Stop the War Coalition and Palestine Solidarity Campaign Have Refused to Mobilise Behind the Defend Our Juries campaign. Why?
October 4 Defend Our Juries Demonstration Against the Proscription of Palestine Action
Both Stop
the War Coalition and Palestine
Solidarity Campaign are doing their utmost to build the 31st (?)
national demonstration this Saturday against Genocide in Gaza. These
demonstrations are important morale boosters for activists yet in terms of their
impact on the British Government they have been a failure. They also attract
very little media attention.
Defend Our Juries
protests by way of contrast have attracted massive media publicity and have
put the Establishment on the backfoot. People like former Supreme Court Judge Jonathan
Sumption have come out and said
in the Independent of 12 August 2025:
The Terrorism Act creates an offence of supporting a proscribed organisation. It precisely defines what acts amount to support. One of them is wearing, carrying or displaying an article giving rise to a reasonable suspicion that the person supports the proscribed organisation. This is far too wide.
Merely indicating your support for a terrorist organisation without doing anything to assist or further its acts should not be a criminal offence and is consistent with basic rights to free speech. It looks as if Palestine Action has deliberately courted trouble by encouraging people to carry placards with messages specially designed to commit the offence. Martyrdom sometimes has a political value.
Even Murdoch’s Times opposed the proscription of Palestine Action in a leading article. Not from any sympathy for PA's 'squalid agenda' but because it might create the impression that pro-Palestinian sentiment was being censored, perish the thought!
As Paul Harris SC, the founding Chair of the Bar’s
Human Rights Committee wrote:
there can be no doubt that a decision to proscribe a
non-violent organisation articulating widely shared concerns is a dangerous
attack on free speech and freedom to protest, which is likely to cause
sustained injustice to peaceful supporters of that organisation or its aims,
who will as a consequence be designated terrorist supporters.
Different
police forces have reacted differently. Some like Devon and Cornwall have
not arrested people with placards supporting Palestine Action. There has been widespread consternation,
reaching into the higher echelons of the State about the overreach of the Terrorism Act
and its effect on the right to protest. The intelligence document on which the government
based its decision concluded that 99% of
PA’s actions were not terrorist.
Professor
Robert Barrington of Sussex University’s Centre for the Study of Corruption argued
that what was happening was a clear example of government abuse of power:
What we are seeing on display is the extent of
government power and the ways in which it can be deployed against protestors.
If PA are terrorists in any conventional sense, then evidence should be put in
the public domain. If the problem is trespass or criminal damage, other
laws are available to prosecute them. If they continue to be branded as
terrorists, what is PA today may tomorrow be any other civil society group that
irritates the government of the day and can be labelled a threat to national
security.
The campaign
against PA’s proscription has rocked the Metropolitan Police in a way that
nothing that PSC or StWC has done.
Paula
Dodds, chair of the Metropolitan Police Federation, was quoted
as saying that officers were “physically
exhausted” but continue to be called on “to facilitate these relentless protests” and that “we are coming under attack for doing so. How
can this be right?”
“There aren’t enough of us. Hard-working
police officers are continually having days off cancelled, working longer
shifts and being moved from other areas to facilitate these protests.
“Our
concentration should be on keeping people safe at a time when the country is on
heightened alert from a terrorist attack. We are emotionally and physically
exhausted.”
A Met Police
officer told Novara Media that enforcing the ban on Palestine
Action made them feel “sick” and “ashamed”, while a Police Federation
spokesperson highlighted the risk of burnout for officers, saying that the
demand is “relentless” and unsustainable.
Middle East Eye quoted
one arrestee who overheard police officers complaining about having to work
long hours, their leave being cancelled, not being allowed to go home, and having
to do mandatory overtime in order to process the hundreds of arrests at various
police stations in and around London.
"I knew that my arresting
officer was very unhappy about having to go to Bromley to process my
arrest,"
Ceinwen Hilton, another protester who was arrested at 6.20pm in Westminster,
then waited till 8pm to be processed. Hilton was not released until after 1am.
Over
2,000 people have been arrested on the demonstrations and probably another
thousand at least have defied the law. I am proud to say that my friend
Elizabeth Morley, an 80 year old Jewish daughter of a holocaust survivor, is
amongst them having been arrested on Saturday. Her local Cambrian News asked
whether she was the new face of terrorism!
You might
think that in this situation PSC and StWC would put their resources behind
the Defend Our Juries campaign. DOJ is a relatively small, pacifistic liberal
organisation. StWC is by contrast a much larger and long established
organisation. It is run by self-proclaimed Marxists of the Counterfire
persuasion. People like Chris Nineham, Lindsey German and John Rees together
with ex-Stalinists like Andrew Murray. It is an unashamedly left-wing organisation.
Rees, who was heavily involved in the Free Julian Assange campaign, has spoken eloquently about the traditions of direct action and protest in Britain. It would seem that to some on the left, direct action is more of a theoretical concept than something to actually be carried out. StWC has done nothing to support the DOJ campaign.
We face a government which is proposing to
continue what the Tories started by granting even more powers to the police to
harass and control demonstrations to prevent that wicked phenomenon of repeat
demonstrations.
Stop the War Coalition March, February 2003
The
reality is that StWC which began with the largest
ever demonstration in Britain on 15 February 2003 against the Iraq War,
believed to be between one and two million strong, failed to capitalise on the demonstration
and prevent Britain’s participation in the war. That would have involved mass
civil disobedience and bringing Britain to a halt. StWC was not prepared to do
so.
Today we
have a liberal organisation taking the lead against government protest laws, whilst the ex-SWP Marxists of
Counterfire prefer a demonstration through the streets of London that will
achieve nothing rather than throwing their weight behind a campaign of defiance that
stands every chance of success.
It is possible
to prevent Starmer, Britain’s most unpopular Prime Minister ever, from taking
the axe to our remaining democratic rights. Yet StWC is more interested in
respectability and confining protest to established channels than defying a tyrannical
law.
Even MI5
is said
to harbour considerable doubts over the proscription of Palestine Action yet
StWC has done nothing.
PSC & Ben Jamal run a mile from anything that would bring them into conflict with the law and the British state
Palestine
Solidarity Campaign is even worse. On the eve of the ban coming into their
effect the leadership of PSC under Ben Jamal took fright that PSC might be
caught out being seen to defy the ban on PA.
At the end of June it sent
out an instruction to its membership that:
"It is very
important that members of the PSC and supporters of our branch do not take any
protest action in the name of the PSC, as this could seriously jeopardise PSC's
work and the movement – thank you."
In other
words PSC should be allowed to go its own sweet way, building an NGO on the
backs of the Palestinians without taking any risks itself. PSC’s whole strategy
over the past decade and more has been to ‘mainstream’ the Palestinian cause. It has been a demonstrable failure.
What PSC has failed to get into its head is the fact that the British Government is hostile to the Palestinians because an alliance with Israel lies at the heart of British, American and European imperialism's strategy for the Middle East. Human rights and international law count for nothing which is why Starmer refuses to accept that Israel's actions amount to genocide when every human rights organisation has long since classified it as genocide.
The British State is the enemy of the Palestinians and should be treated as such. It has no interest in opposing Zionism. A Palestinian solidarity organisation worth its salt would recognise that simple fact. Instead PSC is committed to 'mainstreaming' the Palestinian cause.
PSC
failed to confront the false anti-Semitism smear in the Labour Party or support
Jeremy Corbyn and ended up with Keir Starmer, the Zionist
without qualification. It platformed
open Zionists like Lisa Nandy and Emily Thornberry in the hope that they could
be won over.
It
refused to criticise the two state solution and at no stage has it ever said it
is opposed to a Jewish settler colonial state in Palestine. In 2022 it even
removed opposition to Zionism from its Constitution prompting
my own resignation from the organisation I helped found. Although Ben Jamal now claims that PSC is anti-Zionist
they are mere words. It is difficult to
understand how PSC can claim to be anti-Zionist when it refuses to oppose the
existence of the Israeli state as a Jewish Supremacist State.
PSC
nationally has made timidity into an art form. When Manchester PSC supported
October 7 as a legitimate act of resistance their officers were suspended,
resulting in the whole group disaffiliating from PSC. PSC has refused to
criticise the Palestinian Authority even though it cooperates with the Israeli occupation
authority, arresting and torturing militants on Israel’s behalf. Its ‘President’
Mahmoud Abbas describes its cooperation with the IDF as ‘sacred’.
PSC has
reduced the struggle of the Palestinians to a human rights question. It has
completely depoliticised that struggle. The one thing that PSC has done is to accumulate a
large amount of money, well over a million pounds, since October 7 enabling it
to employ yet more staff to no good effect.
Politically its impact has been minimal. It is more of an NGO than a
campaigning organisation.
PSC has
consistently failed to take up the use of anti-terrorism legislation to
proscribe Palestinian organisations and deter protest. It is not necessary to support Hamas
politically in order to oppose its proscription. The proscription of Hamas’
political wing in November 2021 by Priti Patel, a corrupt and racist
politician, went unopposed by PSC. There was no campaign and I cannot even
recall them mentioning it.
It is no
surprise that PSC’s opposition to the proscription of Palestine Action ended on
July 5. If PSC had thrown its weight
behind the campaign of DOJ then the Police would have been unable to enforce
the law and it would be as good as dead. The same goes for StWC.
That is
what lay behind the appeal of the
Met’s Assistant Commissioner, Ade Adelekan, to DoJ to postpone the protests
using the pathetically transparent lie that opposing genocide was being
disrespectful to the victims of the attack on the synagogue last week. This
appeal also demonstrated the weakness of the Police position.
Can you
remember the last time the Police appealed to the organisers of a criminal activity
to postpone their activities to the following week! Perhaps we will now have
letters to budding bank robbers or burglars appealing to them not to go ahead
with their activities because police resources are stretched. Adelekan’s
letter is itself an admission that DOJ’s activities are political not criminal.
If PSC
had any strategy or political nous it would recognise that the British state is
not going to stop supporting Israel unless it is forced to do so. Appealing to
its better nature is pointless because it doesn’t have one.
It is
noteworthy that the Police offered to ‘meet virtually or otherwise’ with DOJ to discuss
their letter. When the Met banned
PSC from marching on January 18 near the BBC, because there was a synagogue nearby,
which meant accepting the canard that support for Palestine was anti-Semitic and
threatening to Jews, they refused to meet with PSC.
It is to
be hoped that PSC and its members will begin to realise that only by
confronting the British state’s support for genocide and Zionism will it be
forced to change its support for Zionism. That means being prepared to defy
laws which are anti-democratic.
Tony
Greenstein
This is another relentlessly brilliant revelation from Tony of what protesters should be doing. It's a big ask, but can also now have the big reveal on exactly what campaigners now need to do instead.
ReplyDeleteTony, as someone who is a socialist and who has been arrested three times (so far) on demonstrations to oppose the ban on Palestine Action and the labelling as terrorists of anyone saying they support its actions, I completely agree with your analysis (as usual!). Solidarity support, including from people not able or willing to carry signs for whatever reason, would be very welcome indeed. Be in no doubt, we are on the right side of history and will win this battle but, we need to do so as quickly as possible in order to grow the movement forcing the hand of the British state to stop selling arms to the Zionist state of Izreal and help to bring to an end the illegal occupation, apartheid and genocide being conducted now in Palestine.
ReplyDeleteSadly, it is the fate of most pressure groups to succumb to infiltration by the state, sometimes to wish it. That's what you get by allying with bourgeois liberals.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that it is shamefully sectarian that the StWC and PSC have not given real practical support to the brave activists of DoJ as they risk arrest, especially when the demonstrations have taken place on the same day. And also that apart from moral support and a continued presence on the streets these marches are not achieving anything useful. It reveals these organisations motives of building mainstream mass movements and memberships, but without any sort of discussion - let alone strategy - as to how to move from mere protest to resistance. As you rightly say, they are behaving more like NGOs than political pressure groups. I guess we also need those to keep activities ticking over when there is no immediate crisis but that is not true now. It was the same with CND in the 1980s - however with it's more decentralised structure direct action groups emerged that were able to organise under the CND banner but outside of central CND constraints. I hope that the DoJ actions will spark direct actions more generally.
ReplyDeleteGreat write up Tony. Is it fair to say that StWC has never done what it says - stopping wars ?
ReplyDeleteCorbyns is or was in it, and was supposedly against the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, yet not only remained in Labour throughout its plundering of both countries, but told people to vote for it. Sadly, so many don't seem to see that as a red flag and are apparently happy to support his latest grift - Your Party.