Protest is not a threat to Democracy - Protest protects Democracy
The UK Government’s attempt to ban Palestine Action is a risky overreach that threatens to further quash the kinds of protest that protect rather than threaten democracy.
The Arrival of the Jarrow Marchers in London, Viewed from an Interior - Thomas Cantrell Dugdale, 1936
By the time you read this, the UK Government will be making efforts to designate the activist group Palestine Action as a proscribed organisation – making them legally equivalent to armed terrorist groups like ISIS, Hamas, various armed Irish groups and American neo-Nazi organisations (though looking through the list and you’ll quickly see racial biases and other discriminatory patterns that may be the subject of a future article).
On Monday 30th June, a draft bill will be placed before the House of Commons by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper that, if successful, will make it illegal to be a member of the organisation or to invite public support for it (that “expression of support” is drawn deliberately broadly in UK law – to the concern of human rights groups).
Given this, I should point out that I am not and never have been a member of Palestine Action or any closely related group nor have I associated with them in any capacity and nor do I invite anyone to support any group currently proscribed by the UK government.
The crime that led to this was that a guy on a moped broke into an RAF base and chucked some paint on some jets (fun fact, the jets in question aren’t even owned by the RAF but are leased to them under a PFI scheme that costs around £400 million a year– because Britain doesn’t publicly own anything unless it can’t be privatised for three times the price).
The “damage” to the planes has been quoted as being in the millions of pounds (a price that will no doubt be significantly inflated due to the terms of the PFI service contract) but this isn’t the reason for the heavy-handed crackdown against the group. PA aren’t, of course, on anywhere the same level of malicious intent as many of the other groups on the proscription list.
They’re not actively trying to spark an armed rebellion against the UK Government in order to replace it with a white nationalist ethno-state or to violently advocate for the independence of a part of Britain under their rule. The truth is, the State isn’t trying to ban Palestine Action because it’s a serious threat to their rule but because the State has been embarrassed by its own weakness.
In a time when Starmer is scrabbling for scraps around the feet of Donald Trump’s militarism, his glorious British (not an) Empire (anymore) has been humiliated by a guy with a moped and a can of paint. Authoritarian states are rarely scared of people who threaten them with force so long as they think they won’t lose - and they rarely think they’ll lose - but Authoritarians know that they can always be humiliated.
Palestine Action are a civil disobedient direct action group that have almost certainly transgressed the law but the law in the UK is a net being drawn ever more tightly around “legal” protestors in order to hem them in to the point that their protests can be ignored.
And that’s even before we consider laws that are ludicrous in terms of any sense of liberal democracy - while it’s unlikely that I’ll ever face prosecution for it, this article on my personal blog is illegal under the terms of the Treason Felony Act 1848 due to its call in print for the abolition of the monarchy and, while not illegal in the UK yet, my advocacy for Scottish independence (in effect, inciting secession from the British State) – something that your donations pay me to do – would be illegal in more than a few countries (like Germany) and would carry a long prison sentence or perhaps even the death penalty in some.
The hypocrisy of the British Government over this case in particular is stark. If the Government wishes to target PA in particular for these actions then those lines should be applied equally and to all. CND should be branded as terrorists for their disrupting of military operations (as an organisation that is more closely monitored by UK security forces even than most of the far-right and neo-nazi organisations in Britain, this perhaps isn’t out of the question).
Trade Unions should be marked as terrorists for calling for civil disobedience. Perhaps the Government should even proscribe the artist Banksy for causing criminal damage to property with spray paint to protest Israels persecution of Palestine with his artwork “Flower Thrower”.
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”
Historic protesters like the Suffragettes are celebrated now by the very people, like Yvette Cooper, who would persecute them if they were around today. We know this because of their reaction to Just Stop Oil’s protests including one involving a painting that was deliberately damaged by a suffragette in years previous (this was, in fact, why that particular painting was targeted).
There has been a movement recently in the UK to quash protest to make it more “acceptable” and certainly less “disruptive”. The problem is that a “non-disruptive” protest (whether legal or otherwise) is basically just a collection of people being laughed at by those in power.
The painting illustrating this article is a case in point - the Jarrow Marchers (who were protesting the loss of industry from their community) lacked sufficient leverage to apply pressure and were ultimately completed ignored and treated with indifference by those on “the interior”.
As we pointed out in our paper on achieving Scottish Independence, Within Our Grasp, the most powerful and effective form of protest in the modern world is one that involves a campaign of escalating pressure up to and including non-violent civil disobedience. The state’s goal has been to push in the opposite direction – to lower the bar of disobedience to make previously legal actions illegal, to more harshly punish transgressors and to demonise anyone who dares show the state anything other than supplicant obedience. Their goal is to try to make protest seem as if it is a threat to democracy itself.
Except it is the very opposite. Protest is the means by which civilians (who, by definition, lack the monopoly of force that the State enjoys) ensure that the State abides by its own rules and principles. Protest, in short, is much more a form of democracy than is voting for a representative to follow a party whip regardless of personal or constituency desires – as my own MP almost certainly will on this vote – and this is true whether you support or denounce the particular group doing the protest. the aims that they are trying to achieve or even the particular actions they are taking.
Protest is the means by which the pressure is placed on politicians to do the thing they should do but don’t want to do by making the alternative harder. The means of protest is entirely dependent on the amount of pressure required. So long as it remains non-violent, it is never – by definition – terrorism. It’s democracy working.
The UK Government is risking a massive overreach by marking PA as terrorists and I hope Parliament will recognise that. After all, once they are out of power and are marked by the next government as a “collaborator with the previous regime”...how will they speak out and who will they turn to for help?
