UK High Court Blocks Starmer’s Effort to Label Palestine Action a Terrorist Group
Police arresting a protester against the proscription in London, 6 September 2025. Photograph Source: indigonolan – CC BY 4.0
Last year, I was living in the UK when activists from the anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian direct action group Palestine Action hugely. embarrassed the Royal Air Force and the British government by cutting their way through a security fence surrounding an RAF Airfield in Oxfordshire and spraying red paint on the jet engines of two aircraft known to have assisted Israel’s aerial slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.
While the action was only “damaging“ to the planes if one considers having to apply paint remover to the vandals’ handiwork to remove it, the Labor government of Prime Minister Keir of Starmer responded by claiming the “repairs” would cost £7 million (about US$10 million) and as such justified labeling the avowedly non-violent protest group guilty of “terrorism” under a rarely used Anti-Terrorism Law enacted in 2000, had targeted the likes of Al Qaeda and the Irish Republican Army that actually sought to kill people. Although it did list property damage, the law one the quarter of q century of its being on the books has never before been against an action or an organization involved in just property damage and not seeking to harm people.
Labeling Palestine Action a terrorist group, as ludicrous as it was, in fact was and remains a serious matter for the protest organization which has been trying to force the government to stop supporting Israel’s US and UK-backed genocide in Gaza and the West Bank which was at the time slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, including many children, with bombs, planes and weapons supplied by the UK and US. The action also targeted those many British citizens who were protesting over the same issue and specifically the effort to silence and destroy Palestine Action. This is because not only does the Antiterrorism Act cary a penalty for being part of a designated terror organization of up to 14 years in jail. It also makes simply protesting for or speaking or writing favorably about or even just holding a sign supporting a designated terror organization.
I was dismayed to see Britain’s long history of supporting freedom of speech and protest (a tradition dating back to the Magna Carta and that inspired the addition of the First Amendment protecting freedom of speech, press, religion, association and protest to the US Constitution), so casually trashed by PM Starmer and his Labour majority, their fatuous labeling of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization.
I was I should say, dismayed but not surprised. PM Starmer, whose official résumé highlights his past experience as a human rights lawyer — one who ironically once in 2003 passionately and successfully defended another protest group’s similar break-in and damaging of RAF planes in protest against Britain’s joining in the Bush-Cheney US invasion of Iraq based upon the lie that Iraq was constructing weapons of mass destruction—chemical and germ and even nuclear weapons.
Then too, more recently, Starmer before his election as PM in July 2024 was the British government’s head prosecutor, in which post he slavishly did the bidding of three US presidents — GW Bush, Barack Obama and Trump—in keeping journalist and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in prison for over a decade in solitary confinement much of he time, and without any trial, much less conviction, while the US attempted to extradite him to face a treason charge.
The Starmer government’s legal attack on Palestine Action backfired spectacularly as elders, including people with canes, crutches and in wheelchairs, began attending huge protests in public spaces, including popular tourist sites. They all hand-written signs, most saying ,’“I oppose Genocide” and “I support Palestine Action!” The 2700 protesters arrested over several months, essentially begging by displaying those banned lines to be arrested, have been subsequently taken or wheeled into custody, sometimes in the hundreds at such actions over the last half year or so.
Often they found themselves being led to waiting vans by apologetic Metropolitan Police officers, who have had to endure being berated by shocked locals and by European and US tourists remarking, “I thought Britain had freedom of speech!”
This High Court ruling will be especially welcome to the 700 of those arrested sho were slapped with felony charges for “supporting a terrorist group.” A number of these people have been on a hunger strike, with some reportedly coming close to death as their cases made their slow way up through the lower courts. As their cases look likely to be tossed out, most have ended their protest fast.
Over six months after the case went to the High Court, a panel of three Judges issued their ruling: The application of the Terrorism Act to Palestine Action, which they found “does not advocate violence” or acts of violence against people, was being “illegally applied “to the group and to its protesting backers..
It was a sharp slap-down of the prime minister, who has been facing more than his share of disastrous cock-ups requiring a reversals of policy decisions, with many now predicting his early ouster as PM.
The High Court’s dramatic ruling wasn’t, for all that, a perfect win for free speech and the right to protest in the UK This is because, despite the High Court’s strong language in condemning the use of the Antiterrorism Law against Palestine Action, the judges, noting that there would likely be an appeal by the government to the Court of Appeal, the equivalent of the US Supreme Court, said they would leave the ban on the group ion place pending the appeal (though the Metro Police say they will no longer be arresting people for expressing support for Palestine Action or for calling out Israel genocide., Starmer and the Home Secretary Mahmood, have both stated they plan to appeal the ruling.
The interesting thing to me is that in Britain, its is the highest or penultimate court that acts boldly , or perhaps semi-boldly, in reversing decisions by the national government, while lower courts “kick the quid” upstairs to a higher court. Meanwhile, here in the US it is higher courts, the Appellate Circuit Court judges and the Supreme Court justices (who all have lifetime tenure and are likely at the pinnacle of their legal careers, not having to worry about being passed over for nomination to a higher judicial station), who are showing obscene fealty to wannabe tyrant Donald Trump, while hopes for holding the line on the destruction of liberty and democracy, lie with with the lower federal magistrates and judges, who also have lifetime tenure but have to worry that bold rulings that oppose Trump’s destructive executive orders and his cabinet secretaries’ actions shredding . . the Bill of Rights, could end their hopes of advancing to higher court appointments.
Logically, the UK situation makes more sense, but here in the US hoping for courage, principle and a lack of careerist concern in our lower courts is all we’ve got.
There’s also another thought: Perhaps it is the UK’s lack of a written Constitution, and the US’s venerated Torah-like written document that explain the difference in their approach to considering lower court decisions and government actions. . British jurists on the High Court look at the precedents of British Common Law and generally have a whole pallet of them go select from in coming to a ruling, In contrast, US Supreme Court Justices— particularly the “strict constructionist” jurists, all six of them Republican nominees to the bench, who spend their time parsing the exact meaning of the words in the text of the Constitution and its later Amendments in reaching their decisions from the bench, while the three liberals on the court, look at the context of when those words were written, and how circumstances may have changed. Consider for example the 15th Amendment on the right to vote, which states, in full: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
“Strict constructionists, one would think, would be hard-pressed to find a way around that declarative sentence to find a way to justify keeping non-whites from voting. Yet in the intervening decades since tha amendment was approved, these justices have found many ways, arguing for example that requiring proof of citizenship — a birth certificate, driver’s license or passport, for instance can be required since only citizens can vote.. But since many people have long ago lost their birth certificate, or, In the case of poor families and rural families where children were and sometimes still are born at home and their births remain unregistered, or some urban dwellers have never owned a car or needed a driver’s license, while many in the US have never traveled abroad and thus have no passport,.Doesn’t such a requirement constitute an “abridgment” of ther right to vote?
Britain: Roots of the Labour crisis
First published at Anti*Capitalist Resistance.
Morgan McSweeney is gone. Peter Mandelson is gone. And if Labour loses the Gorton and Denton by-election on 26 February, Keir Starmer may not be far behind. Even if he survives that test, looming defeats in May’s local elections — and potentially in the Scottish Parliament and Senedd — could finish the job.
As things stand, Wes Streeting is the bookmakers’ favourite to succeed him — assuming Angela Rayner won’t stand because of her tax problems. Yet neither would break from Labour’s self-imposed fiscal straitjacket. If anything, Streeting would likely push further right: on public spending, on Palestine, and on the right to protest.
Every week brings a fresh scandal. But the real problem is deeper. The common thread is the deference shown by Britain’s major parties towards wealth and power. Even without controversies like the Mandelson-Epstein revelations, Labour would still be trapped in the contradictions of its economic strategy.
The depth of the Labour crisis is such that many are asking whether Labour can survive. When the Labour loyalist paper, Tribune, says the party is on its last legs, the situation is at least deadly serious.
The growth myth
Starmer and Rachel Reeves promised that economic “growth” would magically generate tax revenue. It did not. Partly that reflects a sluggish global economy. More importantly, it reflects a domestic context in which working-class households and poorer segments of the middle class lack spending power.
The result? Millions face low pay, inadequate benefits, and deteriorating public services. The NHS and transport systems are visibly struggling. Meanwhile, the housing crisis grinds on, locking people out of stable and affordable homes.
Yet despite this, Labour pressed ahead with deeply unpopular policies: keeping the two-child benefit cap, scrapping winter fuel payments, and attempting to cut disability mobility payments — moves withdrawn only after backbench revolts. Add to that the retreat on key net-zero pledges and the refusal to take meaningful action over Gaza, and the political damage becomes clearer.
Labour’s slide in the polls was predictable. So too was its failed attempt to deal with Reform UK by echoing it. In addition, the right’s obsession with small boats crossing the Channel, restrictions on care homes, and the NHS recruiting from abroad threaten drastic cuts in the availability of care home places and a further squeeze on the number of NHS workers.
If the aim is to encourage British people to take up these roles, this is unlikely to succeed. Unemployed people won’t want to take jobs that offer low pay and very long shifts, and need skills they don’t have.
New restrictions on international students, including restrictions on family reunion for graduates, will affect both higher education finances and the number of skilled workers and researchers who wish to remain in Britain. And why not go instead to Canada or Australia that are more welcoming?
Reform cannot be beaten by copying its ‘keep them out’ and ‘send them back’ sentiments. The policies of Enoch Powell and the National Front in the 1970s on ‘stop immigration, start repatriation’ are becoming the policies of all the main parties. It is shameful that these are now the policies of a Labour government.
And the widely held but utterly false view that immigrants are to blame for crisis-ridden services ignores the real causes: decades of under-investment, privatisation, and spending squeezes.
The tax taboo
Mention higher taxes and the major parties protest that ordinary people are already stretched. But this deliberately obscures where substantial tax revenue could actually come from.
Corporation tax remains low by international standards. Vast profits are lightly taxed or untaxed. Enormous personal wealth sits shielded in offshore havens. Britain is not short of money — it is short of political will. This is the case for dozens of transnational corporations that reap vast profits in the UK. They pay minimal tax by claiming to be headquartered in Ireland, Switzerland, or Luxembourg, and asserting that their UK subsidiaries must pay substantial licensing fees, leaving little or no taxable income in the UK.
High-tech giants such as Apple, Amazon, Jigsaw (Google), Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, X (Elon Musk), and OpenAI all benefit from a low or no-tax regime for their British operations. In addition, untold billions of taxable wealth globally, valued at £388 billion per year, evade tax in tax havens, the majority of which are British overseas territories.
Public services in decay
Because Labour has bound itself to strict fiscal rules, meaningful improvements to the NHS, elderly care, and housing remain elusive. Across public services, the picture is bleak.
Water is a glaring example. Privatisation has delivered vast profits for investors, rising bills for consumers, and chronic under-investment in infrastructure. The result: polluted rivers and sewage-strewn beaches.
Local government is near breaking point. Housing shortages deepen poverty. All of this creates fertile ground for Nigel Farage and Reform UK. The opposition hardly needs to try.
The shadow of New Labour
What is now unravelling is an attempt to recreate Tony Blair’s New Labour. Across Labour’s leadership — from Streeting to Miliband, Rayner to Starmer — there is broad agreement that the New Labour record is something close to sacred: pragmatic, modern, electorally successful.
But that account is a myth. New Labour’s support started to drain because of Tony Blair’s role in backing George W. Bush in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Domestically, it ended in 2010 with austerity and political collapse after years of indulgence towards banks and financial institutions.
When mortgage-backed investments imploded in 2008, the state bailed out Northern Rock, Lloyds, and the Royal Bank of Scotland and gave significant sums to other banks as well. The cost was in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Austerity followed — first under Labour chancellors Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, which intensified under David Cameron and George Osborne.
Public-private partnerships have left long-term debt that continues to strain health budgets, with some hospital trusts paying millions annually in interest before funding frontline services.
The tight grip on spending is also evident in the slow compensation for victims of the Post Office scandal, the contaminated blood catastrophe, and the Windrush scandal. WASPI women, affected by the rapid rise in the state pension age, have been denied compensation entirely.
Mandelson and the party machine
There is little reason to shed tears for Morgan McSweeney or Peter Mandelson. Over different periods, both were instrumental in marginalising the Labour left and steering the party toward intensified neoliberal and anti-left-wing policies.
Morgan McSweeny rose up the ranks of the Labour hierarchy under the protective wing of Steve Reed, then leader of Lambeth Council, whose chief of staff he became. Latterly, he is said to have had close links with Peter Mandelson while advising Keir Starmer.
Mandelson — alongside Blair and Brown — was a principal architect of “Blairism”. The largely symbolic Clause 4 on common ownership was swept away, the policy shifted rightward, and relations with the wealthy elite flourished.
Mandelson’s close connections with the mega-rich and his strongly pro-American, pro-Israeli positions were positive credentials for an incoming ambassador to the US. After all, the American president also has multiple connections to the rich and famous internationally, a world where hostility to the needs and rights of ordinary people is taken for granted.
Mandelson once said: “Every morning I wake up and think about how to bring down Jeremy Corbyn.” The party’s right wing attempted to remove Corbyn for the first time in 2016 by standing Owen Smith against him. Smith’s campaign was backed by Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper, Ed Miliband, Sadiq Khan, Margaret Beckett, Harriet Harman, and dozens of other Labour MPs and some trade unions, including the GMB and USDAW. The outcome was a humiliating defeat for Smith, who took only 38% of the vote.
But if you drill down into that figure, you find that Smith won 81% of MPs, 46% of trade unions, and 40% of constituency members. However, these votes were swamped by the 123,000 registered supporters, whose votes were permitted in 2015 and 2016. This was a shock to the Labour right, who decided that something much more serious had to be undertaken to undermine Corbyn, and it is a strong indication that Mandelson was involved in the subsequent witch-hunt against him.
The housing example
Housing is among the clearest failures of the Starmer era. Labour pledged to boost housebuilding dramatically and expand affordable housing, promising to sweep away planning “obstacles”. Yet little meaningful public investment has followed.
The housing crisis remains a major driver of poverty and insecurity. Promises of large-scale social housing construction have not materialised. Labour promised 300,000 new homes each year until 2029. Last year, only 122,500 were built, up slightly from the previous year and way off the 300,000 target.
Everyone knows that climbing onto the housing ladder is hugely difficult when the average house price in Britain is £300,000 and a staggering £553,000 in London. The rent for a two-bedroom flat is also extremely high.
Many private renters are paying 50% or more of their disposable income on rent or mortgage repayments. The housing crisis and low wages are graphically revealed in the figure, which shows that approximately 30% of people are still living at home at age 30.
The housing crisis and the high costs of utilities lead to a substantial transfer of disposable income to finance capital. This, in turn, means that hundreds of thousands of households are using their savings and credit cards to sustain household expenditure. They are, in effect, in debt bondage.
The core question
The crisis facing Labour is not just about personalities. It is about political economy. Public services are crumbling. Inequality is widening. Living standards are stagnant. And yet the party leadership refuses to challenge the structures that produce these outcomes.
There is an unavoidable conclusion: if Britain is to repair its public realm — from the NHS to housing, from local councils to environmental infrastructure — state revenue must rise.
Governmental spending is a lower percentage of GDP than in comparable states. In Germany, for example, it is 58% of GDP; in France, it is 57%. In Britain, it is around 40%, just above the US rate of 37-38%, while in Brazil, it’s just 20%. These are not just economic figures; they represent the extent to which public spending has been repressed in Britain.
Political movements advocating a realignment of the British economy towards working people and a shift towards supporting the poor and the victimised internationally face a major political struggle. Without it, the far right will walk into the political vacuum that the left has been incapable of occupying.
A government that works for the majority, the millions without significant wealth, who struggle from one payday to the next, must bite the bullet of a realignment of wealth and power. Until that question is confronted honestly, the cycle of disappointment will continue — and the political space will remain open to Reform UK, the Tories, or a coalition of both.
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