UK High Court Blocks Starmer’s Effort to Label Palestine Action a Terrorist Group

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?