UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has confirmed that she will proscribe the direct action group Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act.
This designation will render the group a terrorist organisation, and would make membership and support for the organisation illegal if passed in Parliament on Monday, June 30.
The announcement came after Palestine Action activists broke into RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire last week and sprayed red paint on British military Voyager warplanes.
Cooper said: “The UK’s defence enterprise is vital to the nation’s national security and this Government will not tolerate those that put that security at risk.”
She described the incident at the RAF base as a “disgraceful attack” and said the group had a “long history of unacceptable criminal damage.”
More than a thousand protestors gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square today to show solidarity with Palestine Action. Police made at least three arrests.
‘Unhinged decision’
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Palestine Action called the Home Secretary’s decision “unhinged.”
“This is an unhinged reaction to an action spraying paint in protest the UK Government arming Israel’s slaughter of the Palestinian people. The real crime here is not red paint being sprayed on these war planes, but the war crimes that have been enabled with those planes because of the UK Government’s complicity in Israel’s genocide.
“It also smacks of rank hypocrisy from Keir Starmer, who rightly defended protesters who broke into an RAF base in 2003 to stop U.S. bombers heading to Iraq, with Starmer asserting that this protest as lawful because their intention was to prevent war crimes. He is now cowing down to the pro-Israel groups and the private arms companies who have been lobbying government to stop Palestine Action because we have successfully hit the profits of these blood-soaked companies and disrupted Israel’s war machine.
“We are teachers, nurses, students and parents who take part in actions disrupting the private companies who are arming Israel’s genocide, by spray painting or entering their factory premises. It is plainly preposterous to rank us with terrorist groups like ISIS, National Action and Boko Haram and the former Police and everyone from the former Tory Policing Minister Chris Philp to the former Labour Justice Minister Lord Falconer have said there proscribing Palestine Action is not justified.
“As leading legal and human rights organisations Amnesty UK and Liberty have stated, proscribing Palestine Action is a shocking and unacceptable escalation of the Government’s crackdown on the right to protest in our country. Future generations will look at the people who stood up the UK government’s complicity in this genocide as being on the right side history.
“We have a long, proud history of direct action in this country, from the suffragettes to Nelson Mandela and others, who were called ‘terrorists’ at the time. The Home Secretary’s statement makes a series of categorically false claims which have been made by the pro-Israel groups which lobbied the government to proscribe us.
“We have instructed lawyers who are pursuing all avenues for legal challenge. We echo the call made by world renowned writer Sally Rooney on everyone who opposes Israel’s genocide to express your support for Palestine Action and your solidarity, to show how unworkable this absurd unacceptable attack on free speech is.”
