Welcome to Starmer’s Britain: When Opposing Genocide Makes You a Terrorist
On July 5th, the UK government officially proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation under the Terrorism Act 2000. From that moment on, expressing any form of support for the group became a criminal offence. That includes chanting in favour of them, wearing their logo, holding a sign, or even posting supportive messages online. You could now be arrested and sentenced to up to 14 years in prison for wearing a t-shirt or shouting a slogan.
Let that sink in: in the UK, in 2025, it is now a crime to express support for a direct action protest group whose main tactic was damaging property, military property, no less, in an attempt to stop arms exports to a government committing well-documented genocide. Meanwhile, journalists are still allowed to publish deranged columns fantasising about bombing music festivals full of teenagers (hello, Rod Liddle, thanks for the shoutout!), and it remains perfectly legal to express support for the Israeli government and its military, despite their relentless bombing campaigns on civilians, including aid convoys, so-called safe zones, and densely populated refugee camps. Apparently, some types of state violence are not only permissible, but praiseworthy.
The Metropolitan Police, already institutionally racist, sexist, and homophobic according to their own reviews, jumped at the chance to enforce this new political repression. Just hours after the proscription was announced, they arrested 29 people for simply voicing support for Palestine Action. Among them was 83-year-old retired priest Sue Parfitt, whose crime was holding a sign that read, "I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action." This is not satire. This is Britain.
It bears repeating: Palestine Action has killed no one. They have injured no one. Their direct actions have included spray-painting drones, damaging equipment used in arms manufacturing, and occupying the premises of weapons factories. One of their recent actions, targeting RAF aircraft allegedly involved in weapons transport to Israel, was hysterically reported as potentially causing £30 million in damages. Yet flight data soon showed that one of the aircraft, the much-discussed ZZ338, was already back in the air. So much for the end-of-the-world narrative. A damaged aircraft can be fixed. A shattered window can be replaced. But a life taken, that of a child under rubble or a medic in a bombed-out hospital, can never be brought back. There is no engineering solution for the dead.
What has the UK government decided to protect with anti-terror laws? Not civilians in Gaza. Not the right to protest. Not victims of rape, assault, or state violence. No, the thing they have prioritised is the safety of warplanes and the reputations of weapons manufacturers. Sorry, we can’t help you while you’re being robbed, assaulted, or worse; we currently have to arrest people who don’t like that people are being murdered.
This is not a theoretical slippery slope. This is the slope, and we are halfway down it. Free expression in the UK is no longer a protected right. It is now conditional on your alignment with state policy. If you stand in the way of genocide, you are the criminal. If you help facilitate it, you are an ally. Welcome to Starmer’s Britain.
And don’t be fooled into thinking this is a fringe concern. Polls indicate that the majority of British people actually support Palestine Action’s objectives. They oppose arms sales to Israel. They support sanctions. They believe what is happening in Gaza constitutes genocide. There is a massive disconnect between what the public believes and what the government is doing. And that gap is being managed not through democratic dialogue or transparent debate, but through repression.
The criminalisation of Palestine Action supporters illustrates a broader pattern: the slow weaponisation of anti-terror laws to suppress political dissent. The Terrorism Act 2000 was not designed to protect warplanes from activists. It was designed to protect civilians from bombs at concerts. By using it against peaceful protestors, the government sets a dangerous precedent: that political opposition to state policy can be treated as a threat to national security.
Even journalists should be alarmed. There is no carve-out in the Terrorism Act for media workers. If one of your colleagues pens an op-ed defending Palestine Action’s tactics as legitimate protest, they could face arrest, house raids, and the seizure of their devices. That’s not speculative fearmongering; it’s already happened. A journalist reporting on Palestine was targeted with a sweeping warrant under counter-terror laws, and had their home raided and materials seized. The courts later ruled the search unlawful, but the chilling effect is unmistakable. This is how dissent is crushed: not always with a bang, but with a quiet knock at the door.
This crackdown isn’t about stopping violence; it’s about stopping criticism. It’s about deterring teenagers from wearing t-shirts, pacifists from holding signs, and journalists from publishing uncomfortable truths. It is meant to make you feel that resistance is futile and dangerous, and that the safest thing to do is shut up and look away.
But we shouldn’t. We can’t. History is littered with movements that were once demonised as extremist or dangerous. The Suffragettes would be called terrorists too. They smashed windows, bombed letterboxes, and chained themselves to railings, tactics meant to shake a complacent society into action. Sound familiar? Palestine Action’s direct actions, damaging military property, occupying weapons factories, interrupting the smooth flow of death-dealing machinery, are just as disruptive and just as politically charged. And yet, like the Suffragettes, they are met not with debate, but with handcuffs.
History has a habit of punishing its visionaries in the present and praising them only in retrospect. The Suffragettes are now safe enough to be celebrated, taught in schools, cast in marble, and worn like costumes by MPs grinning for photo ops in purple sashes. Hours later, those same politicians vote to criminalise women chaining themselves to weapons factories, and remain silent as women and children are slaughtered in Gaza. Their feminism is skin-deep, their solidarity selective. Morality, for them, is not a principle but a PR strategy. The state does not determine morality; it reflects its own vested interests. Irony, meet your grave.
I don’t care whether you agree with Palestine Action’s tactics. You may think they’re too confrontational, too theatrical, too messy. You may think protestors are annoying. Fine. But if we can’t agree that criminalising support for a non-violent political group is authoritarian madness, then we have already lost the plot.
This isn’t just about Palestine Action. It’s about Gaza. It’s about the right to protest, especially in the face of a genocide that the UK government is materially complicit in. It’s about refusing to be silent while tens of thousands are killed and entire neighbourhoods are turned to ash with bombs we helped build. The state now decides who is worthy of free speech, who gets to dissent, and who gets to be labelled a terrorist. And history has shown us what that kind of power leads to.
Consider this: Nelson Mandela was once denounced as a terrorist by the UK government. His resistance to apartheid was met with condemnation, criminalisation, and a place on the terror watch list. And now? He stands in bronze in Parliament Square, praised by the very establishment that once called for his imprisonment. That same square is lined with surveillance vans and riot police ready to arrest protestors demanding an end to the bombing of Gaza. The irony is stomach-churning.
When you criminalise resistance to genocide, you aren’t upholding peace, you are enforcing silence. This moment is not about slogans or logos or whether someone used spray paint on a weapons factory wall. It is about the line between conscience and complicity. The right to shout, to disrupt, to be loud, to refuse to comply, these are the only tools the powerless have left. And when that is taken away, all that remains is obedience, dressed up in the language of national security.
Palestine Action has zero deaths to its name. The same cannot be said for the Metropolitan Police. And yet the former are terrorists and the latter are trusted with enforcing the law. If that doesn’t horrify you, it should.
The Labour government can pass whatever legislation it wants. It can raid homes, arrest priests, and label young people as radicals for wearing protest gear. But it cannot change the truth. And it cannot change what I believe: that direct action is sometimes necessary, that silence in the face of genocide is complicity, and that the people being arrested today will one day be remembered not as criminals, but as the conscience of a nation.
Starmer, Farage, whoever comes next, they may control the laws. But they do not control our morality. That belongs to us. And when the state criminalises compassion, it is our moral obligation to disobey. Well done Parliament. Those weapons factories can sleep soundly in their beds tonight. But the rest of us? We are wide awake. And we are watching.
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