18.06.2026

Attempting to silence us all

Top British judges show themselves to be stunningly ignorant about basic British history. Clearly we should have no illusions in such people, including when they sit in international courts. Rather we should put our trust in the working class movement and mass politics, writes Carla Roberts

Appeal Court judges have upheld Shabana Mahmood’s “lawful” ban of Palestine Action as a “terrorist” organisation (overturning the previous ruling by the High Court in February). Claims by Palestine Action to be a “direct-action protest group which follows in the footsteps of the suffragettes, and the campaigns against apartheid and the Iraq war” were brushed aside.

You see, the suffragettes were very different, the five judges claim - nobody in their right mind would oppose them! They were the good people, representing the acceptable face of “civil disobedience”. Here are a couple of the most ridiculous passages from the judgement:¹

… civil disobedience on conscientious grounds has a long and honourable history in this country. People who break the law to affirm their belief in the injustice of a law or government action are sometimes vindicated by history. The suffragettes are an example which comes immediately to mind. It is a mark of a civilised community that it can accommodate protests and demonstrations of this kind. But there are conventions which are generally accepted by the law-breakers on one side and the law-enforcers on the other. The protesters behave with a sense of proportion and do not cause excessive damage or inconvenience. And they vouch the sincerity of their beliefs by accepting the penalties imposed by the law. [point 145]

Palestine Action, on the other hand, is “the antithesis of this kind of civil disobedience protest group”, write the judges:

First, Palestine Action’s activities are planned and undertaken secretly with the objective of avoiding detection. Secondly, the members of Palestine Action do not vouch their sincerity by accepting the penalties imposed by the law. Thirdly, on a fair analysis, Palestine Action has little or nothing in common with the suffragettes or the anti-apartheid or Iran War protest groups [point 161].

So the suffragettes were “eschewing violence”, did not cause “inconvenience”, showed “moderation”, “accepted the penalties imposed by the law”, and their activities were not “planned and undertaken secretly with the objective of avoiding detection”? You do not have to be history professor to know that this is utter nonsense - and a rather shameless attempt to rewrite history, for very obvious reasons.

The suffragettes’ motto was ‘Deeds, not words’. They sent letter bombs, smashed windows, attacked iconic pieces of art, burnt the contents of pillar boxes, set fire to sporting pavilions, railway stations, lumber yards and the houses of prominent politicians. David Lloyd George was a particular target. Would any of those actions have been possible without secret planning? Obviously not.

So the suffragettes did not just throw themselves under horses. Indeed during the ‘Deeds, not words’ campaign over 1912-14 the Women’s Social and Political Union described themselves as “terrorists”. Emmeline Pankhurst herself, bluntly stating that the suffragettes committed violent acts because they wanted to “terrorise the British public”.²

As to the suffragettes “accepting the penalties imposed by the law” - another lie. There were mass protests outside the prisons where the women were held. When their demand to be treated as political prisoners rather than common criminals was rejected, Marion Wallace-Dunlop initiated the first hunger strike in July 1909. The tactic was quickly adopted by most of the imprisoned women - with horrific consequences: guards pinned the women down and shoved rubber tubes down their noses or throats to pour liquid food directly into their stomachs, causing severe physical and mental trauma. The health of many of the women was ruined for the rest of their lives.

There can be absolutely no doubt that the suffragettes would today be banned as “terrorists”. But there has been a very successful attempt to incorporate them into mainstream history and they have been scrubbed-clean, prettified, reinvented. This was beautifully summed up by then prime minister Theresa May in 2018, when she celebrated the “heroism” of the suffragettes on the 100th anniversary of the Representation of People Act, which gave all men over 21 and some women (those over 30 and “with property qualifications”) the right to vote and be elected to parliament. (It took until 1928 for women to be granted the same voting rights as men.)

Like most media outlets and the school curriculum, May falsely claimed that the introduction of the legislation in 1918 was the result almost entirely of the campaign by the suffragettes, ignoring the far larger and peaceful “suffragists”, but more importantly the labour movement and also the little matter of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The WSPU in fact suspended its campaign at the beginning of World War I, rallying patriotically behind the British flag (as did the Labour Party, of course). The WSPU formally dissolved in 1917. It was to a large degree the fear of the ‘red threat’ spreading to western Europe that forced bourgeois leaders across the continent to grant a range of social and political reforms. No wonder our ruling class falsely claims it was a small group of mostly middle class women who won it.

Class party

This really does point to the fact that lasting and real change generally comes about not by individual acts of protest - but by pressure exercised by the organised working class. Of course, we defend and stand in solidarity with all who have been arrested, charged or found guilty. But their tactics represent, at the heart of it, the politics of desperation, not the politics of liberation.

This political limitation is reflected in the commentary put out by Amnesty International and Liberty, who are both listed in the court judgement as “interveners” on behalf of Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori. We presume PA needed the financial and legal support of both organisations - but politically, they are clearly stuck in a bourgeois-legalistic framework.

In a touchingly naive petition (now updated), Amnesty International pleads that “the government can still reverse its decision and begin undoing years of attacks on our right to demonstrate”, arguing that locking up people for holding up placards is a “violation of the UK’s international obligations”.³ This is mirrored by many well-meaning activists on the left, who cry that the government should be made to adhere to some or other piece of “international law”. Huda Ammori too has announced that “we’ll take it all the way up to the European Court of Human Rights, if needs be”.⁴

We are far less confident that ‘justice’ could be found in this or any other bourgeois court and this might be an opportune place to make the obvious point that international law is, in reality, little more than ‘politics dressed up as legality’ (Martti Koskenniemi). Such courts - made up of picks acceptable to the dominant powers - are not on our side, notwithstanding symbolic rulings like the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

The European ruling classes stand firmly on the side of Israel (the key ally of US-led imperialism in the Middle East). A staggering 25 out of 27 EU member-states have officially adopted or endorsed the so-called “working definition of anti-Semitism” published by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance; globally, it is 47 countries. As we have pointed out many times, it does not actually define anti-Semitism (which is discrimination or hatred of Jewish people). Instead, it lists 11 examples, where it effectively labels criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic, thereby entirely changing the definition of the word. This is very much part and parcel of a wider, international strategy of intimidation and criminalisation of all those critical of Israel.

Anti-terror laws

Even worse than Amnesty International is the statement by Liberty:

We are disappointed about this judgment and believe this proscription is a disproportionate use of counter-terror powers. When it’s not clear what counts as terrorism, public trust collapses and without trust, counter-terror laws simply don’t work. There is an urgent need to update the current definition of terrorism to enable current and future governments to uphold their duty to safeguard the public and national security, whilst protecting people’s rights and preventing overreach.”⁵

Wrong, wrong and wrong again. The anti-terror legislation is doing exactly what it is supposed to do: silence us all.

Under Keir Starmer, the government’s use of the Terrorism Act 2000 has gone into overdrive. The previous Prevention of Terrorism Act was mainly aimed at Irish republicans and not really designed to deal with the rising number of groups abroad that were taking actions against their respective governments - and were being supported by an increasing number of migrant groups in Britain.

This was very clear to Tony Blair in the run-up to the ‘war on terror’. He felt that more restrictive legislation was required to criminalise opposition to the wars against Afghanistan and then Iraq. Dozens of groups were outlawed in a first batch in 2001, including a few rightwing British nut outfits. The main target was, however, the Muslim population.

The legislation has been amended a number of times over the last 25 years to suit the changing needs of the government - most recently in 2021, when section 12(1A) was added, which specifically outlaws “support for a proscribed organisation” - clearly with the aim of targeting pro-Palestine supporters, including those holding up placards.⁶

The government is, in effect, imposing a permanent state of terror against anyone who dissents from UK foreign policy. In the process, the ‘common sense’ definition of ‘terrorism’ has entirely changed, just like the definition of anti-Semitism. The June 15 judgement is likely to lead to the 3,000 people who have been arrested for expressing support for PA to be charged with terrorism offences (over 700 individuals already have been charged). There will be more convictions of activists as ‘terrorists’ - with the sentencing of four Palestine Action activists (even though they were not convicted of terrorism offences when tried by two juries) just the tip of the iceberg. This absurd piece of judicial theatre was partially designed to circumvent the jury.

Supporting a proscribed organisation carries a maximum penalty of up to 14 years in prison - it would take a hell of a jury to convict under those conditions. Juries are famously unreliable from the state’s point of view and “there is the suspicion that too many jurors are allowing sympathy for well-intentioned, but misguided, offenders to override their duty to decide cases according to the law”, as the Daily Telegraph complains.⁷

It is therefore no surprise that the right to trial by jury has come under attack over the years. Not only have judges restricted the defences available to them and limited mention of the defendants’ motivations⁸ - the whole principle of trial by jury is now under attack, with the government wanting to scrap jury trials for thousands of offences, allegedly “to reduce record court backlogs”.

But the danger is even broader than that. The Terrorism Act 2000 defines terrorism as the “use or threat of action” directed not just at “the government”, but also at “an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public or a section of the public or the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause”.⁹

Darling of the liberal left George Monbiot complains that the rioters in Belfast should therefore be called ‘terrorists’: “There is another way of describing the actions of the rioters burning people out of their homes in Belfast, though ministers somehow cannot bring themselves to say it: terrorism.”¹⁰ As so often, he entirely misses the point. This ‘terrorism’ definition is so broad as to encompass the entire history of class struggle. It does not take a genius to work out that our own working class organisations could be outlawed pretty damn quickly, once they become a threat to the ruling class once again.

We do not demand the ‘just’ application of so-called ‘anti-terror’ laws: we demand they are abolished altogether - along with the secret state, the ‘hostile environment’ and all other repressive laws designed to keep the working class in check.