Terrorism isn’t a warning-level offence

Scotland is now in a surreal position where a man accused of terrorism can be let off with a warning. Not a trial. Not a plea bargain. A warning – the kind usually reserved for shoplifting or disorderly conduct.

Sean Clerkin, arrested in July for holding a sign reading ‘Genocide in Palestine – Time to Take Action’, was charged under the Terrorism Act for allegedly displaying support for Palestine Action. The Crown Office has now offered to drop the prosecution entirely if he accepts a warning that will sit on his record for two years.

Clerkin has refused. ‘So is terrorism now a minor offence?’ he asked. It’s a good question – but the better one is how we got to the point where a slogan held up in Glasgow city centre can be treated as terrorism at all.

What we are witnessing isn’t leniency. It’s the logical conclusion of a system that has stretched the definition of terrorism so wide that it has lost coherence. And when a law loses coherence, it can only be enforced arbitrarily.

The absurdity here is not that a warning was offered. The absurdity is that terrorism was ever the charge.

Earlier this year, Westminster made Palestine Action the first direct-action group in history to be banned under the Terrorism Act. Not for bombings or kidnappings or mass-casualty plots, but for property damage – red paint on military aircraft, protests at arms manufacturers, the kind of direct action that has long existed across the political spectrum.

Officials recommended the proscription back in March. Yvette Cooper approved it in June. MPs waved it through in July, bundled in the same order as two neo-Nazi groups – a deliberate move that all but guaranteed Parliament wouldn’t scrutinise it properly. It passed with barely a murmur.

The consequences have been anything but quiet. Across the UK, over 2,000 people have been arrested since July, the vast majority for holding signs expressing opposition to genocide or support for Palestine Action. In Scotland alone, more than twenty people – including writers, activists, and even a screenwriter – are still waiting to hear whether they will face terrorism prosecutions. Some were arrested at home weeks after the protests took place.

Last week, the Independent Commission on UK Counter-Terrorism Law, Policy and Practice delivered the kind of assessment that would, in a functional political system, halt everything.  

Their conclusion was blunt: the definition of terrorism is dangerously broad, relies heavily on ministerial discretion, and enables the criminalisation of legitimate protest. This is not coming from the activist left. The commission comprises a former Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, a former Attorney General, and a former Director of Counter-Terrorism at MI6. In other words, the people who usually defend the security state – not criticise it.

Their warning was unequivocal:

A definition this expansive risks ‘perceptions of unfairness, inconsistency, and the treatment of legitimate protest as terrorism.’ 

Perceptions? This isn’t a perception – it’s exactly what is happening.

The Crown Office’s offer of a warning is, in effect, an admission of this. They claim there is legally ‘sufficient evidence’ to prosecute Clerkin for terrorism, yet that ‘public interest would be best served’ by avoiding a trial.

But what does that even mean?

If this were truly a terrorism case, there would be no debate about the public interest. Terrorism is the most serious criminal category the UK recognises. If Clerkin’s sign were really an act of terrorism, the Crown would be compelled to prosecute. 

The decision not to tells its own story. The Crown Office can read the political weather as well as anyone. Prosecuting a 64-year-old man for a placard risks exposing the absurdity of the prosecution itself, and risks a sheriff court ruling that the law has been disastrously misapplied. A warning, by contrast, quietly files the case away – unless, like Clerkin, the accused refuses to play along.

This is the danger of an overbroad law: once you make everything terrorism, nothing is.

And yet Scotland is being forced to live under Westminster’s definition. Holyrood may protest, but terror legislation is reserved. Last week Humza Yousaf asked what the Scottish Government could do to protect peaceful protest; the answer was effectively ‘nothing.’ Ministers can write to the Home Office, but they cannot un-proscribe an organisation, nor stop Police Scotland from enforcing UK-wide legislation.

Scotland is left in the bizarre position of arresting priests and pensioners under laws it didn’t write and cannot amend.

The deeper problem is not simply legal; it’s political. Proscription was sold as a tool to defend national security. But what it has actually done is expose how national security rhetoric can be weaponised to police dissent.

Politicians talk endlessly about defending democracy. Yet democracy depends on the right to protest – especially against the actions of the state, especially in moments of profound moral crisis. When holding a sign is treated as terrorism, the state is no longer defending democracy. It is defending itself from a democratic challenge.

This is the same pattern we see across a range of supposedly ‘tough’ security measures. The language is muscular; the practice is bureaucratic overreach. The state uses the gravitas of ‘national security’ to cloak what is really the management of political discomfort. It mistakes dissent for danger and opposition for threat.  

The Crown Office’s warning letter is, inadvertently, the perfect symbol of that. Not a conviction, not an acquittal – just a quiet administrative gesture that turns terrorism into a paperwork category.

A country confident in its laws does not enforce them like this.

A country confident in its democracy does not terrorise its protesters.

And a country confident in its definition of terrorism does not wave it around so broadly that it can be applied to a cardboard sign on Sauchiehall Street.

If terrorism has become a warning-level offence, it is not because the protestors have become less dangerous. It is because the law itself has become indefensible.

The real threat to national security isn’t people holding placards. It’s a government that treats political dissent as terrorism – and a Parliament too timid to challenge it.