Palestine Action member tells BBC plan to ban group 'absurd'
A Palestine Action member has told the BBC it is "absurd" the government plans to proscribe the group, which would effectively brand it as a terrorist organisation.Saeed Taji Farouky said it "rips apart the very basic concepts of British democracy and the rule of law", adding: "It's something everyone should be terrified about."The BBC understands the home secretary is preparing a written statement to put before Parliament on Monday.It comes after Palestine Action activists broke into RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire and sprayed two planes with red paint, an incident branded "disgraceful" by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.
Mr Farouky told the BBC he has a conviction for criminal damage related to a different Palestine Action protest.He described the potential move from the government as a "knee-jerk reaction" and said it was "being rushed through".When asked if the group should have been surprised by the move to proscribe it, given its actions, Mr Farouky said the government had tried to reclassify Palestine Action for years and it had "never been a tactic that scared" them.Pressed on whether the group had crossed a line by targeting a military site with a role in protecting the UK's national security, Mr Farouky responded by outlining the group's objectives.He said Palestine Action's "whole reason for being is to break the material supply chain to genocide" and said Friday's incident was an "escalation in tactics because the genocide has escalated".Israel has strongly denied allegations of genocide relating to the ongoing war in Gaza.RAF Brize Norton serves as the hub for UK strategic air transport and refuelling, including flights to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. The air force has conducted reconnaissance flights over Gaza out of the Cyprus base.
Footage posted online by Palestine Action on Friday showed two people inside the Oxfordshire airbase in darkness, with one riding on a scooter up to an Airbus Voyager and spraying paint into its jet engine.After sharing the footage, a spokesperson said: "Despite publicly condemning the Israeli government, Britain continues to send military cargo, fly spy planes over Gaza and refuel US and Israeli fighter jets."The incident, which is being investigated by counter-terrorism police, prompted the government to launch a security review at military bases across the UK.On Friday, a spokesperson for Palestine Action said: "When our government fails to uphold their moral and legal obligations, it is the responsibility of ordinary citizens to take direct action."In a separate post on X, it said the group represented "every individual" who is opposed to Israel's military action in Gaza, adding: "If they want to ban us, they ban us all".Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer called the incident at RAF Brize Norton "disgraceful" on Friday, while Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said it was "deeply concerning".However, Amnesty International UK said on Friday that it was "deeply concerned at the use of counter terrorism powers to target protests"."Terrorism powers should never have been used to aggravate criminal charges against Palestine Action activists and they certainly shouldn't be used to ban them," the organisation added on social media.
Palestine Action has engaged in activities that have predominantly targeted arms companies since the start of the current war in Gaza, with the group claiming responsibility in May for the daubing of a US military plane in Ireland.The UK's independent reviewer of terrorism legislation told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on Saturday it had "gone beyond protest to blackmail"."It's got to a point where they've started to say: 'We will carry on causing hundreds of millions of pounds worth of damage unless you stop'," Jonathan Hall KC added.Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman said the move to ban the group was "absolutely the correct decision"."We must have zero tolerance for terrorism," she wrote in a post on X.The home secretary has the power under UK law to proscribe an organisation under the Terrorism Act 2000 if they believe it is "concerned with terrorism".To enact the move, new legislation will be needed, which must be debated and approved by both MPs and peers.There are currently 81 groups proscribed as terrorist organisations in the UK under the Terrorism Act.Additional reporting by Hollie Cole.
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One of the many, many reasons I prefer living in the UK to the US is the former's more clement weather, which reflects the country's calmer politics. By contrast, America's storms and wildfires feel like a metaphor for its political debates, not least on abortion. So it's apt that, just as a heatwave arrives in this country, the British left loses its mind over abortion. Last week MPs voted to support an amendment, proposed by the Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi, which argues that women who obtain an abortion should never be prosecuted, even if it's after the legal 24-week limit. This sounds good in theory (abortion should not be criminalised, yes, agreed) but is in fact completely nuts. The law already allows late-term abortions in extreme circumstances, but now a woman could have an abortion the day before her due date for any reason she fancied. Now, very few women will do this, and in fact very few ever have, and the harrowing stories that have been used to justify this vote largely took place during the Covid lockdown, when women were buying abortion pills in the post and couldn't see doctors to find out how far along they were in their pregnancy. So: not a widespread problem, and one that could be resolved by re-examining how the Crown Prosecution Service deals with these sad cases. • `Read more: MPs vote to decriminalise abortion Instead, MPs have decided to chuck out the UK's heretofore liberal but pragmatic approach in favour of something far more radical that most people don't want: 87 per cent of the British public are in favour of legalised abortion, but more than half draw the line at the abortion of a healthy baby over the six-month limit. Antoniazzi's amendment upends the delicate compromise that existed until now. Sensing their moment has come, politicians on the right are already arguing that the time limit here should be cut, in line with most of Europe. Meanwhile, some on the left are arguing the amendment doesn't go far enough. Stella Creasy proposed a further amendment, which was written by the part-time tax barrister, occasional fox murderer and full-time tweeter Jolyon Maugham, that would have made it impossible even to prosecute those who coerced women into late-term abortions. This was considered so extreme it was rejected by every abortion provider in the country, and also, wisely, by MPs. Undaunted, Creasy, who seems to believe she represents Washington DC rather than Walthamstow, implied that rejecting her amendment was on a par with the overturning of Roe v Wade. By way of evidence, she reeled off voguish American clichés ('the Donald Trump playbook', 'women's bodies as battlefields') which always suggest the speaker is so high on progressive platitudes they have turned off their brain. If Creasy and her ilk want to take lessons from America, they should look at what happened last week to what is euphemistically called 'paediatric gender healthcare'. On Wednesday the Supreme Court allowed red states like Tennessee to ban doctors from giving hormone treatments and body-altering surgery to gender-confused children. It is the latest blow for the gender movement in the US, and it was entirely caused by overreach by activists. Until about a decade ago, people who wanted to live as the opposite sex were seen as a niche adult demographic who should be treated with kindness. But activist groups destroyed that moderate status quo with their ludicrous arguments, such as that male rapists could be sent to women's prisons and there should be no age limit on body-altering surgery for children. The Biden administration blindly supported them until belatedly realising it was following the wilfully blind, and American politicians are now, at last, trying to undo some of the damage. None of this worked out well for trans people or the left. Progressive overreach and reality denial will always cause a backlash, something Maugham should know, given his own flailing gender activism. Creasy, too, has argued that 'some women are born with penises', suggesting a strong disconnect between her beliefs and actual biology. I'm not sure when Labour politicians decided to follow their Democrat counterparts in defending the most extreme version of a social shift, but they need to get a grip. One reason US feminists lost the abortion argument is they insisted abortion was no big deal and derided Hillary Clinton for describing it as something that should be 'safe, legal and rare', saying that last word was 'stigmatising'. It turned out that it's a lot more stigmatising to pretend getting an abortion is just a jolly lark that should come with a loyalty card. When I was 23 and 11 weeks pregnant, I had an abortion, an experience neither jolly nor terrible but necessary. Afterwards, I felt pure gratitude, which is how I still feel about it now. Since then I've sampled many experiences on the fertility menu: given birth to twins, miscarried, had a baby. You don't need to be a wet-eyed sentimentalist to know a baby becomes a baby well before it's born; I could feel when it happened to all of my babies at about the six-month mark. The legal limit exists for good reasons, including the mother's mental health, and maintaining public support for abortion. Arguing that a woman has the right to terminate a fully gestated healthy baby is the most self-defeating version of the pro-choice movement, because it will reinvigorate the anti-abortion argument in this country, just as arguing for the most extreme version of trans rights destroyed the moderate accommodations that existed before. Labour has kicked a hornets' nest with this vote. And it's women who are going to be stung.
