On Monday My Trial On ‘Terrorism’ Charges Was Adjourned until 18 August 2026

 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’

Tony Greenstein speaking at Kingston Crown Court at the start of his trial on 5 January 2026 before it was adjourned till August 18, 2026

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.

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.

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.’

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. 

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.