Sometimes, you see something and you know it just doesn’t feel right. Watching the hundreds of Palestine Action protestors being arrested for doing nothing more than holding up a placard is, rightly, uncomfortable. About half of those arrested and carried off by unhappy-looking police officers at Saturday’s event in Parliament Square – who have already been dubbed “march martyrs” – were over 60.
Of course, people of that age can be dangerous in all sorts of ways, not least, to themselves, but they do not, by and large, make for ideal terrorists. Calling them such, and detaining them under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000, feels absurd. It’s just too heavy-handed and inappropriate.
If it happened in Russia, say, to some dissidents calling for a ceasefire in Ukraine, we’d be hopping mad about it. Because it happens here, and the bobbies are doing it, and, to be fair, as gently as they could to some slightly frail individuals, there seems to be less of an outcry. Yet we’re supposed to be the free nation.
In Trump’s America, it could happen – but at least they’d have a constitutional safeguard: the First Amendment, an inviolable law. The British have the 1998 Human Rights Act, and the European Convention on Human Rights, which the Tories and Reform UK would probably scrap.
It’s frankly ridiculous, as well as pathetic and offensive, that Jonathon Porritt, the well-known environmental campaigner and former adviser to King Charles, is at risk of acquiring a criminal record because he supports Palestine Action. Or, rather, has the audacity to wave a piece of cardboard around stating such.
However, perhaps the most extraordinary case is that of Alice Oswald. At 58, she’s on the young side, but this former Oxford professor of poetry and winner of the TS Eliot Prize can be nobody’s idea of an Islamist hate-preacher. Anything but.
She is, however, as you’d expect, a perceptive observer: “Clearly, there were some police officers who were really struggling with what they had to do,” she said. “You could see the slightly shifty look on their faces, too. When I was speaking to them in the police van, I did say: ‘Write to Yvette Cooper and tell her that this is making your life impossible.’”
I hope they do at least make their feelings known to their more senior officers. It does at least defeat the myth that we have two-tier policing – the police once again arresting people on the pro-Palestinian side and upholding the rule of law, even if it’s not a particularly good law.
One defect in its present application is to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation with insufficient evidence for it. They certainly use force and violence against property, and have done some serious damage to RAF aircraft when they virtually strolled into a lightly fenced-off base in Oxfordshire. But is that “terror”?
It is not the same as blowing up a Tube train or a shopping centre, or equivalent to the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023. Being a supporter of Palestine Action doesn’t automatically make you a Hamas supporter.
There should be some special category of offence regarding groups who sabotage equipment essential to the defence of the realm, like the old law that made arson in a naval dockyard punishable by hanging.
The authorities mumble about Palestine Action having a dark side that can’t be disclosed for security reasons, but that doesn’t sound like it’s convincing enough to justify putting a poetry professor in a cell.
The wider question is, of course, free speech, which for some reason seems to have become the preserve of the radical Right. In other words, if someone actually wants to wander around a city or go on a march with the message “I Support Hamas”, or an Isis flag, or some IRA banner, should they be at liberty to do so? Should they be allowed to write that online, in a newspaper, or say it out loud on radio or television? What about the terrorists’ “political” spokespeople?
Back in the 1980s, we had a situation where Mrs Thatcher decided that the IRA should not be given the “oxygen of publicity”, and so Gerry Adams could be seen but not heard on the Nine O’Clock News after some murderous attack, with the reporter stating what he was saying (or, as if in parody, an actor voicing the words in a Gerry Adams Irish accent).
I don’t have an answer to this, except to resort to that notion of what feels right and wrong.
A recruitment stall for Isis on a high street dishing out hateful antisemitic propaganda feels wrong, and dangerous. So, too, would an extreme right-wing “patriotic” group dishing out ugly Islamophobic material, inciting hatred.
We have public order laws preventing such things. But taking someone off the street for holding up a copy of a quip from Private Eye can’t be right.
For the record, it was this: “Unacceptable Palestine Action: spraying military planes with paint. Acceptable Palestine Action: Shooting Palestinians queuing for food.”
There. I’ve said it, too. Should I now expect to be arrested? And if not, why not? I’m fashionably old enough, you know.
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