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A week of mass actions protesting against the ban on Palestine Action has been announced, beginning at the Labour party conference in Liverpool and culminating in a national mobilisation in Parliament Square in London on 4 October.
The plans were announced by Defend Our Juries on Friday, a week after 857 people were arrested under the Terrorism Act at a demonstration outside parliament opposing the proscription. It said the next phase of the protests represented a “major escalation” that would create an “unprecedented challenge” for the police, with 1,100 people already registered to take part and risk arrest.
“There should be no confusion about where the blame lies: it sits squarely with the government for pursuing this authoritarian ban, plunging an overstretched police force and court and prison systems which are already in crisis, into further chaos,” a spokesperson said. “The power lies with the new home secretary to end this farce by listening to MPs, lords, UN experts, legal professionals, human rights advocates – and the majority of her own party’s members – and lift this dangerous, anti-democratic ban.”
They accused the prime minister, Keir Starmer, of “grotesque double standards” for meeting the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, this week, while people had been arrested for holding cardboard signs in support of Palestine Action. They said it made people “even more determined to do whatever it takes to overturn this unjust ban, including by targeting Starmer’s upcoming conference”.
Protests at the party conference, which begins on 28 September, will be an unwelcome distraction for the prime minister as he attempts to address Labour’s slump in the polls.
Defend Our Juries launched a new call for people across the country to show their defiance by placing a sign saying “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action” – the same wording people have brandished on placards at the demonstrations – in their front windows. It follows a viral video of a former Labour councillor, Keith Hackett, being told by police he could legally display a poster in support of Palestine Action because it was “not in public”.
Last Saturday’s demonstration was the second major protest organised by Defend Our Juries in defiance of the ban. Defend Our Juries claimed there were 1,500 people holding signs saying “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action” and that the police’s failure to arrest everyone showed they were overwhelmed.
At the previous demonstration, last month, 532 people were arrested, half of whom were aged 60 or above. A spokesperson claimed opposition to the ban, the first of a direct action protest group, was “growing at an exponential rate”.
The then home secretary, Yvette Cooper, announced plans to proscribe Palestine Action in June, three days after it claimed responsibility for a break-in at RAF Brize Norton, although it later emerged that she was advised to proscribe the group in March. She said the group, which targeted organisations it claimed were complicit in Israeli war crimes against Palestinians, had a “long history of unacceptable criminal damage” and was a threat to national security.
Since the ban came into force on 5 July, more than 1,600 people have been arrested under the Terrorism Act, including vicars, priests, doctors, former government advisers, army veterans, and many elderly and disabled people. The figure is more than were previously arrested during the entire “war on terror” since 2001.
Most have not been charged, although seven people appeared in court last week accused of being organisers of the demonstrations.
On Wednesday, the Trades Union Congress annual congress unanimously passed a motion calling on the government to repeal the proscription of Palestine Action.
The president of the civil servants’ union said the ban represented a “significant abuse of counter-terrorist powers and a direct attack on our right to protest against the genocidal Israeli regime”.
