoms of those who may otherwise offend again.
In this case and with the application of this statute, it seems to me that the government is trying a very selective type of warning. When it applies terrorism charges to people protesting, the desired effect is to discourage others from publicly turning out in support. It is to chill debate and, in effect, “let the government get away with” whatever they were doing to provoke the protest.
In this case it seems likely that the government has chosen to maintain some form of on-going relationship with the State of Israel and has found these protests to be an inconvenience because they call out the hypocrisy of Britain’s position. So the use or threatened use of terrorism charges is a conscious effort to quash debate and intimidate citizens to “stay at home” and allow the government to continue with their chosen course of action.
However, if we can agree that one needless death is one too many – the idea that it is wrong to try and judge the scale of an atrocity such as this by mere numbers dead – then we have to consider the actions of the government in the context of the actions taken with respect to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Russia invaded a sovereign state and is prosecuting an unprovoked war of aggression for territory and resources. Russia has murdered probably hundreds of thousands – indiscriminently – and has targeted hospitals and homes. Israel is flattening the entire Gaza strip – they are bombing indiscriminently. They are targeting homeless refugees queuing for food. They are blocking attempts by the international community to bring food to innocent civilians.
In terms of actions taken, the state of Israel’s activities in Gaza appear, on the face of it, to be more extreme/worse than those of Russia in Ukraine [which, let’s be honest, are horrific]. Ukraine had the means to defend herself. The people of Gaza were and are among the world’s poorest, living in the most densely populated part of the world’s surface.
Yet London and the West has sanctioned Russia, frozen Russian assets and applied sanctions… while the leader of the Israeli government has been free to fly the world [or at least to the US] with impunity.
It took time… but eventually the world agreed that the actions of Nazi Germany against the Jews were a holocaust of such extreme nature that even security guards were prosecuted – people who took no active part in the mass murder.
I wonder how we will look back on Israel’s genocide against Gaza in 50 or 100 years. If the answer is anything less than the way that the world dealt with Nazism, we have no right to call ourselves the civilised society.
And a British government that seeks to use the law as a tool of intimidation in support of a genocidal regime is, in my book, as guilty and as worthy of condemnation as that regime itself.
Is not causing £7m of damage to national security assets ‘serious damage’?
Where, out of the air, have you plucked that £7m figure from?
It’s the number being bandied about for the Brize Norton damage. Like most of these claims it’s probably ludicrously inflated. Although in cost terms military equipment is fiendishly expense to maintain and aircraft especially so – particularly if you have dismount and strip engines.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgrq9d8n3zo.amp
The new door to the House of Lords costs £9,600,000 and doesn’t work. Could it be that the government’s tendering process leaves something to be desired?
That was a very good article thank you for sharing.
On PM…once he urged restraint; now he has the reins… Power, as ever, proves hard to resist.
An interesting and disturbing read.
Well, MI5 has form when it comes to telling untruths (sorry, lapses of memory) viz a recent contretemps with a BBC journalist in court. Even the judges noticed that untruths (sorry, lapses of memory) were being presented as evidence. more to go on that one if it cannot be buried.
Back to Palestine. Plainly PA are very naughty boys etc and vex HMG most awfully. HMG might feel a frisson of embarrassment having seen Palestine reduced from a thriving state with a nice green map to a non state whilst Britain was (mostly) at the helm. I missed the bit where Palestine became a non state.
The direction of travel has been plain to see since Balfour’s day. Israel has played a brilliant strategy and the Arab nations and the Palestinians have made every misstep in the book. How that happened is a deeper study.
As recent newsreels showed Britain is reduced in stature whilst America bestrides the globe and has a deep and abiding love affair with Israel. So if MI5 et al wants the funding and intelligence feeds to continue it had better come up with some ‘helpful’ messages to help poor old HMG out. What is a porky or two between friends in a tight corner.