Lydia Wilson
New Lines Magazine / July 2, 2026
The banning of the activist group Palestine Action and the resulting public outcry reveal a steady erosion of rights that goes back a quarter of a century.
Around a year ago, then-U.K. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper informed Parliament of her intention to proscribe the group Palestine Action. This group is dedicated to preventing weapons arriving in Israel from the U.K. using direct action techniques, and it had just been in the headlines for an attack on the Royal Air Force base Brize Norton; its members had broken in on scooters and sprayed the engines of two military planes, putting them out of action at a huge cost to the Ministry of Defence. The group’s immediate attempts to block the proscription taking effect failed, and the House of Commons voted to place Palestine Action on the U.K.’s terrorism list on July 2 last year; a move accepted by the House of Lords a few days later.
What happened next dominated the news cycle in a way the government was surely not expecting. Protesters came out in their thousands, the majority of them pensioners, holding placards saying: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action,” knowingly incriminating themselves as “terrorists.” The protests didn’t stop, despite the unprecedented numbers of arrests at each demonstration and the viral images of silver-haired grandparents, from poets to priests, being carried off by police and loaded into vans to be charged. In the first six months after the ban came into effect, 2,779 arrests were made under the Terrorism Act for supporting Palestine Action, more than all the arrests across all proscribed groups over the previous decade. The latest statistics reveal that the average age of someone in the U.K. arrested for terrorism is now 59, and for the first time women have overtaken men. That is, a woman in her 50s is now the typical U.K. terrorist, and her crime is silently holding a placard.
The proscription also meant that those already in the justice system were suddenly facing very different charges. The past year has seen a particularly high-profile case moving through the courts — alongside the fight to overturn the ban. The case of the “Filton Six” — a group of young Palestine Action activists who broke into and occupied an Elbit Systems manufacturing facility in Filton, near Bristol — has involved a number of “unprecedented” legal moves. These have included the denial of bail, the defendants being held without charge for over the three times the recommended maximum amount of time before trial, extreme hunger strikes that were disregarded by the press and politicians (unlike their predecessors in the IRA), limitations placed on their legal teams, in particular being unable to express their motivations as part of the defense, and one of their barristers being charged with contempt of court (for the first time in British history) — and it has all recently come to a dramatic head.
After a jury failed to convict the Filton Six of a number of crimes, including the most serious crime with which they were charged — aggravated burglary — they were subsequently retried. Two were acquitted and four found guilty of the lesser charge of criminal damage (for the same actions, which none of them denied). Even more shocking to the British public and the country’s legal profession, the four found guilty have been sentenced as having a “terrorist connection,” resulting in a combined total of over 20 years in prison. Yet this connection was withheld from the jury, and the defendants were not tried on that basis. Furthermore, the category of terrorist relies on an analysis of motivation, which the defendants were not allowed to explain during their trial.
In the same week, the news came that the Court of Appeal had overturned the High Court’s April 2026 ruling that the original ban of the group had been illegal. Palestine Action has already applied for permission to counterappeal, which will likely see the case go to the U.K. Supreme Court, and lawyers close to the case have predicted that if they lose, they will go to the European Court of Human Rights — notoriously more liberal than the U.K. judicial system.
It seems that the government has backed itself into a corner on the issue of Palestine Action, with yet more people demonstrating and being arrested in recent weeks, meaning the courts will be clogged with legal actions against individuals as well as the group as a whole for years to come. This is despite the fact that the government’s inability to censor Israel over the past three years has clearly lost them support. Not even their losses in recent local elections, with Gaza cited as a major factor, have initiated a change in direction.
The million-dollar question is why. Why is the government squandering so much money and political capital on pursuing this group through the courts? As I traced the story of the proscription of Palestine Action, I found a very different explanation unfolding than the one I was expecting from media and social media reports, which pointed to support for Israel, and according to some, direct Israeli influence. But the government’s determination to extend the label of “terrorist” is not only about Palestine. It is part of a far longer arc in the U.K., with Palestine the test case this government has chosen to push existing laws on terrorism and freedom of expression further than ever before. The optics are terrible, with public opinion against the government on Palestine and Palestine Action alike. But more important are the far-reaching consequences of these legal battles. Democratic avenues of dissent are being closed off, restricting the ability to challenge the government — and all future governments. The U.K. is looking increasingly authoritarian.
Palestine Action was founded in 2020 by activists Huda Ammori and Richard Barnard, who were inspired by the direct action techniques of environmental groups active at the time, such as Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion. This aim gained increasing urgency after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks and the subsequent war on Gaza. There was a sharp uptick in recruitment and therefore attacks, which were mostly aimed at Elbit Systems, an Israeli-owned defense company with subsidiaries all over the world, and there were also attacks on the premises of businesses associated with the company. Palestine Action attacks have caused, according to the proscription documents drawn up by the government (which has an interest in exaggerating such costs), millions of pounds worth of damage. Estimates vary, but the court heard that the Filton attack caused £1.2 million worth of damage, and an earlier attack in Glasgow in 2022 caused around another million. According to the words of the government: “Palestine Action is a pro-Palestinian group with the stated aim to support Palestinian sovereignty by using direct criminal action tactics to halt the sale and export of military equipment to Israel.” This description is largely accurate, as Palestine Action’s own comments clearly show, but is it terrorism?
Direct action has a long pedigree in U.K. history, with the suffragettes now lauded as achieving votes for women through their campaign of bombing letter boxes and buildings, and many other actions designed to raise the profile of the cause. (Emily Davies, for example, died after breaking onto the track at the Epsom Derby and bringing down the king’s horse.) “I still believe it’s the most effective, possibly the only effective way, of stopping the supply of weapons to Israel from this country,” Joey Hinchcliffe, one of the Filton Six, told me. “We’ve tried everything else.” Hinchcliffe has just been acquitted of all charges after spending 18 months in prison for their action.
Cooper, the former home secretary, unintentionally supported this view when she explained her decision in The Observer newspaper on Aug. 17, 2025 (during a month traditionally used by politicians to bury news). She began by acknowledging that the scenes of “suffering and devastation in Gaza” were “intolerable,” and that people were understandably feeling “desperate and angry.” She did not point out that those coming out to protest lawfully had therefore achieved nothing in the 22 months since the war in Gaza started (which she wrote as “18 months” of protesting), but it was a lesson easily drawn from her article — and that therefore, as Hinchcliffe noted, everything else Cooper was suggesting had been tried.
Implied, too, was that damage to property could be counted as terrorism, a move she did not acknowledge nor explain. The headline asserted that Palestine Action is not lawful protest, and that “Demonstrating is vital to free speech but this right does not extend to violence, intimidation and inflicting injuries.” But those causing the damage did not admit that this was outside the law, “not when the defences of necessity, prevention of crime and protection of property still exist and are applied to cases like mine,” Hinchcliffe wrote to me. Other Palestine Action activists had been acquitted on these defenses, including the “Discovery Five,” who were permitted by their judge to explain their motivations, and used the legal defense of preventing damage to property in Gaza. They were acquitted on June 18, 2026. Cooper neither defended her claim that these are unlawful actions, nor explained her further step of labelling them terrorism.
There was the same conflation when she addressed Parliament on the issue, saying that the vandalism of the two planes was “disgraceful,” pointing out that the group had a “long history of unacceptable criminal damage.” Again, she implied that the damage they inflicted, which was never denied but claimed with pride by the group, amounted to terrorism. Also unexpressed was the fact that the property was destroyed with the single intention of saving lives in the genocide we were all witnessing daily, in acts that had already been deemed illegal under international law.
Cooper’s article also implied the group was antisemitic, in her description of a “Jewish-owned business in north London badly vandalised in the dead of night by masked men.” This evocation of the ultimate bogeyman, faceless, attacking in the “dead” of night (the timing was actually chosen to lower the risk of injury to people) linked to another article in the Observer, from two weeks before. The linked article reported the vandalism in more depth, and it undermined Cooper’s own point. “The activists stencilled a message on the forecourt in spray paint,” the article said, “It read: ‘Drop Elbit’ — a reference to the Israeli arms manufacturer. The Stamford Hill business owns an industrial park in Kent where a subsidiary of Elbit has a factory.” Thus the action was, again, about disrupting the arms industry.
Their actions were part of a coherent strategy designed to save lives in Gaza, raise public awareness and put pressure on politicians all at once, though of course many would not condone their approaches, even if they agreed with the aims. This, again, is in keeping with the history of direct action: It splits movements between those who want to keep to nonviolent methods and those who believe nothing will change without violence. Palestine Action crossed lines concerning violence to individuals in two high-profile cases. The sentencing sheriff in a trial in Glasgow said: “Throwing pyrotechnics into areas where people are being evacuated could hardly be described as non-violent.” (A smoke bomb was thrown; activists have argued there was no threat to life.) In the Filton case, one of the defendants injured a police sergeant with the sledgehammer used to damage weapons inside the factory. He successfully argued that he acted to protect a co-defendant, never intending to cause injury, and was convicted of grievous bodily harm without intent.
Despite these two cases shading into violence against people rather than only property, the move to designate them as terrorists caused an outcry from a wide range of lawyers, activists and human rights groups, who denounced it, variously, as overreach, politically motivated and authoritarian. But what few pointed out was that Cooper was absolutely within the law. Under the Terrorism Act 2000, Palestine Action can be designated a terrorist organization, as can all direct action groups. The wording is vague, and includes “serious damage to property” along with the more usual definitions of terrorism as killing, or aiming to kill or injure. One aim under this act is “to influence the government.” All direct action is defined by damage to property with the aim of influencing government, and thus it was this legislation, signed into law a full 26 years ago, that has enabled Palestine Action to be proscribed.
Lawyers I spoke to described the effect of the past 26 years of legislation and the gradual restriction of methods to express dissatisfaction with the government. Beyond writing to your local parliamentarian or going on protests, there are really only two avenues left: voting and taking legal action. “I think that’s the danger,” one lawyer said. “That something becomes nondemocratic because people are inconvenienced on a tube journey. And nondemocratic, in this context, might amount to terrorism, legally.” Watching testimony from a range of Palestine Action activists builds a picture of young people frustrated by the lack of action to prevent the genocide they were watching daily. The feelings of helplessness were assuaged by direct action: Nothing else had worked, and they were preventing weapons from being used to kill indiscriminately, and in some cases shutting down the factories entirely.
Many have pointed out the possibility of political interference in the Palestine Action ban. Freedom of information requests show that there were meetings with representatives from Israel about protecting Elbit and restricting Palestine Action going all the way back to 2020, when then-Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab assured Israeli officials that the U.K. was committed to stopping incidents of direct action. But looking at the incidents in a longer timeline shows a very different picture: of an increasingly authoritarian country cracking down on various avenues of protest.
There has been remarkable continuity over the politically tumultuous 26 years since this act was signed into law, from its origin in Tony Blair’s New Labour to a coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats led by David Cameron, a Conservative majority government under a bewildering array of leaders, and the current Labour Party led, until recently, by Keir Starmer. The Terrorism Act 2000 was passed in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, seeking to put various pieces of ad hoc, temporary and emergency legislation stemming from the Troubles in Northern Ireland into one piece of permanent legislation, updated to take account of the very different landscape of international terrorism at the time. Of course, 9/11 gave the government more support for such legislation, and the coordinated attacks on the London transport system in 2005 widened police powers in dealing with suspected terrorists.
At the same time as extending anti-terror powers, successive governments were also restricting protesters’ rights in the name of national security. A step change came under the Boris Johnson government, with his Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. As part of a raft of changes to the criminal justice system, police were granted new powers to restrict and control protests and public assembly. This drew wide-ranging criticism, including from former heads of constabularies in Durham and Manchester, who said it signalled a move toward paramilitary policing.
Perhaps even more worrying were attacks on the legal profession itself. “Johnson seems to regard the law not as a core part of our constitutional system but as an unnecessary obstacle to the exercise of executive power,” wrote Conor Gearty, then-professor of human rights law at the London School of Economics, in the London Review of Books in January 2022. “There was a noticeable step change with the Boris Johnson government where they stopped respecting court judgments,” one human rights lawyer told me. “There was an apparent shift in mentality, and an increasing disregard for the rule of law, which has unfortunately continued under Labour.” This seems to indicate the breakdown of what the political historian Peter Hennessy has called the “Good chap theory” of British politics, writing that “The British Constitution is a state of mind,” which “requires a sense of restraint all round to make it work.” This restraint appears to be fading, along with the “good chaps,” leading to the situation we’re in now, where the government is flinging everything they can at the legal cases regarding Palestine Action, including the endless appeals, leaving thousands of suspected “terrorists” in limbo.
“What’s happening out there is such an abuse that it is dismantling democracy in our country,” the poet Alice Oswald told me. She was arrested twice for supporting Palestine Action, once in August 2025, soon after the ban was passed, and again in October. (At 59 years old, she happens to be the typical profile for a U.K. terrorist, in the current moment at least.) She believed in the cause of the group, but that wasn’t the motivation for getting arrested for the first time in her life. “I feel passionately about the Palestinian cause … but that’s not the absolute focus of getting arrested. The point where you can’t not act is where it’s really clear that in our country, that the system itself is breaking down.”
Mari Martin was also arrested for the first time in her life over this issue. Martin had always been an activist for environmental issues but had never risked arrest. “It seemed a step too far,” she told me. But then she saw how climate activists using direct action were being treated in court. “They were being denied their rights, really. Some of them were not allowed to mention the word climate emergency. They were not allowed to defend themselves by saying why they’d done it.”
Lawyers confirmed that this type of defense, i.e., of arguing that the climate crisis amounts to a “lawful excuse” for their actions, has in recent years been virtually ruled out. “Protesters are no longer allowed to say, ‘I was blocking the road because of climate change,’” one told me, “which often would have worked in the past.”
What started in environmental trials was easily expanded to Palestine Action, but despite the precedent, Palestine Action activists were not expecting this right to explain their justifications to be taken away. Hinchcliffe explained to me that although they knew they would end up in court, they believed that they had a legal defense based on explaining their motivations, and had watched other direct action activists walk free on this basis. But this was prevented by the initial rulings in the case. “No question of lawful excuse arose,” the judge later summarized, of his previous rulings. “The jury were to put views of the Middle East and the war in Gaza (whether their own or those of anyone else), and emotion, to one side.” In other words, the activists were left to either deny they had committed criminal damage or admit they had but be forbidden from explaining why to a jury of their peers. This led to some of the Filton Six defendants sacking their barristers in order to make their own closing speeches, their final attempt to say what they wanted to say, to explain to the jury their reasons for their actions. (And in two cases it worked: The jury acquitted them of all charges.) It’s no exaggeration to say that even those accused of killing a person get to offer an explanation for their actions.
Martin was inspired by the activist and retired social worker Trudi Warner, who sat outside courtrooms where the trials were taking place holding a sign that read: “Jurors you have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to your conscience.” This refers to jury equity, a right written on a 1670 plaque inside the Old Bailey, detailing the right of juries to give their verdict according to their convictions. Despite her sign being factually correct, the solicitor general sought to have her imprisoned, but the High Court found in her favour, the judge stating: “It is fanciful to suggest that Ms Warner’s conduct [amounted to common law contempt]. Her placard simply summarised the principle of jury equity. Her conduct was consistent with information sharing.”
Warner was acquitted of contempt of court for reminding juries of their right to acquit based on their conscience. But contempt of court was the charge used against the barrister defending the Filton Six, when he reminded the court of the “right of juries to give their verdict according to their convictions.”
The contempt of court charge against a leading human rights barrister was astonishing and sent shockwaves through the legal system. This was the first time in English legal history that a barrister has been charged for this in respect of a closing speech at a criminal trial. His chambers, Garden Court, said in a statement: “The procedure being used to prosecute Rajiv is wholly novel and without historical precedent.” Others in the profession flocked to his defense, calling it “chilling,” with an inevitable effect on future cases; the proceedings “undermine and diminish our system of criminal justice,” another statement from his chambers said. It appeared to many to be another example of how far the legal profession was disregarding its own rules in this one particular case.
But another expert I spoke to cautioned against such a knee-jerk response. The reminder to the juries of their right to acquit according to their conscience went against a ruling given by the judge, namely: “No counsel is permitted, in their closing speeches, to invite the jury to disregard the court’s rulings of law or to disregard their juror oaths or to apply what has been described as the principle of jury equity or to inform them of it.” Breaking a ruling is not permissible, and to allow it sets a bad precedent, he told me. If you disagree with the ruling — as most legal scholars I spoke to did about this and other rulings connected to the case — you should appeal the conviction, arguing that the ruling was wrong, not break it, the argument went, which is perhaps exactly what we will see in the appeals of the four convictions. This goes to the heart of another aspect of the case, that multiple rulings were issued that were, at a minimum, unusual — or “novel,” to use lawyers’ preferred term. Rulings are made by judges on points of law or procedure during a court case, but some of the rulings in the Palestine Action case were deeply controversial.
The rulings were extensive in this case, including deeming much of the evidence inadmissible, in particular: “(a) The history of the Middle East. (b) The reasons why Ms Head believed that Elbit supplied weapons to Israel. (c) The reasons why Ms Head believed that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.” Crucial, too, was the removal of the right to explain motivation. The jury, the judge ruled, “were to determine the charge of criminal damage by deciding only if it was sure that Ms Head had (whether herself, or as a joint enterprise with others) damaged or destroyed property belonging to another, intending that it be damaged or destroyed.”
Yet this was never in doubt, and never denied; damage had of course occurred and had of course been the intention. From the point of view of the activists, this was in the course of protesting a political position — and it was precisely that political position that the jury was not able to hear. Those rulings from the judge at the start of the case appeared to tip the scales, so that the activists would be convicted, with no lawful excuse.
Moreover, the jury was also not told what would happen afterward. They were not told that, if found guilty of criminal damage, the defendants would be sentenced for terrorism, and the press were forbidden to report on it. This has exacerbated the fear felt by so many of the protesters. “How can you be sentenced for a crime you weren’t tried for?” Martin asked me. “Don’t you get goosebumps at the very thought that this can happen?”
The question remains: Why is the government pursuing this group and the individual protesters with such single-mindedness? Why are the legal rulings so unusual, and the sentences so severe? The reason goes back to the longer trajectory of the U.K.’s crackdown on freedom of expression. The message to future protesters is unambiguous, the legal cases making it clear that lengthy prison sentences await, along with the record of terrorism. When attempting to “influence the government” was made a key part of terrorism legislation in 2000, it opened the door for this extreme charge to be applied to any form of dissent that bordered on criminal damage — including blocking roads or destroying deadly weapons. It seems that all governing parties are content to sacrifice the meaning of words and the freedom of expression in exchange for less criticism and expanded powers.
For both Oswald and Martin, choosing to be arrested was more to do with political interference in legal rights than Palestinian rights alone, though Oswald cogently argued that the two causes are linked. “That’s what happens if a government ties itself in knots to support a genocide. They’re going to end up being sort of internally contradictory, and they will only be able to manage that if they just lock everyone up who’s pointing it out.”
“They couldn’t have done this with any other group,” Hinchcliffe of the Filton Six echoed in a conversation with me. “The world’s getting more and more authoritarian, but I don’t think they could have achieved this crackdown and justified it to enough people with any other cause.” The problem with this view is that public opinion is largely with the protesters, not the government. Polls have repeatedly shown that the U.K. public want stronger penalties against Israel, and petitions and protests have continued to grow, and yet the government has used none of the tools at their disposal to restrain Israeli action despite the abundance of evidence of war crimes (last week a U.N. report was published that showed Israel has deliberately targeted Palestinian children, resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes). The government clearly misjudged this in the initial ban of Palestine Action, and protesters are continuing to hold placards and get arrested outside the courtrooms of all the myriad, ongoing trials.
The bigger picture, of course, is that Palestine Action is making a comment about upholding international law, laws that Britain itself has signed up to. In a conversation following her acquittal, Hinchcliffe repeated to me a phrase that they have used in previous public statements — that they are proud to be called a terrorist if it means saving lives. The thousands of people lining up to be arrested outside the courtroom feel the same: pride in standing up for democratic rights and against genocide. The government has lost public approval on this issue, but continues to fight on, and currently has all the tools on its side, thanks to increasingly wide-reaching and vaguely worded laws on public order and terrorism, and an increasingly conservative body of precedents on human rights. And all this happened under a government led by one of the most successful human rights lawyers of his generation — Keir Starmer. His resignation might give his successor an opportunity to change direction, but given the continuity from Blair to the coalition to the Tory government and back to Labour, this seems an unlikely hope. Much currently rests with juries and the limited evidence presented to them, but with the steady erosion of the right to a trial by jury, this last avenue of approach is also being closed off (though Andy Burnham, who is likely to become prime minister in the coming weeks, has suggested that he would reverse the current plans). With so many coming out to be arrested, day after day, the country will soon be full of terrorists (legally speaking), all committed to peaceful protest. The government, as well as the law, has surely never seemed as much of an ass, but the consequences are grave for the future of protest and legal avenues to express dissent — both key parts of democracy. How long the appeals and counterappeals can go on without an examination of where this is taking the country remains to be seen.
Lydia Wilson is Culture Editor at New Lines Magazine
