11.09.2025

We will not be silenced

Both the 30th national demonstration against the genocide in Gaza and the protest against the proscription of Palestine Action were peaceful and disciplined, writes Ian Spencer, yet the police arrested 890 people under terrorism legislation

On September 6 the day started as any other. The demonstrations have been going on so long that the usual stalls were up and running before most of the marchers arrived. The political groups were all in place, papers at the ready. But this, the 30th national demonstration organised by the Stop the War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, etc, was to be one of two. The other, in Parliament Square, featured people holding up placards such as: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action” in defiance of the organisation’s proscription under the Terrorism Act 2000.

This smaller demo was called by Defend our Juries, which has been organising peaceful civil disobedience in defence of the right of juries to acquit a defendant according to their conscience. Jurors, of course, have had a tendency to find PA activists not guilty when they argue, naturally enough, that, by vandalising Israeli arms factories, or RAF reconnaissance aircraft, they are helping prevent a far bigger crime: genocide.

Such acquittals have occurred despite judges frequently ruling that juries are to ignore defendants’ reasons for their actions and stick to ‘the facts’, which do not, of course, include the fact that the weapons used by the IDF kill civilians, two thirds of whom are women and children.

According to the StWC, there were 300,000 on the main demonstration. As usual, it was the very model of peaceful protest. The police, ever present, were low key and not out in particularly in large numbers. After all, most of them were needed to deal with the people patiently waiting to be arrested in Parliament Square!

Proscription

On July 5, the day the ban on PA came into force, 29 people were arrested at a demonstration in support of the non-violent direct-action group,¹ while another 71 were arrested at similar demonstrations across the UK on July 12.² A further 100 were arrested on July 19, including an 81-year-old former magistrate.³ At a larger demonstration in London on August 9, the figure was 532 arrested - 521 of them for holding an offending placard.⁴

On September 6 around 1,500 held some illegal, usually hand-drawn placards, 857 of whom were arrested under the Terrorism Act. Amongst them were Sue Parfitt, an 83-year-old retired priest, and 62-year-old Mike Higgins, who is blind and in a wheelchair. The Met Police were at pains to point out that a further 33 were arrested for other offences.

Among the placards and T-shirts of protestors not yet ready to be arrested were a range of inventive ways of saying they support PA - most common of which was the face of Morph, the 1970s ‘stop motion animation’ figure. This is because on August 18 Miles Pickering was arrested for wearing a T-shirt he had designed, using the PA font, saying “Plasticine Action” (!), the ‘o’ of which contained a picture of the animated figure, with thumbs up, and had the subheading: “We oppose AI-generated animation”. Whether the arresting officer was overcautious or dyslexic is not clear. However, it was not long before Miles was ‘de-arrested’ - and since then he has gone on to sell thousands of the T-shirts on his website in support of Medical Aid for Palestinians.⁵

The Met also managed to arrest (I suppose, strictly speaking, confiscate) a mannequin! One of the protestors in Parliament Square had brought a shop dummy to hold the placard!⁶ But my favourite hand-drawn placard of the day was a piece of cardboard held by a woman, which read, “Seems like a good day to remind everyone that ‘I was only following orders’ was rejected as a defence at the Nuremberg trials!”

It seemed clear to many observers that the police were not enjoying their titanic battle with the frail, elderly and inanimate, especially in the face of demonstrators chanting “Shame on you!” and “Who do you serve?” But that did not stop the Met Police from claiming to be the victims in all of this!

They alleged that that there had “been a coordinated effort to prevent officers from carrying out their duties, which escalated to violence”, with “an exceptional level of abuse, including punches, kicks, spitting and objects being thrown, in addition to verbal abuse”.⁷ However, photos and video footage showed the Met wielding their batons and aggressively arresting non-violent people. At least one young man was injured and required treatment following a police assault.

However, the principal weapon employed by the police was boredom. The Parliament Square protest started promptly at 1pm, but the bulk of the arrests did not begin until about 5.30pm - presumably in the hope that people with trains to catch would drift off home. But many of the demonstrators were made of sterner stuff and waited to be escorted or carried from the square to be processed in a street facility, made up of gazebos, to cope with the large numbers. Protestors were typically kept waiting for hours to have their details taken before being released, without having to see the inside of a police station.

The StWC leadership did eventually send a contingent with a banner to show solidarity with the Defend our Juries demonstration, but that was after 4pm, by which time many of those who had attended the main demo had heard the speeches in Whitehall and started to drift off home. Just imagine what might have happened if the next stop for the main demo had been total solidarity with those waiting to be arrested in Parliament Square.

Success

The author of the ban on PA, Yvette Cooper, has, of course, now been reshuffled (off to the foreign office) and her replacement is the one-time advocate of Palestinian rights and direct action, Shabana Mahmood.

In 2014 Mahmood lay down outside a branch of Sainsbury’s in Birmingham city centre. She said, “We lay down in the street … to say we object to them stocking goods from illegal settlements - and they must stop. We managed to close down that store at peak time on Saturday. This is how we can make a difference.”⁸

For that, Mahmood, the MP for Birmingham Ladywood, not only got a telling-off from Labour Party bureaucrats, but was accused by the Jewish Chronicle of encouraging “mob rule” in her support for the campaign against the Zionist state.⁹ She subsequently released a cringeworthy retraction, although on her website Mahmood still describes herself as a “passionate supporter of Palestinian rights”. But then in the 2024 general election she had a greatly reduced majority when she was challenged by the independent candidate, Akhmed Yakoob, whose campaign focused on Palestine. She clearly knows which side her bread is buttered and identifies with the Blue Labour faction of the party.

In the meantime, PA can claim to have had some success. Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, has taken the decision to close one of its Bristol plants, which had been repeatedly targeted by PA. Elbit’s latest accounts show that it made an operating loss of £4.7 million last year - compared to a £3.8 million profit in 2023. Last year it sold its West Midlands-based subsidiary, Elite KL, after its operating profit fell by 75%, primarily due to increased ‘security’ costs. However, that is small beer, when one considers that Elbit Systems UK is part of a consortium close to winning a £2 billion contract that would make it a “strategic partner” of the ministry of defence.¹⁰

Back to Palestine Action. On September 4, the court of appeal ruled that the home office can attempt to block a move by PA to have its ban overturned by judicial review. While the legal wrangles continue, so does the genocide, the proscription and the fact that some PA activists are languishing on remand in prison. The judicial review of the PA ban is currently scheduled to be heard during a three-day hearing in November.

Huda Ammori, one of PA’s founders, said: “The political misstep by Yvette Cooper has led to hundreds facing prosecution under the Terrorism Act, leading to a much wider chilling effect on the freedom of speech.” She added that, in “doubling down” in her attempt to prevent the judicial review, the home secretary was “trying to avoid scrutiny of her decision.”¹¹

But the people of Gaza cannot wait and Defend our Juries will not wait: they are already planning a bigger demonstration to make the proscription of PA unworkable.¹² Imagine if it was not just 1,500, but tens of thousands!