The criminalisation of conscience

A new wave of criminalisation is sweeping the UK, targeting activists, communities, and anyone who refuses the official narrative. Here’s why the terror label is no longer about terror.

There are moments in public life when the mask slips – not dramatically, not with some cinematic gesture of authoritarianism, but in the quieter, procedural ways that reveal far more about the true nature of power. Britain’s treatment of Palestine Action activists is one of those moments. It is the kind of crisis that tells you less about the activists themselves and more about the nervous system of the state: what it fears, what it protects, and who it is prepared to break in order to preserve the old order of things.

We speak so casually about ‘criminalisation’ in politics that the word has lost its voltage. Criminalisation is not about crime; it is about the attachment of a criminal label to whatever unsettles the status quo. It is ideological work. It is narrative labour. It is the systemic manufacturing of illegitimacy.  

And in Britain today, the ideas being branded illegitimate happen to be solidarity, conscience, and the audacity to say that a weapons manufacturer arming a genocidal assault might not be a morally neutral institution.

In another era, this would be political dissent. In ours, it is being treated as terrorism.

Over the past year, the British state has deployed every tool of suppression it normally reserves for organised violence: solitary confinement, years-long pre-trial detention, censorship, mail seizure, ‘terrorism connections’ where no terror charge exists, and a proscription order so sweeping that a sign bearing the words ‘I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action’ has become grounds for arrest.

Six prisoners are now on hunger strike – an act of last resort in any democracy, but especially damning in one that likes to flatter itself as the birthplace of liberty. These are not convicts. They have not been tried. They are people awaiting trial who have already faced the kind of treatment associated with authoritarian states, not the self-proclaimed Mother of Parliaments.  

Heba Muraisi had her hijabs confiscated and her mail withheld.

Tueta Hoxha was denied books, moved between prisons, and punished retrospectively for belonging to a proscribed group.

Kamran Ahmed and Qesser Zurah have been held in conditions that resemble sensory assault: lights on all night, lockdown for twenty-three hours a day.

Ella Moulsdale, Zurah’s family member and friend, reports violence by guards, enforced non-association, and punishment for comforting other prisoners.

And then there are the timeframes. Some of these activists will have been imprisoned for two years before trial – well over the standard Crown Court limit. Even the prosecution admits their alleged ‘terrorism connection’ is not based on terrorism but on the symbolic value of the state treating dissent as a security risk.

This is not a malfunction. This is doctrine.

And before Scotland congratulates itself on being safely insulated from Westminster’s authoritarian drift, we should remember that Holyrood is bound into the same terror legislation, the same Prevent network, the same policing culture that treats certain forms of dissent as contagion. Scotland’s hands are not clean because the prisons in this story lie south of the border; the architecture of repression is shared, even when its expressions are uneven.

Moreover, if we need a Scottish example, we need only look at the Clerkin case – in which a man holding a placard reading ‘Genocide in Palestine – Time to Take Action’ was arrested under terrorism legislation, only for prosecutors to later reduce the matter to a two-year warning. Terrorism, it seems, is now an accusation serious enough to justify an arrest but trivial enough to be disposed of with caution. The state wants the deterrent power of the terror label without the evidential burden of a terror trial – a performance of extremism rather than its prosecution.

Suppose you want to understand why this crackdown feels so dissonant, so disproportionate, so deeply un-British in the stories Britain tells about itself, you need to examine the machinery behind it.

The criminalisation of Palestine solidarity in the UK is not occurring in a vacuum. Research traces a broader pattern: the use of suspicion to shrink the space for dissent. What makes Palestine Action a lightning rod is not that it is uniquely disruptive – British history is littered with disruptive protest movements – but it challenges the intimate relationship between Britain’s geopolitical posture and Britain’s self-image.

Palestine solidarity activism is not simply anti-war protest. It is a direct confrontation with the UK’s position within the global hierarchy: its arms trade, its alliances, its investments, its post-imperial identity. When activists block the entrance to Elbit Systems’ Kent factory or spray-paint arms manufacturer’s headquarters in London, they are not merely committing criminal damage. They are disrupting a supply chain embedded in the architecture of Western power. 

And for a state clinging to the psychic remnants of empire, there are few greater threats than those who expose the violence required to maintain its global standing.

Again, criminalisation begins with identifying a threat to the ‘perceived status quo.’ For Britain, the status quo is its unquestioned alignment with the US-Israeli security apparatus, its unbroken commitment to the arms industry, and its enduring belief that it sits near the top of the global hierarchy, shielded by its alliances and its history.

The activists are not dangerous. The idea they represent is.

There is a temptation to see all of this as heavy-handed policing or bureaucratic overreach. But that understates the cohesion of what is happening. This is not an accident; this is architecture.

Consider the sequence:

A non-violent direct-action network is proscribed under terror legislation – the first time in history that Britain has banned a peaceful protest group using the same statutory tools used for ISIS and al-Qaeda.

Over 2,100 people are arrested for expressing solidarity – more than during the entire ‘war on terror.’

Activists are held in solitary confinement. Their letters are withheld. Their books are confiscated. Their hijabs are taken. Their bail is routinely denied. Their pre-trial detention is extended far beyond the normal legal limits.

All of this is done not to punish terrorism but to construct the appearance of it. To brand, narratively, certain forms of resistance as existential threats to the state.

It is, in effect, a kind of political theatre – but theatre with real consequences, real suffering, real bodies in real cells.

“The activists are not dangerous. The idea they represent is.”

In earlier articles, I argued that British politics has become a choreography of performance and power. What we see here is the extension of that choreography into the realm of policing and criminal justice. The state is not merely responding to protest; it is performing danger in order to justify repression. It is creating the conditions in which extraordinary measures appear reasonable.

But the extraordinary is becoming the new normal.

For some communities, this is not new. Over-policing and over-criminalisation have long been everyday realities, especially for Black, Muslim and working-class people. What has changed is the scope: techniques once confined to the margins are now being deployed against white middle-class activists, clergy, students, artists, veterans – anyone who steps outside the sanctioned narrative.

This is what happens when a state decides that dissent itself is contamination. 

And here is the deeper, more uncomfortable truth: the UK is not simply punishing activists. It is reasserting its allegiance to a particular vision of the global order – one in which the West dictates the rules of violence, in which arms manufacturers enjoy state protection, and in which solidarity with colonised people is treated as subversion.

The crackdown is not a glitch. It is a defence of Britain’s place in the world.

There is, too, a Foucauldian undercurrent to all of this, though not in the lazy sense of ‘panopticism equals prison.’ What we are witnessing is the state using carceral techniques to regulate political behaviour – extended remand, sensory deprivation, communication control – not to rehabilitate offenders but to discipline the political imagination.

Prison here functions as a warning: step outside the permissible bounds of dissent, and the state will show you the limits of your liberty.

This is not about the activists. It is about everyone else watching.

When solitary confinement becomes an ideological tool, when a pre-trial detention becomes a deterrent, when the label of ‘terrorism’ is stretched to include non-violent protest, then the purpose of punishment is no longer justice. It is pedagogy. It is the teaching of submission.

Which brings us back to the hunger strikes.

People with no convictions, no sentences, no jury verdicts – starving their own bodies to protest conditions that should shame any society that still claims to value human dignity.

We could call it authoritarian drift.

We could call it democratic backsliding.

We could call it a shrinking civic sphere.

But here is a simpler way to say it:

A state reveals its character not by how it treats its friends, but by who it decides to fear.

And right now, Britain fears those who remind it that its hands are not clean; that its alliances are not neutral; that its place in the world is maintained not by moral superiority but by the machinery of militarised capitalism.

Palestine Action is not being punished for breaking the law.

It is being punished for exposing it.

For showing the public what lies beneath the polished language of ‘defence,’ ‘security,’ and ‘strategic partnerships.’

For pulling the curtain aside. 

The question, then, is not: Why is the government doing this?

The question is: How far will it go?

Because once a state decides that solidarity is subversion, and protest is terrorism, and conscience is a criminal offence, the line between democracy and its shadow becomes frighteningly thin.

Britain is not yet a police state, even in miniature.

But it is rehearsing for the part.

And unless we name this rehearsal for what it is – the criminalisation of dissent to preserve an imperial order – it will become the performance.