Dubbing tame pensioners ‘terrorists' makes a farce out of the Terrorism Act and freedom of speech

Independent

a day ago

How upsetting for JD Vance to find himself holidaying in a country where terrorism rages out of control and where an autocratic leader orders people to be grabbed off the streets for voicing even the mildest of dissent. We know the US vice president cares about these things. Only last week, he warned that the UK must not go down a 'very dark path' of losing free speech.
And a few months ago, he spoke of his concern at the 'backslide from conscience rights' in Britain. So we can only imagine his dismay over breakfast in the Cotswolds to read of the rounding up of hundreds of mainly older people for daring to scrawl a few words on a piece of cardboard. And how to calibrate his alarm after learning that they were all suspected terrorists?
That's right – literally hundreds of terrorists roaming the streets barely 90 minutes up the M40 from the agreeable country house in the village of Dean where he has come with his family for a bit of R&R.
His officials will doubtless brief him as to what on earth is going on. They will tell him that there is a group called Palestine Action, which has been going around mounting vigorous protests at what they view as the Starmer government's support for the situation in Gaza. The protests have included spray-painting military planes on an RAF base.
Vance will not like the sound of these people. But even he might concede that they may be acting out of conscience, and that, as he argued only in February, conscience rights should be protected. How would he react to being told that these elderly protestors had also been labelled terrorists in a piece of rushed legislation last month? And that the effect of the new law meant that it was now a terror offence to even voice support for the banned group? Surely he's with George Orwell: 'If liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear?'
The background to this outbreak of terror on the streets of London? More than 500 well-meaning protesters were arrested under section three of the Terrorism Act 2000 for holding a placard indicating support for Palestine Action. Around half of them were aged 60 and above, including almost 100 people who are in their seventies – and 15 of whom are in their eighties.
Never mind free speech, it is difficult to imagine a bigger waste of stretched police time than deploying thousands of officers to haul harmless old people off the streets. And it is straightforwardly bonkers to order such draconian action where the entire prison system is close to collapse. And yet prison governors were ordered to trigger 'capacity gold command' at the prospect of an influx of demonstrators swamping available cells.
And may god help the court system as it struggles to process these pesky protesting pensioners. Only recently, Ministry of Justice figures show that there is currently a backlog of more than 76,000 cases in the Crown Court and 310,304 outstanding cases in the magistrates' court.
Now, it is perfectly reasonable to deplore the behaviour of Palestine Action – especially when they inflict costly damage. But there are already numerous laws in place to deal with such criminal behaviour – and the protestors well understand they could well spend a lengthy stretch inside for acting on their conscience. That doesn't deter them.
You may similarly deprecate the group's beliefs. But it is perfectly reasonable to believe that Israel is, in fact, committing genocide in Gaza and vehemently to object to the UK assisting in that mission in any way at all.
It is worth reading a lengthy and densely argued recent op-ed column in The New York Times by Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. He is an Israeli American scholar who's been described by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum as one of the world's leading specialists on the subject of genocide.
'My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people,' he wrote on 15 July. 'Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the IDF as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognise one when I see one.'
Again, you may disagree with Bartov. But if he, with his background and expertise, can legitimately make such an argument in an international publication of repute, then why not the thousands demonstrating in London and other cities this past weekend? Why should the British state be so alarmed by these beliefs – and by people who feel impelled to act on them – that they introduce draconian laws that would predictably lead to apple-cheeked quaker grannies being carted off to police cells? And if quaker grannies are now termed terrorists, doesn't that devalue the whole currency of terrorism?
If you don't have the time to read Bartov's piece, can I suggest reading this magnificent letter from a retired wing commander named Andrew Brookes, who was UK commander of RAF Greenham Common cruise missile base in the 1980s? Older readers will remember the heady days when the base was under virtually constant siege from women who repeatedly cut the perimeter fence.
'We had a strong Ministry of Defence police presence to stop intruders, often in a rather Benny Hill fashion,' wrote the former commander. 'The intruders were left in no doubt that if they tried to infiltrate the secure storage area with its 96 nuclear warheads, they would be shot by US air force military police, who were a mean crowd. There were thousands of such protesters 'threatening' the base, but their freedom of speech was always respected and I never heard anyone in Whitehall or the Pentagon suggest that they should be classed as terrorists.'
It's a funny old world when Margaret Thatcher had a greater sense of individual liberty than Keir Starmer, who once upon a time defended protestors who, similarly motivated by conscience, broke into RAF bases.
And Vance? Is his respect for free expression in the UK unconditional, or is it limited to speech he approves of? If it's the former, will we see him break off from his holiday to denounce the bully-boy tactics against people who feel they cannot remain silent in the face of genocide? Stranger things have happened.