Outlawing Palestine Action has sparked mass civil disobedience. Fleet Street Fox points out there’s something far more terrifying at work
A poet. A retired Army colonel. A knight of the realm. Among the crusties, the permanently-outraged and the usual suspects were children of the Holocaust and former government advisors, and they all got nicked.
In total 532 people were arrested – some of them twice – for attending a protest for Palestine Action, who are to the problems of the Middle East as much of a threat or a cure as Just Stop Oil was to climate change. Just like them their most dangerous weapon is superglue, and they have been banned as a “proscribed terror group”.
The problem is that the people behind Palestine Action are not particularly terrifying. They do not throw political opponents or homosexuals off tall buildings, like Hamas. They do not steal food aid. They do not take hostages, or fly in to peaceful farms and slaughter civilians. The worst thing they’ve done, so far, is scoot around RAF Brize Norton and damage two refuelling planes with paint and crowbars.
It could have been worse, but paint and a few dinks are easily fixed. The most damaging bit was broadcasting to the world how easy it was to wriggle past the chainlink and access expensive military assets. Keir Starmer was furious, and so he should be – he’d been made to look a right prat.
Some people have been arrested and charged with endangering UK security, and you can see the argument – while those planes were out of action, our skies were a little less safe. But the government went a step further, and banned Palestine Action as the organisation which claimed credit. They had put out a statement claiming that, as Britain was flying recces over Gaza and refuelling Israeli jets, it was “an active participant in genocide” and the activists had “directly intervened to break the chains of oppression”.
A bold claim to cover the wielding of a paint can, especially as the absence of two Voyagers made bugger-all difference to what was happening in Gaza. But, like activists everywhere these days, Palestine Action’s main tool is causing social embarrassment. To be expected, when activist groups are frequently run by a middle-class Tabitha who feels oppressed when Waitrose runs out of oat milk.
But being arrested in their hundreds is not as futile as splashing paint on an artwork or blocking a motorway. It gums up the justice system, costs millions, and guarantees media coverage through a lengthy judicial appeal process. At the end of which, judges and juries may feel that sane non-terrorists should have the same right to wave a placard as an East End mum outside an asylum hotel.
There were thousands who sat down in Parliament Square at the weekend to protest the outlawing of Palestine Action. They were a lot further away from being actual terrorists than those who protest outside migrant hotels to complain that it’s only asylum seekers who put women and girls in danger, and who have a worrying habit of attracting the wrong sort of bystander.
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There’s nothing more stupid than Greta Thunberg donning a keffiyeh on a yacht carrying nowhere near enough food to a place she’s no hope of reaching, except perhaps someone laying siege to asylum seekers who thinks a crusader’s flag is going to help the situation. But the sort of stupid that makes the history books is that of a government which lets the Far Right march because we’re a free country, and locks up perturbed vicars because we need to help nationalist wingnuts bomb civilians. Pick a team, Keir!
It’s not like we haven’t been here before. A lot of economic migrants came over, on small boats, got blamed for rapes and murders, and demanded a right to remain. The government of the day felt their barbaric religion would impact social cohesion, ordered the military to push them out, and the Vikings beat King Alfred so soundly he had to hide in a swamp for a year.
After finally winning some battles, he did not deport the Danes. He went one better, and gave them the East of England. In one brilliant political move he had guaranteed he would never lose again, and that they could have his headache of defending their territory from all the other Vikings. He turned invaders into stakeholders, and there’s not a modern political leader who would dare to domesticate their problems like he did.
Alfred wouldn’t call it integration, or surrender. He’d call it accepting what you cannot change, and changing what you cannot accept. Israel and Palestine, which both claim the right to self-determination, have to accept the other guy has it too. Then, perhaps, they could find a way to change the terror neither of them can live under. As for the migrants – if your bug bear is the cost of hotels, then let them work and house themselves. If you don’t want that, then perhaps you’re just a racist. As with the Vikings, let’s give it 1,000 years and see if they’re any good at football.
Banning protest – even empty, pointless, futile, expensive protest, like painting things orange – only adds to its power. Do as the galleries did, by installing glass over the artwork. Let Greta land her cargo of vegan nibbles and be swamped by smelly, starving, desperate humanity. Let them sit on a motorway gantry, and keep the road open. Let them feel like they’re doing something, even if it’s a complete waste of everyone’s time.
Because when you crack down on it, you feed it. Protest gets more purposeful, and embarrassment becomes an insurrection. More than 500 arrests don’t ‘send a message’: it just proves the protesters were right, and the politicians become the ones wallowing in futility.
Alfred knew it; the Suffragettes exploited it; the resigned-looking police officers know it, too. What should terrify us all is humanity’s persistent inability to learn from history, to think that you can wrap yourself in a flag, issue a law, and that will change things. The boats won’t stop, the war won’t end, the protests will only grow. A government whose laws are ignored isn’t governing, but only a tyrant gets tougher. Starmer needs to find a compromise, before he loses his crown.