Two tracks of government repression: an explainer

Keir Starmer has had a particularly tough month. From the Mandelson scandal, to the humiliation of the Gorton and Denton by-election, and the quintessentially Starmer “alienate everyone while doing the most immoral thing possible” approach to the illegal war on Iran, there’s been a lot going on for our beleaguered prime minister. 

Yet through it all, one thing has remained constant: his government’s utmost dedication to attacking civil liberties at home, particularly when it comes to speech or political activity that is critical of Israel. True to form, however, even that’s not going so well for him anymore.  

Today marks exactly four weeks since the high court ruled that the Home Office’s proscription of Palestine Action was unlawful. Since then, a lot has happened. 

To help you keep track of the latest developments in the government’s project to advance two primary vehicles for repression – existing terror legislation and the forthcoming Crime and Policing Bill – we’ve put together an explainer addressing what’s going on, what it means, and what could happen next. For it is through maintaining uncertainty and keeping people in the dark that the state is able to induce yet further repression.

In solidarity,

The Vashti Editors 

I. Terror laws

What’s happening with the proscription of Palestine Action? 

On 13 February, the high court ruled that the July 2025 proscription of Palestine Action was unlawful on the grounds that it breached the rights of freedom of expression and assembly as protected under Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The court also ruled that Yvette Cooper, who was home secretary at the time of the initial decision, failed to follow her own policy for proscription, which would have had her consider “other factors” in determining whether an organisation that could be proscribed should be proscribed. In this sense, the court described the ban as “disproportionate.” 

The current home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, immediately announced her intention to appeal the decision. On 25 February, the high court granted Mahmood permission to take the case to the court of appeals and declared that the ban would remain in place until an outcome is reached in a new hearing. No date is currently set for the appeal, but it is expected to take place in the spring. 

In a statement on 13 February, the Metropolitan police reasserted that expressing support for the group remains a criminal offence pending the outcome of a government appeal. However, the Met stated that while it would cease making arrests under sections 12 and 13 of the Terrorism Act, it would “continue to identify offences where support for Palestine Action is being expressed” and gather evidence on those offences. 

On 3 March, the chief magistrate of England and Wales, Paul Goldspring, announced a hold on the trials of people charged with supporting Palestine Action until 30 July. He had previously decided to adjourn a number of Palestine Action cases until late April, but given the potential massive waste of public resources, has now decided there should be a blanket review. 

In Scotland, a separate petition against the proscription of Palestine Action brought in October 2025 by the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, received permission on 27 January to proceed to judicial review in the Scottish Court of Session. 

In the decision to grant permission, the court stated: “A Scottish court would not be required by precedent to follow any decision of the High Court in England. There had [sic] been a number of recent examples of important constitutional challenges proceeding in parallel in Scotland and England.”

Murray expressed his intention to continue the case even after the high court’s decision to declare the ban unlawful, fearing that the government could win at the court of appeal or again lose and take the case to the UK Supreme Court. A two-day substantive hearing will take place next Tuesday and Wednesday, 17 and 18 March.

What does all of that mean? A month after the high court’s ruling, is Palestine Action still considered a terrorist organisation?

While the high court decision was a major victory for Palestine Action and the pro-Palestine movement as a whole, the government’s decision to appeal means that the case is far from over. Al Jazeera reporter Rory Challands estimated that the appeals process could take months or even years. 

Importantly, even though the high court ruled that the proscription act was unlawful, it did not issue a quashing order to actually invalidate the act. In fact, the same 25 February order granting the Home Office permission to appeal the ruling also issued – and then immediately suspended – an order to quash the proscription, pending the outcome of the government’s appeal. 

As University of Cambridge public law professor Mark Elliott explains in his very helpful blog (which, he specifies, “is not intended to be a source of legal advice and nothing in it should be relied on as such”), this is a period of limbo: 

“Those who have already been charged with offences under section 12 will therefore find themselves in a period of unavoidable uncertainty until the appeal process has been concluded: we simply cannot know whether the High Court’s view will turn out to be the right one, the ‘right’ view, for present purposes, being that which is eventually reached by the most senior appellate court to address the issue.” 

Similarly, there remain potential consequences for those who support Palestine Action even now, in spite of the high court ruling:

“Anyone who today invites or expresses support for Palestine Action therefore runs the risk that if an appellate court disagrees with the High Court, the section 12 offence will have applied in respect of Palestine Action without interruption since the original imposition of the proscription order on 5 July 2025.” 

A number of questions also remain about what the combination of the high court’s decision, the government’s appeal, and the Met’s policy of non-enforcement means for online speech and platform censorship.  

Last week, 19 human rights organisations, academics, and writers sent a letter to Ofcom (the UK’s communications regulator) demanding guidance for platforms that are obligated to remove “terrorist content” under the Online Safety Act. 

Specifically, they called on Ofcom to clarify whether platforms must still remove content and whether previously removed content can be restored if Huda Ammori, the Palestine Action co-founder bringing the case against proscription, again prevails over the government at the appellate court. 

The campaigners also expressed the urgency of this situation, given the new requirements to “proactively scan for illegal content, restrict live streaming and suppress algorithms" that are due to come into effect later in 2026. This is all the more essential in an online environment in which content related to Palestine is already removed or hidden from major platforms. Ofcom has not yet directly addressed the specifics of the Palestine Action case. 

As it stands, in the eight months of this unlawful counter-terrorism regime, nearly 3,000 people have been arrested in relation to the ban, more than 500 have been charged under the Terrorism Act, and Palestine Action activists arrested prior to proscription have nonetheless been treated as terrorists while held in remand. It’s clear that this government intends to go to the ends of the earth to find legal vindication for the repression of its own citizens.

What about the Kneecap terror case?

Earlier this week, the high court ruled against the UK government’s attempt to reinstate a terror charge on Kneecap rapper Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh (known on-stage as Mo Chara). Ó hAnnaidh was initially charged in May 2025 with support for a proscribed organisation after he allegedly displayed a Hezbollah flag during a November 2024 concert – a charge that the rapper denied. 

The Crown Prosecution Service’s (CPS) defeat, however, was the result of a procedural error rather than a ruling on the substance of the case: the CPS failed to receive the permission to institute the charge from the attorney general or solicitor general within six months of the alleged offence. The case was first dismissed in November 2025 by Paul Goldspring, the aforementioned chief magistrate, because the CPS acted outside the statute of limitations. 

Nevertheless, the government decided to persist with an appeal to the high court, which upheld Goldspring’s decision. The case has now been thrown out and cannot proceed further. 

The behaviour of the CPS in this case is revealing of both its incompetence and its priorities. In Prospect Magazine, lawyer DAT Green succinctly captured the government’s conduct: 

“[R]ather than accept that errors were made, the CPS used considerable public resources to reverse the chief magistrate’s decision, resorting even to upending decades of settled case law in a way which the chief magistrate rightly described as defying logic. There was nothing the CPS would not do to give the impression that no mistake had been made.” 

Green interprets the CPS’ dogged pursuit of this clearly compromised case as an attempt to make up for its initial errors and protect itself. However, it’s also quite reasonable to see this abuse of public resources as totally consistent with the immense amount of capital this government is willing to expend on repressing political expression and free speech, no matter the financial or political cost. 

II. The Crime and Policing Bill

What is the Crime and Policing Bill?

At the start of last year, the government brought forward its voluminous Crime and Policing bill. Introducing it in the House of Commons, then home secretary Yvette Cooper was keen to be seen addressing the concerns of ordinary members of the public. She focused her remarks on how the Labour party would be “putting police back on the beat, introducing respect orders and taking action on off-road bikes, shoplifting, street theft, stalking, spiking, grooming and child abuse, knife sales, terrorism and serious crime”. 

Cooper made no mention of the part of the bill dedicated to public order, or how the mammoth piece of legislation would be used to push through some of the most draconian measures limiting protest rights that this country has seen in decades.

The initial draft of the bill included a chapter on New Offences Relating to Protests and Assemblies, which contains clauses introducing, among other things, a new offence of “concealing identity at protests”. If passed into law, this would mean a person could be sent to prison for up to a month and fined as much as £1,000 for the crime of wearing a facemask and sunglasses at a protest in a designated “police area”.

As the bill made its way through the House of Commons, the government added further clauses dedicated to Police Powers Relating to Protests and Assemblies. These would give senior constables the authority to ban or restrict protests in a loosely-defined “vicinity of a place of worship”, where demonstrators “may intimidate persons of reasonable firmness”. 

The vagueness of the wording means the legislation could effectively be used to prevent any assembly or protest being held across the entirety of central London, where routes for demonstrations can be said to fall within the “vicinity” of places of religious worship. 

Indeed, such an excuse was already given back in January 2025, when the police blocked the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and others from gathering outside the BBC’s headquarters, owing to the disruption that could be caused to a synagogue in the proximity of Broadcasting House.

Then, last October, in the wake of the Manchester synagogue attack on Yom Kippur, the home secretary announced additional plans to target protest rights, through laying amendments to the bill as it passed through the House of Lords, in order to revise sections 12 and 14 of the Public Order Act 1986. 

The changes would give police the power to re-route, and potentially shut down protests because of their “cumulative impact” on a locality. This is defined to include disruption resulting from a particular procession or assembly in question along with any other protest that “was held, is being held or is intended to be held in the same area”, meaning that police could push for a protest to be banned because it was deemed to be within a locale where entirely unconnected past and future protests had, or simply could, take place.

What does that have to do with Palestine solidarity?

These legislative changes are all ones that the Board of Deputies (BoD) has vociferously lobbied for at public events and in private meetings with ministers over many months, as part of its longstanding campaign to block national demonstrations in support of Palestinian rights. 

Since the beginning of the Gaza genocide, and the mass public outcry and mobilisation that it has generated, the BoD along with other Zionist advocacy groups such as the Jewish Leadership Council have been constantly and consistently pressuring police forces – including with legal threats – to ban rallies against the crimes Israel is perpetrating in Palestine and beyond, under the guise of “protecting Jewish safety”. 

In Keir Starmer and Shabana Mahmood they have found stalwart allies in their crusade to pit the UK Jewish community against anti-genocide activists. This was most grossly on display in the days following the attack on Heaton Park synagogue, when the home secretary spoke about how “fundamentally un-British” it was of demonstrators to mark the second anniversary of the commencement of Israel’s assault on Gaza. 

The prime minister then published an op-ed in both the Jewish Chronicle and Jewish News, in which he stated: “I urge anyone thinking about protesting this weekend to recognise and respect the grief of British Jews this week. This is a moment of mourning” – as if the two things were somehow incompatible, or that those people (including many British Jews) mourning the more than 67,000 Palestinians (or 1 out of every 33 people in Gaza) killed in the first 24 months of the genocide had no right to express their grief through demonstrating against Starmer’s own active complicity in Israel’s crimes against humanity.

On Tuesday evening this week, Mahmood took the major step of consenting to the Metropolitan police’s request to ban the Al Quds Day march due to take place this Sunday, and which has taken place in the final week of Ramadan for more than four decades. It is the first time an outright ban under section 13 of the Public Order Act 1986 has been imposed in 14 years, and only the 25th time a home secretary has made such a decision since 1994 – with almost all the protests blocked in that time having been ones organised by the far right. 

While the BBC ran with a headline centring on allegations about the Islamic Human Rights Commission, which organises the annual protest, being an “Iran-linked group”, Mahmood told the Commons, that the police’s assessment she consented to was “grounded in the tensions created by international conflict, the scale of the expected march, and the presence of protesters and multiple counter-protesting groups all seeking to march at once.” 

As such, the decision sets a precedent for future situations in which there are large protests planned about international issues, and where there could be counter protesters present – as indeed there are far right and Zionist groups that come to make racist jeers at the sidelines of practically every pro-Palestine demonstration. 

How soon will we see one of the national marches organised by the PSC-led coalition being banned under section 13, simply because Stop the Hate or some other pro-Israel group hints at its intention to form a counter-protest?

In this way the Palestine solidarity movement should be seen as the litmus test for draconian measures that Labour or future governments of even more authoritarian stripes can employ to clamp down on a broad range of causes across British society, from environmental justice campaigns to striking workers. 

No doubt the erosion of employment rights is high on the agenda of a prospective Nigel Farage premiership, and the provisions of the bill, particularly those clauses on “cumulative impact”, could furnish a Reform government with the tools to restrict picketing.

Coda: Woodcock’s amendment 

Yet, with the government’s defeat in the high court on the judicial review of the Palestine Action proscription, it appears the anti-democratic instinct of the Starmer administration may have overreached itself. This has left some lawmakers looking for alternative ways to criminalise the direct action group, and, on Monday evening, the House of Lords passed an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill that would introduce a new category of “Extreme Criminal Protest Groups” (ECPGs).

The amendment was introduced by Baron Walney – aka John Woodcock, the former MP and Labour Friends of Israel chair turned Boris Johnson-backer and lobbyist for the arms and fossil fuel industries. 

After cynically quitting the Labour party amid investigations of sexual misconduct, and then vacating his seat in the Commons at the 2019 general election, Woodcock was ennobled by the Tories, and in turn served as the independent adviser on political violence and disruption to successive Conservative and Labour governments between 2020-2025. 

During this time, he used the position to call for the police to be given powers to ban Palestine solidarity demonstrations, in response to the “explosion” of antisemitism across the UK. 

The role was initially only supposed to last for six months, enough time in which to write a report on “understanding of the challenge posed by the Far-Left, Far-Right and other fringe political groups in the UK”. 

However, the project ended up taking him more than four years, and in May 2024, the day before Rishi Sunak announced the snap general election, Woodcock finally published his policy paper Protecting our Democracy from Coercion. In it he recommended the government not only force protest organisers to pay for the policing of their own demonstrations, but that ministers also develop a “new framework” for restricting the activities of groups like Palestine Action, because he believed, at that point in time, that the group’s activities did not meet the “very high” bar for proscription. 

On this matter, given the judgment of the high court in the judicial review, it seems Woodcock has been proven right. And while he supported the government’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action in July 2025 – delivering a speech in which he falsely claimed he had expressed that opinion in his review the year before – as of this week, he has reverted to the position that a establishing a new category may be the most effective way of dealing with the group, if the government is unsuccessful in its appeal. 

Arguing for the amendment in the Lords, he accepted that the “sight of people being arrested and charged for holding up signs is uncomfortable”, and that he would “hazard that there is not great public support or understanding” for branding members or supporters of Palestine Action as “terrorists”. 

His suggestion then is to bring in regulations to designate a group as an ECPG, of which it would not be a criminal offence to express “an opinion or belief that is supportive”, so long as “that expression does not amount to encouragement or assistance of criminal conduct”.

However, an ECPG’s members, promoters, fundraisers, and those providing it with material support would face up to three years imprisonment. By chance this happens to be the limit below which people could face a judge-only trial, under the government’s “unpopular, untested and poorly evidenced” plans to do away with the age-old right to be tried by a jury of one’s peers – because, it would appear, the state has had enough of people being acquitted over smashing up arms factories that are providing the weaponry to perpetrate the infinitely greater crime of genocide. 

The amendment passed with the support of the Conservative benches, and many of the more rabid pro-Israel advocates from all sides of the upper chamber. But neither the Lib Dems nor Labour peers voted in favour – the former abstaining, while the government whipped its members to vote against. 

The minister, perhaps concerned that support for the amendment would undermine the government’s appeal of the judicial review, explained the reasoning was twofold: first, no matter the opinion of the court of appeal, Palestine Action had certainly met the threshold for proscription as a terrorist organisation; and, second, existing public order and related legislation is sufficient for dealing with the criminality of “Extreme Criminal Protest Groups”. 

It remains to be seen whether the government will maintain this position were it to lose its appeal, the result of which cannot be expected until later in the spring or summer at the earliest. With so many fates, indeed the collective fate of Britons’ ability to freely express support for Palestine, hung in the balance until the conclusion of the appeal, this protracted uncertainty is itself a tool of state repression.▼