The latest Irish Times’ Weekend section was enlivened with a picture of Sally Rooney on the cover – windblown hair, red lipstick and a pensive expression – and a headline inside saying, “I support Palestine Action. If this makes me a “supporter of terror” under UK law, so be it”.
Really you hardly needed to read the piece, in which Sally Rooney declares:
“I feel obliged to state that – like the hundreds of of protesters arrested this weekend – I too support Palestine Action….My books, at least for now, are widely available in bookshops and even supermarkets. In recent years the UK’s state broadcaster has also televised two fine adaptations of my novels and therefore regularly pays me residual fees. I want to be clear that I intend to use these proceeds of my work, as well as my public platform generally, to go on supporting Palestine Action and direct action against genocide…To ensure that the British public is made aware of my position, I would happily publish this statement in a UK newspaper – but that would now be illegal.”
So, at a stroke, Sally Rooney has managed to give an endorsement for Palestine Action which is quoted almost everywhere, to put herself on the side of free speech and to make a fool of the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper. If it hadn’t been for the Government’s foolish decision to proscribe Palestine Action, the Normal People author would be just one more celeb protesting about the (very grim) situation in Gaza. As it is, she is taunting ministers by inviting the “British state” to investigate WH Smith and the BBC for promoting her work and funding her activities.
Personally I can’t read too little Sally Rooney, and I say this on the basis of having read a page or two of Normal People and listened to a reading of a few episodes of her subsequent novel on the radio. This may be unfair but I tried and failed to read more. Less engrossing narrative I have yet to encounter, though I gather it’s enlivened by bits of filth.
The author herself is plainly intelligent and articulate as well as being that rare beast in contemporary letters, a Marxist, but it’s not enough to make her characters engaging or likeable. She is, I’d say, a symptom of the problem of the contemporary novel in which not a great deal happens to not very fascinating people yet the reader feels obliged to hang on in there anyway on the basis that everyone says it’s really good.
Still, Sally is a notable member of the contemporary pantheon of celebrated British and Irish authors – I wish that were higher praise – and where she leads, others may follow. How long before other writers and actors of a liberal persuasion similarly defy the Home Secretary to prosecute them for funding a terror group by giving money to Palestine Action?
As it is, activist pensioners are much in demand to be very publicly arrested for carrying placards supporting the organisation – this is on the basis that a criminal record won’t do them much harm at their age. What a waste of police time and court time.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was forever engaged in disrupting activities but nobody thought of proscribing them
Palestine Action has allegedly engaged in acts of criminal damage, notably when some of its members were charged with spray painting fighter planes at RAF Brize Norton. The notion, however, that it is a terrorist group on a par with the IRA or Islamic State is nonsense. It’s like Just Stop Oil or the other aggressively activist environmental groups which do their best to commit very public acts of damage to publicise the cause. The way to deal with this is to arrest people for criminal damage, not for belonging to the organisation, or for expressing support for it. So if someone chucks a tin of soup at an important painting, spray-paints fighter jets or glues themselves to the motorway, you deal with that through the existing criminal law. Then you hope very much that if convicted, the judge hearing the case will throw the book at them. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was forever engaged in disrupting activities at bases associated with nuclear weapons, but nobody thought of proscribing them – that would have looked like proscribing free protest on the issue of nuclear weapons. Why is this government more trigger happy than Mrs Thatcher’s in the 1980s?
Proscribing Palestine Action – whether you agree with the organisation’s goals or not – was a mistake on the part of a Home Secretary who wants to look tough but simply isn’t: witness her abject failure to stop the migrant boat crossings. And government by gesture is bad politics. Sally Rooney is absolutely entitled to sound off about the dreadful situation in Gaza, but giving her the opportunity to taunt the Government with her financial support for Palestine Action is to give her the unearned gift of publicity.
She is in the very agreeable position of defying the state by making a donation and then sounding off about it in an Irish paper. Are the police meant to arrest her the next time she lands in London? Don’t they have better things to do? It’s time for the Home Secretary to execute that useful and familiar political manoeuvre, the U-turn, and lift the ban on Palestine Action. Then it should monitor its activities like hawks.
Melanie McDonagh is a columnist at The London Standard
