If Starmer’s Labour proscribes Palestine Action, none of us will be safe

This week, Sir Keir Starmer’s government is set to launch an attack on civil liberties of a kind not seen in the UK in the modern era by proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist group. In so doing, Starmer’s government will almost certainly invite the routine surveillance of swathes of the politically engaged public and even the political opponents of Starmer’s party. 

It may, in the worst-case scenario, provide the tools to criminalise a new generation of anti-genocide, anti-war and anti-austerity political candidates who are on track to seriously threaten the most senior members of Starmer’s cabinet – and Starmer himself. 

This is the politics of Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Viktor Orban’s Hungary. It stains the progressive history of the Labour Party. 

I know about that progressive history because it was fundamental to the struggle against South African apartheid. I was recruited to the ANC in the 1980s, becoming, in the eyes of the South African government, a terrorist sympathiser. I went into exile because an authoritarian regime was using the law to smash a global anti-racist movement for peace and justice.

If Palestine Action is proscribed, will I, and the global movement that supports it, be called terrorist sympathisers yet again?

Back then, when Margaret Thatcher was declaring Nelson Mandela a terrorist (see how well the UK establishment’s idea of terrorism ages?), we in the ANC knew that the Labour Party’s rank-and-file had our back.

It was precisely this solidarity that destroyed the despicable apartheid regime, which was choked by the dual hands of ungovernability at home – purposeful, defiant criminality – and sanctions and boycott abroad.

If Palestine Action is proscribed, will I, and the global movement that supports it, be called terrorist sympathisers yet again?

The decision to proscribe Palestine Action has been slammed by every major human rights and civil liberties organisation in the country, from Liberty to Amnesty International, as a direct attack on basic political freedoms. The Home Office’s own civil servants, hardly a bevy of radicals, are reportedly astonished by the decision and its plainly political character. 

Anybody with any foresight knows that it will create a dangerous precedent that could be used by this country’s insurgent far right to criminalise resistance to authoritarianism, racism and environmental despoliation.

For the first time in the UK’s history, a domestic non-violent direct action group, and anyone who supports them, will be recast as a terrorist. A handful of committed activists, wielding little more than cans of red paint, bolt cutters and electric scooters, will be considered to be the same as groups like Islamic State, which ritually beheaded prisoners on camera, or Boko Haram, which used its reign of terror to abduct 2,000 women and girls, whom they raped, abused or sold into sexual slavery. It is obscene. 

Opposing Israel’s genocide

And what is Palestine Action protesting against? Israel’s genocide of Gaza. An honest to god, live-streamed genocide, shown daily and in high fidelity on our phones, where we can see the viscera of children carried in plastic bags and people severed in two by falling buildings.

A genocide that has created the largest cohort of child amputees in history.

A genocide that drops bombs on refugee tents and burns the sick and wounded alive.

A genocide that has killed tens of thousands of children.

A genocide that, in a single year, reduced Gaza’s life expectancy from 75 to 40 – the lowest in the world.

A genocide enabled by the weapons of war that our government continues to sell and the surveillance flights we continue to fly. 

Starmer’s government has the temerity to claim that in proscribing Palestine Action it is acting in the interests of national security, including assisting Ukraine. But this is the inversion of the truth. Nobody’s national security – and certainly not Ukraine’s – is enhanced by Israel’s genocide, which is destroying the credibility of international law. 

Despite the desperate smears, Palestine Action does not disdain the law – it is the law’s most fervent defender.

Palestine Action activists do not resist arrest. They do not seek mistrials or hide behind technicalities. They undertake their actions knowing that they will have to answer to a jury of their peers. They make the conscious decision to risk their liberty in solidarity with the people of Gaza. They do so not because they reject the law, but because they desperately want it to be applied – to the representatives of a genocidal government who fly secretly to meet with our foreign secretary, to the weapons companies that aid and abet war crimes, and to our politicians who allow mass slaughter.

Again and again, Palestine Action’s activists have been found not guilty by their fellow citizens, for the plain and obvious reason that it offends natural justice to jail individuals using non-violent methods to disrupt the annihilation of an entire people.

Threat to democracy

What of the consequences for British democracy? 

It is no secret that Palestine Action has huge support among the British public. It is no secret that it is held in high esteem by a large number of progressives, including young voters, prominent Green Party figures and many journalists. It is no secret that progressives, who strive to fight injustice through solidarity, will be infuriated, horrified and outraged by a plainly unjust proscription. It is no secret that they will be tempted to speak out. 

All of these individuals and groups, having previously defended Palestine Action against proscription, will now be primary targets for surveillance by counter-terror police, who will no doubt be under pressure to enforce this new proscription. 

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So when George Monbiot addresses a literary festival, will there be a plainclothes policeman taking notes of what was said? 

When Owen Jones livestreams on YouTube, will police resources be dedicated to monitoring the comment section? 

When Sally Rooney flies to the UK, will she be held up and interrogated at the airport by counter-terror police because of what she wrote in the Guardian?

When Zarah Sultana meets with her constituents, will she have to wonder whether she is speaking to a resident of Coventry South or an agent provocateur? 

When Green Party candidates like Zack Polanski hold party meetings, will everyone be looking over their shoulder in fear and suspicion?

When you walk alongside the hundreds of thousands of other protesters who march peacefully through the streets of London to demand an end to genocide, will you be surveilled?

Will all of us opposing genocide and this unjust proscription have to worry about getting that knock on the door in the middle of the night?

It is shameful that these questions even need to be asked.

Who will be targeted next?

But there is another ugly dimension to this affair. The decision to proscribe Palestine Action will undoubtedly invite the surveillance of the sort of anti-war, anti-austerity and pro-Gaza candidates who now threaten many of Starmer’s most senior Cabinet ministers.

Look at Wes Streeting, Starmer’s mooted heir-apparent, sitting on a 500-vote majority threatened by Leanne Mohammed – a twenty-something independent who is unshakeable in her commitment to opposing crimes in Gaza, to fighting imperialism and defeating austerity.

Or look at Shabana Mahmood, the Lord Chancellor, who barely held on to what used to be one of Labour’s five safest seats in the country in Birmingham. Recent polling suggests that a mere 5 percent (yes, 5 percent!) of voters in Birmingham are likely to vote for the Labour Party in next year’s local election. 

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Then look at Sir Keir Starmer, whom I challenged at the last election, and whose majority was slashed in half. I do not presume to assume that the progressive community in Holborn & St Pancras will choose me to run at the next general election, but I know for certain that they will choose a candidate that will push Starmer to the brink.

Walk around Camden and talk to ordinary people and you will soon discover their genuine outrage that their own MP fails to properly stand up to Israel’s genocide while taking away benefits from the elderly and disabled.

What will happen in the lead-up to the next election, when dozens of Labour MPs are threatened by a newly emerging cohort of progressives to their left, some independent and some in the Green Party? Will the party face them fair and square? Or will the party do what it did to the likes of Faiza Shaheen and innumerable other left-wingers: go through their social media to find anything that might even resemble an infraction and use it against them? 

Forgive me for being alarmist, but we’ve been here before. In 2022, the Labour Party under the control of Starmer’s faction proscribed a series of groups. Anybody who expressed support for the groups would be immediately expelled. Incredibly, proscription was applied retrospectively. People could be expelled for having liked a tweet from an organisation years before doing so was an offence. 

It obviously offended natural justice. So the party changed its rule book. Previously, the rule book had said the principles of natural justice would apply to cases like proscription. Now that was deleted. Yes, read that again: the Labour Party literally deleted natural justice from its rule book.

Maybe I’m being an alarmist. Maybe this government, struggling in the polls, won’t use the state to go after its political opponents

Back then, the Labour Party claimed it was proscribing groups to tackle antisemitism. In reality, proscription was used as a tool to expel people the leadership found politically unpalatable but who could not be brought up on other offences. It was through this mechanism that the party expelled renowned filmmaker Ken Loach. 

It was also through this mechanism that the party expelled a raft of left-wing and anti-Zionist Jews. In fact, the Labour Party disproportionately used proscription to expel Jews – in the name of fighting antisemitism! Now, the Labour government is proscribing a non-violent direct action group opposing the war crimes of Israel – in defence of the law.

Maybe I’m being an alarmist. Maybe this government, struggling in the polls, won’t use the state to go after its political opponents. Maybe they won’t do exactly what they did to destroy their opposition in the Labour Party. But we can all agree that in a functioning democracy, this shouldn’t even be conceivable.

Labour MPs: Do not go quietly

In 1996, Nelson Mandela called me into his office and told me that I was being “deployed” to South Africa’s first post-apartheid parliament. As a proud Jew, the son of a Holocaust survivor, it was the honour of my life to introduce the first ever motion in South Africa’s parliament to recognise and lament the Holocaust. I know what it is like to stand in parliament and make decisions about the future of your country. 

So, as a fellow legislator, let me take this opportunity to address the Labour Party’s 411 MPs who will vote on proscription this week. 

In the near future, there will be museums and memorials to this genocide. Soon, everyone will acknowledge this once-in-a-lifetime horror. Soon, your friends, your family, your children and your grandchildren, will ask: what did you do when Israel was bombing the children of Gaza? 

Did you have the guts to defend the innocents of Gaza, to protect British democracy, and to stand up to your own leaders?

How do you think they will respond when you tell them that, instead of standing up for the Palestinian people, you voted to make it a terrorist offence to spray-paint an aircraft flying surveillance flights over Gaza, or mildly vandalise Donald Trump’s golf course, or disrupt the Israeli war machine with some hammers and no shortage of personal bravery?

In the dead of night, when you can’t sleep, as you turn over your life’s choices, you will have to answer to yourself for what you do this week. 

What will your answer be? 

In this moment of crisis, did you stand on the side of genocide? 

Or did you have the guts to defend the innocents of Gaza, to protect British democracy, and to stand up to your own leaders? Did you say, aye, Palestine Action and everyone who supports them are terrorists? Or did you instead say, no. No more. Never again. Not in my name. 

Choose wisely. The world, and your constituents, are watching.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.