The Terrorism Act 2000 Under Which I’m Being Prosecuted Has Nothing to do with Terrorism – It is a Colonial Law Designed to Protect Repressive Regimes ‘However Odious’
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First my thanks to the
many people who came from far and wide to support me at my trial in Kingston
Crown Court on Monday 5 January. I was very grateful for the demonstration
outside and a full public gallery.
My trial was postponed
until August 18 as the Defence has submitted an interlocutory appeal to the
Court of Appeal. Judge Plaschkes did her best to avoid the postponement but in
the end had to admit defeat.
The trial could have
gone ahead this week if the judge, who has faithfully adopted the prosecution position
throughout, had not echoed a ruling of Lord Justice Lawton about keeping
politics out of the court room. This was in the context of a prosecution
attempt to keep out of the Jury Bundle blogs and articles which explain my
views about Hamas and the situation in Gaza prior to October 23.
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I am accused of
‘Inviting support for a proscribed organisation (Hamas)’ under s.12 Terrorism Act
2000. In fact I supported the October 7 Uprising not Hamas but to the
Prosecution this is one and the same. It therefore makes sense for me to explain
my reasons for supporting the Uprising although that doesn’t suit the Prosecution.
The Prosecution and
Plaschkes are determined to ensure that the reasons why Palestinians rose up on
October 7 are kept from the jury. Pulling the wool over the jury’s eyes is an integral
part of a Prosecutor and Judge’s toolbox.
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Freddie Lawton, as he
was known, was not above politics but they were far-right politics. For him
racism and chauvinism weren’t politics but the common sense of his class. When Freddie
was at Cambridge University he joined
the British Union of Fascists and founded the
Cambridge University Fascist Association.
Freddie Lawton’s view
on wife beating was that it ‘may be socially acceptable in
Sheffield, but it is a different matter in Cheltenham.’
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In 1987, after he retired, he
complained of the difficulty prosecuting "the gyppos and tinkers who invade a farmer's land".
From
1936, when the BUF appended to
its name ‘and National Socialists’ he
was adopted as the BUF's candidate for Hammersmith North but because the 1940 election was shelved he never
actually stood.
Lawton
ruled in the case of King and Simpkins
[1973] that:
‘This
Court wishes to state in the clearest possible terms that courts are not
sounding boards for anybody’s political views. Anyone attempting to bring
political opinions into court is attempting to introduce wholly irrelevant
matter.
While it may be
understandable that the political views of someone charged with burglary or assault
are irrelevant to the charge they are facing, I am being accused of inviting
support for Hamas. My views on Hamas and information about Israel’s illegal occupation
are highly relevant to the charge I’m facing and of course they are political. However Plaschkes decided it was easier to
act as a sounding board for the prosecution than to look at the position
objectively. Hence the appeal.
Of course the opinions
of judges are not considered political, at least by themselves, but normative. Historically
though the opinions of judges have been a litany of reflexive reactionary and
anti-democratic sentiments.
As far as the
Prosecution is concerned, what happened before October 7 is irrelevant. The
attack was a terrorist attack that happened out of the blue for no reason at
all. The illegal occupation of Gaza for 57 years is irrelevant. This is how colonialism
is normalised. It is the reaction of the natives that is important.
Any attempt to provide
context or background is deemed ‘political’ whereas in fact it is the decision
to proscribe Hamas in 2001 which was highly political. Added to which Plaschkes
is a deeply conservative judge.
I thought as an
experiment I would ask Google’s AI ‘are
there any sources for judicial opinion of the suffragettes?’ Its response
was:
Under the heading Key Judicial Sentiments and Decisions AI summarised that:
·
Rejection of Legal
Arguments: Judges
consistently ruled against the suffragettes' core legal arguments. For example,
in the case of women graduates seeking the right to vote in Scotland, a House
of Lords decision rejected their claim. The courts also determined that while
there was a right to present a petition, there was no right to do so by means
of a disruptive deputation that obstructed police.
·
Support for the Executive: The
judiciary often aligned with the government's position, for instance, in the
case that found force-feeding was legally justified under the general defence
of "necessity" to prevent a prisoner from dying in custody.
·
Discretion in Sentencing: When
militancy escalated, magistrates often consigned suffragettes to the second
division of imprisonment (harsher conditions) rather than the more lenient
first division, to discourage further offences.
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Nor was it merely about
women that judges were at their most prejudiced. When Oscar Wilde was found
guilty of ‘gross indecency’ Mr Justice Wills described the
maximum sentence he could impose, of two years imprisonment, as "totally inadequate" for a
case of "such a hideous kind."
In 2017 Wilde’s conviction was erased under the
Alan
Turing law. In June 2025 the British Library restored
the library card of the Victorian era’s finest playright!
The 1977 Blasphemy
Trial of Gay News editor Denis Lemon was the last such trial before
the Blasphemy statute was repealed in July 2008 in England. Lemon had published
James
Kirkup’s poem ‘The Love that
Dares to Speak Its Name’, Judge Alan King-Hamilton told The
Observer on 3 July 1973, the
day before the trial began, that homosexuality caused the fall of the Roman
Empire.
During the trial
itself, Hamilton made
his prejudices clear in other ways, such as apologising to the jury for
having to read the "offensive" poem.
Likewise there is a long
history of judicial hostility to trade unions. In March 1834 six farm
labourers, known as the Tolpuddle Martyrs, were sentenced by Sir John Williams to transportation
to Australia and exile for 7 years for forming a trade union. It was a savage
sentence and many men transported died en route.
Such was the public
reaction that they were pardoned after 3 years. But judicial hostility to
workers combining together remained
The second concerned an
industrial dispute in 1901 between the Taff
Vale Railway Company and the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants over
the victimisation of a trade unionist.
The Company sought an
injunction against union officials and the union itself in order to prevent
further picketing of its premises. The unions' status as unincorporated
associations under the Trade Union Act of 1871 rendered them impervious to
actions for damages founded in tort but in the High Court, Farwell J held that
it
would require very clear and express words of enactment to induce me to hold
that the Legislature had in fact legalised the existence of such irresponsible
bodies with such wide capacity for evil '
The
injunction was granted and the Company successfully sued the union for
damages. The case resulted in the passing of the Trade Disputes Act of 1906,
which granted trade unions immunity for tortious acts that were committed 'in furtherance of a trade dispute.’
As Winston Churchill,
then a Liberal, remarked
in 1911 in a debate in the House of Commons:
It is
not good for trade unions that they should be brought in contact with the
courts, and it is not good for the courts. The courts hold justly a high and, I
think, unequalled prominence in the respect of the world in criminal cases, and
in civil cases between man and man, no doubt, they deserve and command the respect
and admiration of all classes in the community, but where class issues are
involved, it is impossible to pretend that the courts command the same degree
of general confidence. On the contrary, they do not, and a very considerable
number of our population have been led to the opinion that they are, unconsciously
no doubt, biased. (1911) 26 House of Commons Debates col. 1022
The judiciary have been
ato the fore in opposing free speech. On December 1792 Lord
Kenyon sentenced Thomas Paine to Outlawry after he was convicted of
Seditious Libel. In October 1819 Richard
Carlile was found guilty of blasphemy and seditious
libel for writing an article about the Peterloo massacre and was sentenced to
three years in Dorchester Gaol. Henry Cook, Daniel Defoe and Henry Hetherington are amongst others
gaoled because they printed what the authorities didn’t like. In all cases the
judiciary acted as the willing and eager servants of the government.
This is the historic
context for the willingness of today’s judges to interpret the Terrorism Acts
in the most austere and repressive fashion. Not only are organisations proscribed
but supporting any act by them, even if it has no connection with terrorism, is
deemed an offence. Hamas, whose proscription was particularly outrageous, was
not only a resistance group but the elected government of Gaza.
In R v Choudary and Rahman [2016]: The Court of Appeal held
that "support" includes moral, emotional, and "intellectual"
support.
Indeed at times the prosecutor, Kate Temple-Mabe is more reasonable than Plaschkes. At one stage Plaschkes tried to persuade the parties to agree to reporting restrictions on the trial but the Prosecution wasn’t interested and so she didn’t pursue it.
In the afternoon Plaschkes
raised the fact that a reporter had asked the parties for copies of their
Skeleton Arguments, which are the basis for their respective arguments. Plaschkes
seemed have a bee in her bonnet about them although she gave no reasons for her
concerns. One can only assume that she is hostile to the principle of open
justice
She was clearly unaware
that the Bar Council issued advice
to barristers in June 2015 about how to respond to requests from third parties
for documents in the case and their advice was that the
The
default position under the open justice principle is that the court should
grant access to the parties’ skeleton arguments and written submissions...
unless there is some strong countervailing reason to the contrary.
I am therefore, in the
interests of open justice making
available both the Prosecution and Defence Skeleton Arguments as well as
the Ruling
on Monday of Plaschkes.
The Terrorism Act 2000 – a Warrant for Genocide
The purpose of the
Terrorism Act 2000 is not to prevent or deter terrorism as we are seeing today
with the prosecution of supporters of Palestine Action. It is there to clamp
down on any expression of support for groups the government doesn’t like.
These include groups
which by no stretch of the imagination can be called terrorists. They are
national liberation or resistance groups. As Tom King, the former Conservative
Defence Secretary, observed in the debate
on the then Terrorism Bill ‘one man's terrorist is another man's
freedom fighter.’ But instead of an objective definition of ‘terrorism’
that could then be applied to groups, everything is left to the discretion of
Ministers.
So Hamas,
even though it doesn’t operate on British soil, is proscribed
as a ‘terrorist’ group because the British government supports the
Israeli state and its occupation of Gaza. The justification isn’t worth the
paper it’s written on. It is an insult
to the intelligence but in 2021 its political wing was banned by that corrupt
liar, Priti Patel. It states:
Hamas
has used indiscriminate rocket or mortar attacks, and raids against Israeli
targets. During the May 2021 conflict, over 4,000 rockets were fired
indiscriminately into Israel. Civilians, including 2 Israeli children, were
killed as a result. Palestinian militant groups, including Hamas, frequently
use incendiary balloons to launch attacks from Gaza into southern Israel.
If accidentally killing
two Israeli children is proof of terrorism, in addition to flying ‘incendiary
balloons’ over the lands that were once theirs, then Israel is a terrorist
state 10,000 times over (at least).
Banning the political
wing of a group was a new departure and in my view unlawful. It asserted,
without any evidence, that Hamas had become one single organisation. It the British
Government had adopted the same policy towards the IRA and banned Sinn Fein, as
the Unionists demanded, then there would have been no Good Friday peace
agreement.
What is worse about
this is that Hamas is not just a resistance organisation but the government of
Gaza. It includes in its ranks those who have never handled a gun. Teachers,
doctors, refuse workers, civil servants, lecturers etc. If a doctor is
considered to be a terrorist because s/he is a member of the political wing
then Israel can claim that when it targets hospitals it is targeting ‘terrorists’.
That is why I say this
is a warrant for genocide. Israel has targeted every single hospital in Gaza
under the pretext that Hamas operates out of them. It hasn’t produced a shred
of evidence that Hamas has used them as a base to fire on their military. But
if unarmed civilians are called ‘terrorists’ then what Britain is doing is
legitimising and justifying Israel’s attacks on hospitals, schools etc. Britain
is thus encouraging what amounts to genocide.
Likewise
the Kurdistan
Workers Party (PKK) is proscribed
although it too doesn’t operate in this country.
Its crime is that it opposes the Turkish dictator Recep Erdoğan. The justification for the proscription of the PKK is that it is ‘responsible for serious human rights abuses.’
Although acknowledging that the Turkish states tortures its opponents the
Assessment justifying the proscription plays it down.
The Israeli state however
can’t be proscribed because it’s only actions against governments that are
‘terrorist’. The Terrorism Act conflates two
different types of organisations depending on whether the British government is
friendly with the dictator in question.
As
David Anderson QC observed in his Report ‘THE TERRORISM ACTS IN 2011’
The
current law allows members of any nationalist or separatist group to be turned
into terrorists by virtue of their participation in a lawful armed conflict,
however great the provocation and however odious the regime which they have
attacked.
Anderson went on to say
in para. 4.50 that it is difficult to justify the proscription of:
(c)
ethnic/separatist groups whose activities are not directed to the UK or UK
interests, or which have no record of recruitment or fund-raising here, or
whose ―terrorist‖ acts, performed in the context of war, are lawful under
international humanitarian law. 132 That is so particularly when proscription
risks affecting innocent members of the communities concerned.
Tony Greenstein relaxing inside Kingston Crown Court!
Section 1 of
the Act defines terrorism solely in terms of influencing a government and it
involves serious violence, property damage, endangers someone’s life, creates a
serious danger to health and safety or disrupts or interferes with an
electronic system.
There is nothing in the
above cannot be covered by existing legislation. In short it is highly
political to begin with. The definition is deliberately framed in terms of
actions against an existing government. It deliberately excludes state
terrorism of the kind the Israeli state has indulged in for over two years.
The genocidal Mayanamar
government is not proscribed whereas groups opposing the government could
be proscribed but for the discretion of Ministers. The decision as to who is
and is not proscribed is therefore political relying on ministerial discretion.
Hamas is proscribed,
not because of anything it has done but because of the British State’s relationship
with the Israeli state. Those fighting the Myanamar government aren’t
proscribed because the government doesn’t have friendly relations with the
regime.
The decision to
proscribe a group is arbitrary and has nothing to do with whether the group in
question is engaged in terrorism, i.e. the deliberate targeting of civilians as
ISIS and Al Qaeda do. This is why the Terrorism Act is not about terrorism but
protecting friendly repressive regimes.
Ironically the Blair
Government did more to create terrorism when they conducted an illegal invasion
of Iraq than anyone. As a result of the invasion of Iraq ISIS was born.
Likewise the United
States. By using Afghanistan to weaken the Soviet Union, the US created
Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The ‘War on Terror’ was a deception which was used to
repress Muslims at home and resistance organisations and unfriendly states
abroad.
Plaque Commemorating the Case of Ed Bushells (1670) when the Jury was imprisoned for defying the Judge's instruction to convict - it is displayed at the Old Bailey today
In his follow-up
report published in July 2014 Anderson quoted Parliament’s Joint Committee
on Human Rights which noted that the definition of terrorism “includes any action designed to influence
the policy of any government, anywhere in the world’ and that
“The
main problem to which this gives rise is that the counter-terrorism measures
are capable of application to speech or actions concerning resistance to an
oppressive regime overseas. For example, the creation of the offence of
encouragement of ‘terrorism’ in s.1 of the Terrorism Act is to criminalise any
expression of a view that armed resistance to a brutal or repressive
anti-democratic regime might in certain circumstances be justifiable, even where
such resistance consists of campaigns of sabotage against property, and
specifically directed away from human casualties. The Home Secretary does not
deny that this is the effect of the offence but defends its scope on the basis
that there is nowhere in the world today
where violence can be justified as a means of bringing about political change.
(my emphasis)
It is difficult to
think of a more reactionary dictum than saying that people everywhere must
accept the regimes that rule them, however bloodthirsty and oppressive.
Judges such as Sarah Plaschkes
are left to keep the reality of the Terrorism Act 2000 from juries. All that
matters is whether one has broken the law. The law itself is not questioned.
Although I don’t
support Hamas I do support resistance against Israel. In the eyes of the
Prosecution that is tantamount to support for terrorism. Palestinians are
expected to endure whatever Israel does because if they resist that is
automatically ‘terrorism’. And if resisting the legal theft of Palestinian land
becomes ‘terrorism’ then what is really being said is that the Palestinians are
a terrorist people, which is what the Zionists say.
The contrast with
Ukrainian resistance to the Russian occupation could not be greater. This is
not deemed terrorism. The neo-Nazi
Azov Brigade whose founder, Andriy Biletsky said
in 2010 that Ukraine’s national mission was to
lead
the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led
Untermenschen [inferior races]”
does not face proscription
though it satisfies the definition of terrorism in every respect. See The
Western Media Is Whitewashing the Azov Battalion.
The irony is that if
this Act had been in effect in the 1940s then the French Resistance could have been
proscribed but not the Nazi occupiers.
Similarly the Warsaw Ghetto fighters could have been proscribed but not
the SS troops led by General Juergen Stroop.
One final word about
the backward and reactionary politics of British Judges. As the Law Gazette reported
in June 2019, ‘Senior judges (are the)
most socially exclusive' of all professionals’. 65% of senior judges were educated at an
independent school and 75% attended Oxford or Cambridge.
Matt
Foot, the Director of the charity Appeal,
in an article
‘The courage and endurance of the jury’ in Counsel, the Bar Council magazine,
quoted a ‘seminal book’ The Politics of the Judiciary written in 1976 by
J.A.G. Griffith.
Griffith identified the number of
judges from public school backgrounds had increased between 1987 and 1994 –
from 70% to 80%.... 71% of senior judges attended independent schools
(compared to 7% of the public as a whole) and 75% attended Oxford or Cambridge
(compared to 1% of the public). Only 4% of 150 senior judges went to comprehensive
school – the lowest figure for all groups. In Elitist Britain 2019,
… ‘65% of the most senior judges in England and Wales went to an
“independent school” – more than any other elite profession it looked at
Judges are not chosen
for their brilliant intellects but primarily on the basis of their social class.
Most people cannot afford to train as barristers unless their families are
rich. With privilege comes a narrow-minded, blinkered and conservative outlook
in which justice plays second fiddle to a rule of law that is based on the
protection of their class interests. Hence why miscarriages of justice have
never figured highly on their agenda and why today, the victims of miscarriages
of justice have
to prove their innocence in order to receive compensation thanks to a 2014 amendment
to the Crime & Policing Act for which we have to thank the Lib-Dem/Tory
Coalition Government.
Between 1999 and 2015
approximately 1,000 sub-postmasters were convicted
of theft and false accounting. They were convicted on the basis of the common
law presumption that the computer was right,
following the repeal of s.69 of the Police & Criminal Evidence Act
1984. In this case the bug ridden Fujitsu
Horizon software.
Not one Crown
Court judge thought fit to ask whether the
Common Law presumptions should be challenged. You would have thought with cases
of ‘fraudulent’ subpostmasters flooding through the criminal justice system
that at least one judge would have woken up to the fact that something was
wrong.
But no, it took the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance
formed by Alan Bates to eventually prove that the Post Office Executives
were a bunch of crooks led by Paula Vennels, an
ordained Anglican priest who has not yet been defrocked or prosecuted. Which is
understandable since the Police hate prosecuting rich crooks.
Remember 236 or
one-quarter of the postmasters were gaoled.
At least 13 committed suicide. The CPS during Starmer’s time as DPP prosecuted
at least 3 cases. As with Jimmy Saville he knew nothing.
This is one of the
consequences of saying that something is the law. It means you don’t have to
think any further. The idea that the courts should be about justice and that
law serves the people and not the other way around is not something that the Sarah
Plaschkes of this world understand.
Which is one reason why
Plaschkes saw nothing wrong in Sarah Sackman, acting in a quasi-judicial
position as Solicitor General, giving permission for my prosecution to go ahead
given that Attorney General Hermer had disqualified himself. The fact that
Sackman was not only Vice-Chair
of the Jewish Labour Movement, a Zionist group which was alleging that Palestine
solidarity supporters in the Labour Party were anti-Semitic. It was integrally
involved in my expulsion, to the point where Sackman attacked
me personally in the Jewish News of 26 as ‘problematic’. This did not trouble Plaschkes at all.
Juries though have a
wider common sense and appreciation of what is right and wrong. That is why many
Palestine Action protesters have been acquitted. It is also why that ‘Christian’ David
Lammy is intent on abolishing them. They are held responsible for delays in
cases coming to court whereas the real problem lies in
courts being empty much of the time. Judges can be relied upon to deliver
the verdict that the state requires, whereas juries are more thoughtful.
That is why we should
campaign against any attacks by creatures like Lammy on Jury trials. In fact we
should reinstate them where they have been abolished. Libel trials used to be
held in front of a jury. Now that judges
hear them the establishment has less to fear.
A few years ago I sued
the Campaign Against Antisemitism
who called me an anti-Semite. I lost. I have no doubt that if a jury had heard
my case instead of Judge Nicklin and another nondescript High Court judge then
I would have won.
Please sign and share
this Parliamentary Petition
Do not remove trial by jury
for certain cases.
