Petition to Remove anti-Protest Police State Measures from the Public Order Bill

Let’s Use Johnson’s Imminent Demise to Get Rid of His Poisonous Legacy

Please Sign Here 

In the coming session of Parliament the Government intends to introduce a new Public Order Bill which will effectively abolish the right to all except ineffective protests and demonstrations.

Interfering with ‘onshore oil and gas exploration and production facilities’ i.e. fracking will now be a specific offence in itself. Because ‘onshore oil and gas exploration’ will now be defined as ‘key national infrastructure’. And oh yes, there is no more important infrastructure than Rupert Murdoch’s printing press. Blocking them will also be an offence. Locking on to a gate or person will also be a new offence.

A whole range of forms of direct action will be criminalised. The right to protest under the European Convention of Human Rights will be abolished. The recent Supreme Court decision in Ziegler will be overturned.  In other words the owners of big business and capital can go about their way, harming however many people they chose to hurt and it will be a criminal offence to get in their way.  It is the dictatorship of capital.

This is the first Parliamentary Petition that I have initiated. It couldn’t be more important that you sign it. If the Bill is passed it will be a milestone on the road to a Police State. You can only sign it if you are a British Citizen. Just as importantly share, share and share again on social media and place it on your site(s).

This Bill represents a major threat to those most basic of rights in any society that calls itself democratic - the Right to Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Assembly and Association. These rights are enshrined in Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention of Human Rights It is little wonder that the Government intends to replace the Human Rights Act 1998 which implements the ECHR.

I confess to having a personal interest in since I am currently on bail for having participated last March 2021 in an action against Israel’s arms factory, Elbit. This Bill targets and seeks to penalise Palestine Action, Extinction Rebellion, Climate Action, Insulate Britain and similar direct action protest groups.

In June 2021 the Supreme Court in DPP v Ziegler upheld previous decisions of the European Court of Human Rights that

‘the protection of articles 10 and 11 ECHR extends to a protest which takes the form of intentional disruption obstructing others. However, the extent of the disruption and whether it is intentional are relevant factors in the assessment of proportionality’.

The Supreme Court upheld the acquittal of protesters at Stratford Magistrates Court who had locked on to an access road at the Arms Fair at the Excel Centre in East London in 2017. This Bill effectively reverses Ziegler as well as conflicting with Articles 10 and 11 of the ECHR.

If this petition gets 100,000 signatures then the Petitions Committee will consider whether it should be debated in Parliament.

As the Government openly admits (below) the provisions of the Bill are aimed at the right to protest with measures that can only be called draconian.

What would the Public Order Bill do?

The Bill would bring in three major changes to the way protests are policed in England and Wales.

·         Expanding protest related offences: the Bill would introduce four new criminal offences related to disruptive protest including “locking-on”; being equipped to “lock-on”; obstructing major transport works; and interfering with key national infrastructure.

·         Extending police stop and search powers: the Bill would provide the police with new powers to stop and search people for items related to specified protest-related offences.

·         Introducing a new preventative court order: the Bill would create Serious Disruption Prevention Orders aimed at people who repeatedly engage in disruptive protest activity. The orders would be issued with conditions to prevent individuals from being in particular places or with particular people or from participating in certain activities

EXPLAINER: The Public Order Bill 2022

The Network for Police Monitoring has produced below an explainer detailing the proposals in the Bill and their implications, especially for direct action groups. Some of these offences like the Serious Disruption Orders can be used against trade unions and strikers. They have massive implications for our democratic rights.

New ‘locking on’ offences

The Bill proposes that if a person locks themselves onto another person, an object or to land and subsequently causes (or could cause) serious disruption to two or more individuals or an organisation, then an offence is committed. For ‘organisation’, read corporate interest. The maximum penalty is six months imprisonment and/or an unlimited fine.

It also proposes another new offence of “going equipped for locking on”. This is defined as having an item “in a place other than a dwelling with the intention that it may be used in the course of or in connection with” an attempt to lock on. This could mean a bicycle D-lock or a tube of superglue. The proposed maximum penalty is an unlimited fine.

New stop and search powers

The Bill also seeks to amend section 1 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) to provide the police with wide-ranging new grounds for using stop and search powers.

These include suspicion that someone is going to commit the offence of obstructing the highway (under section 137 Highways Act 1980), public nuisance (section 78 of the PCSC Act) or all the new offences proposed by the Public Order Bill (see below).

If that was not alarming enough, the Bill would also introduce a new blanket stop and search power that does not require “reasonable grounds”. This is essentially a version of existing section 60 powers (Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994) that are authorised when there is an alleged threat of serious violence or the use of weapons.

If passed, this would put obstructing the highway, public nuisance and the other offences in the Bill on the same footing as an imminent threat of violent disorder.

It also means that if a senior officer believes these protest offences are likely to take place in an area, they can approve far-reaching new stop and search powers for a 24-hour period.

Blanket search powers are already hugely controversial, as they excuse the police from needing to show reasonable suspicion when stopping someone and have largely been used for racist harassment.

Black people are 40 times more likely to be stopped under Section 60 powers than their white counterparts, and less than 2% of searches result in any further police action. In May 2021, the Criminal Justice Alliance made a super-complaint calling for the repeal of Section 60.

These powers are likely to be used by the police to harass anyone they think is on the way to a protest and is part of a movement whose very legitimacy they question. However, they are particularly worrying for marginalised communities that already bear the brunt of racist policing.

Interference with ‘key infrastructure’

The Bill proposes an offence of interfering with “the use or operation of any key national infrastructure in England and Wales” (or intending to). So, what does this include? Although the Bill gives the Home Secretary the power to add to the following list, it says infrastructure includes:

• road transport
• rail
• air transport
• harbour
• downstream (refining) of crude oil
• downstream (processing and purification) of natural gas
• onshore oil and gas exploration and production
• onshore electricity generation, or
• newspaper printing infrastructure.

Had these proposed offences been in place over the last decade, they would have severely restricted sustained and ultimately successful local opposition to fracking sites and other environmentally destructive fossil fuel extraction. The inclusion of newspaper production appears to result from ministers’ anger at Extinction Rebellion’s blockade in September 2020 of sites belonging to the government’s close friends at News Corp.

The maximum penalty is six months imprisonment and/or an unlimited fine in Magistrates’ Court or 12 months imprisonment and/or an unlimited fine on indictment at the Crown Court.

Obstruction of major transport works

For anyone wanting to take action against large-scale and damaging transport projects such as HS2, an airport expansion or a new motorway, there is a proposed new offence of obstructing major transport works, by blocking or interfering with equipment or blockading, for example, construction work.

However, like so much of the Bill, this is vaguely worded and open to very broad interpretation: obstructing construction staff from “taking any steps that are reasonably necessary for the purposes of facilitating, or in connection with, the construction or maintenance of any major transport works” is also an offence and could mean almost any activity.

The maximum penalty is six months imprisonment and/or an unlimited fine.

Serious Disruption Prevention Orders

This is one of the most disturbing elements of the new Bill. These orders can either be made following a protester’s conviction or on application to a Magistrates’ Court from a Chief Constable of a local police force.

Crucially – because you do not need to be convicted of an offence to be issued with one – Serious Disruption Prevention Orders actively encourage the expansion of police intelligence gathering on a range of social and political movements.

This is because they will be used to seek out and target people whom the police perceive as key organisers and to potentially ban them from attending, organising, or promoting protests seen as “disruptive to two or more individuals or to an organisation” for two years or more, even if they have never been convicted of a crime.

Furthermore, the state may decide they become guilty of a crime if they break the rules of the order in any way – or even fail to notify the police that they are staying somewhere else.

As Serious Disruption Prevention Orders are civil orders, the government may allow courts to decide, on the balance of probabilities (the civil standard of proof), that an individual is likely to cause disruption based solely on intelligence from the police.

In March 2021, a review on the policing of protests by the inspectorate body HMICFRS gave a green light for increased surveillance on so-called “aggravated activists”. Serious Disruption Prevention Orders provide a renewed impetus for police to seek out this new classification of campaigner.

Two of the following conditions need to be met for a Serious Disruption Prevention Order:

·         A person has committed a protest-related offence.

·         A person has committed a breach of an injunction leading to a conviction for contempt of court.

·         A person has “carried out activities related to a protest that resulted in, or were likely to result in, serious disruption to two or more individuals, or to an organisation, in England and Wales”.

·         A person has “caused or contributed to the commission by any other person of a protest-related offence or a protest-related breach of an injunction”

·         A person has “caused or contributed to the carrying out by any other person of activities related to a protest that resulted in, or were likely to result in, serious disruption to two or more individuals, or to an organisation, in England and Wales “.

Modelled on the draconian Knife Crime Prevention Orders that systematically criminalise Black youth, conditions of Serious Disruption Prevention Orders can include:

·         Not associating with named people

·         Not going to certain areas

·         Banning people from attending protests

·         Reporting to a police station at certain times

·         Not participating in certain activities

·         Not using the internet to commit a protest-related offence or to “carry out activities related to a protest that result in, or are likely to result in, serious disruption to two or more individuals, or to an organisation, in England and Wales”.

There is also a provision in the bill for electronic monitoring (wearing an ankle tag) of those subject to orders, for up to a year.

The version of the Public Order Bill that has received its first reading in the House of Commons is available here

Please sign the Petition here

The Petition reads:

We want the Government to remove provisions for:

- electronic tagging of people who intend to attend demonstrations

- orders not to use the internet in certain ways

- expanded stop and search powers

- new offences for "locking on" to others, objects or buildings

We believe the measures proposed are another step in the creation of a police state in this country, and represent a fundamental attack on our civil liberties.

Why We Need a Genuine Palestine Solidarity Movement

The Failure of PSC to Oppose Zionism and the Jewish Supremacist Nature of the Israeli State Renders it Politically Incoherent

Palestinian thugs attack demonstration

In 1982 I was among a group of people who founded PSC in a meeting at the University of London Union. It was shortly before Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. It gives me no pleasure to say that the organisation we formed is today incapable of building a mass solidarity organisation in the same way as the Anti-Apartheid Movement [AAM] did a generation ago.

As Bob Dylan said The Times They Are A Changing. The old lies about Israel being ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ or the Israeli army being ‘the most moral army in the world’ don’t have quite the same ring to it when you see police firing stun grenades inside a mosque or children being battered.

Today there is a real possibility of building a mass movement in support of the Palestinians and engaging with the thousands of young people who demonstrated last summer for Black Lives Matter. The narrative around Israel is changing however many times robots like Keir Starmer claim that they are ‘Zionists without qualification.’ The production of two reports this year, by B’Tselem and then Human Rights Watch, describing Israel as an apartheid state, is a game changer. Coupled with Israel’s ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem and its mass murder spree in Gaza, it is no longer possible to hide the reality of Israel no matter how many times false accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ are made. There is no longer any stopping the process of Israel’s ‘delegitimisation’.

There is no Palestine

But as long as PSC is controlled by two tiny, quasi Stalinist groups, Socialist Action and the Communist League, Israel will have little to fear. Both SA and CL fear, quite correctly, that if a mass movement developed they would lose control. In short they have a vested interest in not building a mass movement around Palestine.

You only have to ask what steps did PSC’s leadership take to link up with Black Lives Matter or Extinction Rebellion? Or what steps did PSC take to support the demonstrations against the Police & Crime Bill. PSC is not interested in linking up with other movements.

Nick Georges

What is the political basis of PSC’s failures?

Quite simply it is that PSC is not anti-Zionist. To be pro-Palestinian and not anti-Zionist is like opposing the oppression of Black people in South Africa without being anti-Apartheid. Zionism is the cause of all the Palestinian ills. It cannot be ignored because it is tactically convenient to do so.

PSC refuses to allow anything to get in the way of subordinating its politics to the trade union bureaucracy. In practice that means supporting the two state solution which is the antithesis of anti-Zionism. By definition supporting 2 states means accepting a Zionist State of Israel.

If you have a look at PSC's 2020 Annual Report or the previous one you will search in vain for the words ‘Zionism’ or 'Zionist'. It must be a complete mystery to much of PSC’s membership why Israel behaves as it does. Perhaps the Israelis are particularly malevolent. PSC calls Israel an apartheid state but it never explains why Israel is an apartheid state or how it became one.

Still less does PSC talk about Israel as a Jewish Supremacist state ,a conclusion that even B'Tselem came to, because of its fears of being called anti-Semitic.

In practice, PSC has always supported a two state solution. In 1993 it supported the Oslo Accords (which didn’t even promise a Palestinian state). As has become clear to most people, the two state solution was never other than a smokescreen under cover of which Israel’s settlements expanded. It was always an illusion because the Zionist movement always claimed the entire Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael).

It was Oslo which created the monstrosity that is the Palestinian Authority. In October 1993. In a debate with Julia Bard of the Jewish Socialists Group I wrote:

The agreement provides for a Palestinian police force up to 30,000 strong. Their first duty will be to suppress Palestinian dissent and any resistance to the Accord. Little wonder that this provision evokes such Israeli enthusiasm....This is an agreement built on shifting sands. It represents a massive victory for imperialism

Virtually everything that I predicted has come true. It did not need a crystal ball to predict that Oslo would be a disaster. All you needed to understand was the nature of the Zionist settler colonial movement.

PSC has never abandoned Oslo. Instead it accepted the ‘Peace Process’ and the legitimacy of the PA. With the recent murder of Nizar Banat by the thugs of the PA PSC has been forced to criticise the actions of the PA for the first time. But it has never questioned its legitimacy.

Even now their statement merely demands that ‘the PA should be severing all security cooperation with the occupying state.’  It says that  ‘PSC has raised these issues in the past with the PA and is doing so again in relation to the death of Nizar.’ It is as if the French Resistance had written a letter to Marshall Petain asking Vichy France to join the ranks of the Resistance!

Nowhere in its statement does PSC demand that the PA disbands itself or even that its armed thugs be disarmed. Instead it treats the PA as a legitimate institution rather than the bastard fruit of Oslo.

Contrast this with Joseph Massad’s Why the PA's days are numbered which describes the PA as ‘a collaborating body’ with the Israeli apartheid regime under US sponsorship.’ Massad describes how

‘The PA police arrangement in fact replicated, and was perhaps inspired by, the South African apartheid state’s use of the Black police to suppress Black resistance before 1994, an arrangement that reduced the danger to the lives of white policemen.

If you compare Massad’s incisive analysis to PSC’s statement it is clear that PSC has no analysis. PSC is not only politically but intellectually bankrupt. It treats what is happening in Palestine as a human rights not a political question. PSC fails to understand that the PA is an adjunct to Israel’s occupation. It is its military subcontractor.

In 2014 I proposed a motion which said:

PSC should sever all relations with the Palestinian Authority, which is a quisling government, whose role is to police the Palestinians on behalf of Israel.

Betty Hunter, the General Secretary and now President of PSC, blew a gasket at my describing the PA as a ‘quisling’ organisation. In her view and PSC’s, the PA was a legitimate representative body of the Palestinians.

Compare this with what Ali Abunimah, the editor of Electronic Intifada,wrote in the wake of Abbas’s withdrawal of support from the Goldstone Report following Operation Cast Lead:

Naming collaboration — even treason — for what it is has always been a painful taboo among Palestinians, as for all occupied peoples. It took the French decades after World War II to begin to speak openly about the extent of collaboration that took place with the Nazi-backed Vichy government.

Tommy Robinson is welcomed onto the pro-Israel demonstration

PSC – An Ideas Free Zone -

The internal publications of PSC are an ideas free zone. They do nothing to educate or raise people’s consciousness. Palestine solidarity for PSC is a human rights issue not a political issue. It campaigns on human rights abuses but never connects them. There is no explanatory narrative.

The word ‘Zionism’ never crosses the lips of the PSC leadership and its Director Ben Jamal or Chair Kamal Hawwash. The obvious conclusion is that Israel is a legitimate state which can be reformed.

This has major implications for the solidarity movement. Israel can withstand criticism of its human rights record (using ‘security’ as its excuse) but it reacts wildly to those who question its legitimacy.

In 2010 in response to BDS, the Reut Institute produced a Report Building a Political Firewall against the Assault on Israel's Legitimacy. In the section London as a Case Study it explained that ‘

The assault is increasingly perceived to be a strategic concern for Israel, with potentially existential implications. This understanding underlies the recent mobilization by the Government of Israel (GOI) to offer a systemic response to this challenge.

What the Zionist movement and the Israeli state fear most of all is the questioning of the very concept of a Jewish state. To them this is an ‘existential’ problem. PSC simply ignored this document. And because there is no forum within PSC to debate or discuss such issues, the organisation continued to blunder along blindly.

The Zionist response to questioning ‘Israel’s right to exist’ as a racist state was to launch the campaign to paint Israel's opponents as ‘anti-Semitic’. It didn’t begin with Jeremy Corbyn but his accession to the leadership of the Labour Party lent a new urgency to the Zionists campaign.

Jeremy Corbyn

Corbyn himself is an example of the poverty of PSC’s politics. He was extremely close to PSC’s leadership. He attended every AGM for a decade or so. He was PSC's human rights ambassador but he simply mouthed 2 state platitudes. PSC never provided him with any explanation of Zionism.

I knew Jeremy well in the early 1980s when I was Chair of the Labour Movement Campaign on Palestine. He was a sponsor. Our motion to the Labour Party conference in 1982 supporting a Democratic Secular State in Palestine passed. Jeremy chaired the Labour Movement Conference on Palestine which called for the disaffiliation of Poale Zion (JLM).

Thornberry at LFI

When the right-wing in Labour under Kinnock and Blair took over the LMCP disappeared. PSC took Corbyn under its wing and he began spouting 2 States nonsense. Jeremy too treated Palestine as simply a human rights question. Hence when he took part in the JLM leadership debate with Owen Smith he praised the independence of Israel’s judiciary! The very judges that have legalised the theft of Palestinian land since 1948. PSC depoliticised a young and enthusiastic MP because it had no anti-Zionist politics.

PSC engages in routinism. It is happy for people to stand on street corners handing out leaflets and lobbying MPs. All very worthwhile as we have to win public support but it is not enough.

We have to transform support on the streets into political support and on this PSC has hopelessly failed. In fact PSC hasn’t even tried.

PSC has a ‘strategy’ of mainstreaming Palestine which has led it to putting Emily Thornberry, a patron of Labour Friends of Israel, on its platforms. Thornberry is a vitriolic Zionist who declared that those who deny Israel’s right to exist as a racist state should be expelled. In a groveling address at Labour Friends of Israel annual dinner’ in November 2017, Thornberry declared that

‘even today... modern Israel stands out as a beacon of freedom, equality and democracy, particularly in respect of women and LGBT communities.’

That must seem like a sick joke to those who are being evicted in Silwan and Sheikh Jarrar today as part of the Master Plan to increase Jerusalem’s Jewish majority. Or those who are confronting pogromists in Bat Yam. Thornberry is an open racist. Yet PSC put both her and Lisa Nandy, a self-declared Zionist on its platforms.

Trade unions and Two States

PSC says that it doesn’t support any solution – 2 States or 1 State. Its excuse being that it’s up to Palestinians to decide what they want. This is a problem because when people ask what we want to see in Palestine PSC has nothing to say. PSC has no vision to offer whereas the AAM had no hesitation in declaring that it wanted a unitary South Africa.

It is also disingenuous since Palestinians today have no representative organisations. The PA, which PSC supports, believes in 2 states. Indeed it believes it has already achieved a Palestinian state!

Yet all surveys of Palestinians show that today a very clear majority – 66% in the West Bank and 56% in Gaza support a unitary state compared to 14% in the West Bank and 31% in Gaza supporting a 2 state solution. But even if Palestinians still supported a two state solution a solidarity movement should reject it. The reason why some Palestinians support 2 states still is because they are desperate for anything that relieves their plight.

A two state solution is an apartheid solution which leaves Israel in place as a Jewish Supremacist state. We speak to British supporters of the Palestinians not the Palestinians. Our job is to persuade people here that Israel is illegitimate. Our end goal must be a state where all people live together not a continuation of apartheid by other means.

But PSC leadership are dishonest. They are not concerned about Palestinian opinion. Some 53% of Palestinians now support Hamas compared to 14% for Abbas and Fateh. The real reason why PSC clings to a 2 state solution is that the affiliation of trade unions to PSC has been obtained at a political price. That price is not adopting a position which opposes Israel’s right to exist as a ‘Jewish’ ie racist state. The trade unions support 2 states. So does LFI and the JLM because they know it won’t happen!

The trade union leaders support 2 states because they want to support both sides of the ‘conflict’. It’s as if, 30 years ago, they had supported the White Nationalists and the Black liberation movements. In situations of colonisation you can’t support both sides and supporting 2 states is exactly that.

PSC or rather Socialist Action, is happy to cuddle up to trade union leaders and accept their money in return for silence. It is a faustian bargain, a deal without principle or any semblance of morality.

An article in Oxford Student in response to the attempt to ban Ken Loach from speaking at St Peter's college

The IHRA

The IHRA was drawn up at the initiative of Dina Porat of the Stephen Roth Institute at Tel Aviv University in 2004. Kenneth Stern, its principal drafter, described at a conference in 2010 in Paris ‘The Working Definition of Anti-Semitism [WDA] and Six Years After’ its genesis in an article ‘The Working Definition – a Reappraisal’. As Stern makes clear the intention all along was to redefine hostility to Zionism as anti-Semitism. What Stern didn’t support was using it to brand individuals as anti-Semites, especially on campus and chill free speech. Whether Stern was naive or duped is an open question.

The IHRA has been the main instrument by which anti-Semitism has been weaponised. It has been the sword of defamation and has been responsible for numerous anti-racists and anti-Zionists being traduced as racists. It is an example of racists accusing anti-racists of racism in an Orwellian world where words have lost all meaning.

PSC has dropped any campaign against the IHRA. It is difficult to understand what exactly PSC has done apart from funding a legal opinon from Hugh Tomlinson QC and writing a round robin letter to local authorities. Perhaps the one initiative they did take up was when the Big Ride was banned from meeting in a park in Tower Hamlets by their Blairite Mayor. That was a brief respite from doing nothing.

However PSC has not taken up the IHRA on campus. At the end of last year Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, threatened that Universities who refused to adopt the IHRA would have their funding cut. PSC has been completely inactive over this. It isn’t a priority.

The IHRA has been used to attack anti-Zionist academics at a host of universities including Bristol, Sussex, Leeds, Warwick. There are more. At Warwick at least 4 staff have been targeted by the  Union of Jewish Students as ‘anti-Semites’. The University adopted the IHRA in October of last year. The attack on the staff prompted the Warwick Assembly, which over 200 staff attended, to reject the IHRA by over 93%. As a result the adoption of the IHRA has been suspended.

The most egregious case of a witchhunt is at Bristol University. Four years ago the misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism targeted a Jewish lecturer, Rachel Gould over an article she had written. They called for her dismissal. Tory Cabinet Minister Eric Pickles called her a holocaust denier. The attack on her was described by Kenneth Stern in testimony to Congress as ‘egregious’ ‘chilling and McCarthy-like.’

On 13 February David Miller, a Professor at Bristol University, called for an end to Zionism and described how Zionist organisations were using Jewish students as pawns. Immediately the the Zionists demanded that Miller be dismissed. Two weeks later 100 MPs and Lords, including Caroline Lucas MP, wrote an open letter to the Vice Chancellor of Bristol University demanding that Miller be removed.

Caroline Lucas’s Tory friends on the Education Select Committee then demanded that Miller be sacked. These McCarthyists called Bristol University a “hotbed of antisemitism” and fostering a climate similar to “1930s Nazi Germany”. If anyone else made comparisons with Nazi Germany they would be called anti-Semites! Jonathan Gullis MP went further attacking Goldie Osuri at Warwick University. ‘“We need to start sacking people’ Gullis said.

I wrote to Ben Jamal demanding that they issue a statement supporting David Miller. Well they issued a statement Protecting Palestinian Rights and Academic Freedom but they offered not a word of support or solidarity. Instead PSC accused David Miller of failing

‘to apply depth, context, and clarity, and to avoid narratives that oversimplify the interlinks between groups which oppose actions in support of Palestinian rights, and Israeli state actors.... it can risk drawing on anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish power.’

They didn’t even have the courage to make these criticisms directly. Instead the following weasel words appeared:

‘Whilst some have criticised Professor Miller for lacking such depth and clarity in the way he has couched his remarks...’

The push by the Tories for the adoption of the IHRA has gone hand in hand with a campaign by various Zionist organisations - the Board of Deputies, UJS and the CST to target anti-Zionist academics.

Compare PSC’s response to the forthright statement of BRICUP:

BRICUP is not qualified to comment on Professor’s Miller’s scholarly work but affirms the responsibility of all academics, irrespective of discipline or political view, to defend his right to teach and research without the threat of external intervention.

PSC has forgotten what the word solidarity means.

Trade unions

In 2010 PSC refused to support a resolution to boycott Histadrut, Israel’s Apartheid Union. From its inception in 1920 Histadrut supported a policy of Jewish Labour i.e. a boycott of Arab labour. It took 39 years to admit its first Arab member. Even then Arabs were put into a separate section. Histadrut was, with the JNF, one of the main organisations of Zionist colonisation.

Whilst UNISON voted to boycott Histadrut, PSC and its trade union officer Bernard Regan opposed boycotting it.

PSC, far from encouraging unions to take the boycott of Israel seriously is happy to confine boycott to settlement goods only, which is a nonsense since they are marketed as the produce of Israel.

PSC has refused to raise the IHRA in the unions. When I leafleted delegates at PSC’s trade union conference, I was told to leave by Ben Jamal. PSC refused to include the IHRA on the agenda. If PSC had campaigned for the unions to oppose the IHRA then Labour would not have adopted it. The witchhunt of Palestinian supporters in Labour would have been halted in its tracks.

I wrote on behalf of my union branch to Len McLuskey asking that Unite’s Executive stop supporting the IHRA. On 16 May 2021 McLuskey wrote back indignantly stating that:

‘In the meantime Unite will continue to support PSC and I dismiss out offhand your suggestion that we are betraying PSC.’

The strange thing is that I had not mentioned PSC. What had triggered this response? Clearly McLuskey believed that PSC supported the IHRA. This is understandable because PSC had refused to campaign in the unions against the IHRA.

The Labour Party and the False Anti-Semitism Campaign

Throughout his leadership Corbyn and the Labour left was accused of anti-Semitism. The purpose of the campaign was to brand anti-Zionism and support for the Palestinians as anti-Semitic.

Yet as activists were being picked off PSC kept silent. It never defended Corbyn from allegations of anti-Semitism. It issued no leaflets explaining why anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. I wrote to Secretary Ben Soffa on 11 April 2016 asking why the silence. Ben responded on 20 April in what was a master class in complacency. He wrote that ‘I make no apology for the fact that we do not engage in every debate some would wish to involve us in.’

As activists were being picked off for any mention of Israeli Apartheid many others were intimidated into silence. The campaign against ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party spread into virtually every area of society. PSC still seems unable to come out and say that the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign had nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

PSC has nothing to say about Zionism since it is afraid of being accused of anti-Semitism. It has never mentioned the links between the Zionist movement and the far Right, people like Viktor Orban, the anti-Semitic Hungarian Prime Minister and friend of Israel or the support of Germany’s neo-Nazi party AfD or even Tommy Robinson’s recent appearance on a pro-Israel demonstration. PSC is unable to go on the offensive against the Zionist lobby. It resembles David Low’s depiction of the TUC as a slow-witted carthorse.

PSC is an ideas free zone – a political vacuum

The campaign against Israel is different in one crucial respect from that against Apartheid in South Africa. Whereas the latter had no domestic support base apart from the capitalists, right-wing Tories and fascists, the Israeli state has a lobby that is strong and powerful.

Israel has support in the Jewish community. The last survey by Yachad of British Jews in 2015 found that 59% identify as Zionists. However 31% said that they weren’t Zionists. This was down 13% on a similar survey 5 years previously.

Despite the attempt to label BDS as anti-Semitic 24% of British Jews support some form of sanctions on Israel. Among secular Jews this rises to 40% and among the under 30s it is 41%. Compare this with the Board of Deputies which purports to speak for British Jews, which never criticises Israel. Zionist organisations have hijacked the  voice of British Jews. British Jews are in the words of Barnaby Raine the Establishment’s ‘favourite pets: heroic colonists in the Middle East and successful citizens in the West.'

British Jews are, as David Miller asserted, treated as pawns by Zionist organisations. They fulfil the same role in support of Israel as Algerian Jews did under French colonialism. What is surprising is not that there is anti-Semitism as a result of the identification of British Jews with Israel but that there is so little anti-Semitism.

PSC could, if it had any internal democracy or discussion forums, take advantage of these divisions amongst British Jews to challenge British Zionist organisations. But since there is no discussion of strategy in PSC there was no discussion about how to combat the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign except maybe inside Socialist Action or the Communist League.

There is a great deal of debate about Palestine in Britain yet within PSC there is no attempt to debate strategic issues such as how how to advance BDS. There is no internal discussion bulletin or forum to debate how to combat the pro-Apartheid lobby.

Discussion about strategy or tactics is left either to individual branches or ad hoc groups like Palestine Action. There was a strategic review some years ago by Ben Jamal but it was top down. When it comes to internal debate PSC is an arid desert.

Palestine Action and direct action

In 2020 a staff member of PSC and former student activist, Huda Ammori, was forced to resign. She alleged bullying by the Director Ben Jamal that forced her to go sick with depression. When she submitted a grievance letter she was pressurised by PSC Chair Kamel Hawwash into withdrawing her complaint.

In the wake of Huda being forced out 4 members of PSC Executive resigned. Quite amazingly at its 2021 Conference there was no mention of the resignations in the Annual Report, presumably on the basis that if it didn’t get mentioned it didn’t happen!

Huda and others then formed Apartheid on Campus which PSC did its best to destroy despite doing nothing on campus itself. The failure of PSC to make any impact amongst students is itself a disgrace.

PSC and Palestine Action

Palestine Action was formed late last year with a focus to campaign against companies complicit in Israel’s colonisation of Palestine, Elbit Systems in particular. Elbit has some 10 factories in Britain. You will have seen news of many of its actions. The state has spent enormous resources trying to criminalise its activists.

Having done little itself you might imagine that PSC would welcome a group campaigning against Elbit. Wrong. In February PSC circulated a bogus piece of legal advice to branches warning against supporting PA. It warned that those who supported it financially could be prosecuted. This was nothing more than scare mongering. The real reason for PSC’s hostility was its opposition to direct action and confronting the British state. In addition to its fear of competitors.

PSC contacted the Boycott National Committee and got them to warn PA not to use the term BDS!! Despite PA receiving massive support PSC has not let up in its hostility. When Brighton and Hove PSC wanted to move an emergency motion at PSC AGM supporting PA Socialist Action’s Louise Regan ruled the motion out of order. Regan, PSC’s Vice-Chair, told the AGM that people had a choice – they could support PSC or Palestine Action. They could not do both.

PSC should have welcomed Palestine Action. They weren’t obliged to fund them but there was absolutely no reason to try and destroy them. PSC objected to the minor criminal damage that PA caused to Elbit’s factories like breaking windows or painting its buildings red!

I wrote to Omar Barghouti of the BNC in March this year suggesting that Palestinians in Gaza were unlikely to protest at PA damaging Elbit Factories given the reign of terror they face from its drones.

If PSC prioritised Palestine solidarity rather than empire building they would have offered legal help to PA. They could have publicised PA actions and begun a campaign themselves against Elbit, which boasts that it is the backbone of Israel’s military. They could have supported the pickets of courts where defendants, myself included, have been arraigned to face trial. Instead it has done nothing.

During the recent attack on Gaza PA activists occupied the roof of the Elbit factory in Leicester. The occupation received massive publicity both nationally and internationally from the BBC, The Independent, Al Jazeera, Jewish News, Novara Media and Electronic Intifada to name but a few. When the Police arrested those involved hundreds of local people surrounded the police vans to prevent them being taken away. The Fire Brigades Union refused to aid the police attempts to bring down the occupiers. When have PSC ever gained the support of workers on the ground for an activity?

The occupation of Elbit, like the refusal of dockers in Italy, South Africa and California, to unload ships belonging to Zim, was a concrete act of support for the people of Gaza. What was PSC’s reaction? Nothing except embarrassed silence. Not one word emanated from PSC nationally. The only emails I got during the Gaza attacks from PSC were appeals for money.  The attack on Gaza was its opportunity. Solidarity there was none.

Why then the hostility to PA? There was similar hostility to InMinds. PSC wants to preserve Palestine as its monopoly. It therefore resents other groups trespassing on what it considers its territory. This is a product of the political sectarianism of those who control PSC.

Mainstreaming Palestine

But it’s more than this. PSC’s whole strategy is what it calls ‘mainstreaming’ Palestine. In other words winning over the British Establishment. PSC doesn’t understand why the British government supports Zionism and Israel. The reasons, as anyone who has any awareness of the linkup between British and Israeli political and military echelons knows is because of shared interests between British imperialism and Israel. Israel is the West’s strategic watchdog in the Middle East. It conducts joint exercises with NATO. That is what lies behind the support of the most reactionary sections of the Tory Party, Eric Pickles et al – for Israel. It certainly isn’t love of Jews.

Direct action that involves spraying blood red paint on a factory goes against PSC’s ‘strategy’ of winning over the Establishment. PSC have difficulty understanding that British imperialism has no principled objection to Israel’s human rights abuses. The British Army hardly had a spotless record in Iraq, Afghanistan or Ireland. Human rights abuses and imperialism go together.

PSC’s mainstreaming ‘strategy’ has been a disaster. Apart from Corbyn it has no MPs as sponsors. It got rid of Baroness Tonge sometime ago. It has not  even tried to persuade MPs to form a BDS lobby. It lacks support from the Establishment yet it attacks direct action.

Since May there have been two huge demonstrations in support of the Palestinians, the last one 200,000 strong. They were called by 6 organisations including CND, Al Aqsa, Stop the War Coalition and the Muslim Association of Britain. MAB in particular mobilised huge numbers. It is doubtful, given its previous record, that PSC would have mobilised even a tenth of these numbers by itself.

What it does prove is that the cause of Palestine has massive potential. If PSC were a genuine solidarity organisation then membership would be 20,000 not around 5-6,000. It would be a movement at the forefront of direct action, linking up with groups like BLM, Xtinction Rebellion and the recent Campaign Against the Police Bill.

What PSC does have is a number of active branches nationally. It would have even more if there was an effective branch development policy. The list of branches on its website is hopelessly out of date.

Branches receive little support from the national office. When Brighton and Hove PSC waged a 2 year long campaign against Sodastream in Brighton, which successfully closed the shop down, we received no support from PSC nationally. The same was true of the successful campaign against Ahava in Covent Garden. PSC nationally mobilised nobody. Direct action simply does not fit into PSC’s plans.

The question is whether sufficient branches will be the kernel of a new and healthier Palestine solidarity movement which can build on the enormous support for the Palestinians today. A group which isn’t controlled by tiny sects, leftovers of the International Marxist Group, who believe that China is a socialist utopia. The question for activists is how to go about building such a movement.

Tony Greenstein