High Court Predictably Refuses to Delay the Coming into Effect of The Proscription of Palestine Action As A Terrorist Organisation

Large Demonstration Outside the Royal Courts of Injustice Today Declares 

‘We Support Palestine Action’

We Support Palestine Action Demonstration Outside the Royal Courts of Injustice Today 4 July 2025

At midnight tonight the proscription of Palestine Action as a ‘terrorist’ group comes into effect, the High Court having turned down an application to delay its implementation.

This so-called Labour government has driven a nail through our democratic right to protest by proscribing a protest group, Palestine Action as a terrorist group. In the process it has made the term ‘terrorist’ meaningless.

Instead of terrorism being acts of violence against a civilian population, which is what the Israeli state is, any group which interferes with Police State Starmer’s right to support genocide is liable to also be proscribed.

The old saying that ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’ has been proven correct. Most people see the Israeli state as a terrorist state but to the war criminals who head our government, murdering hundreds of thousands of people, executing Red Crescent and humanitarian aid workers, bombing hospitals and murdering journalists is merely collateral damage.

In the House of Lords yesterday peers defeated a ‘regret’ motion from the Green Party’s Baroness Jenny Jones by 144-16 though as in the Commons it was the opponents of Starmer’s police state legislation that had the better arguments.

Peter Hain, who in 1970 organised the Stop the Tour Committee against the proposed tour of the Apartheid Cricket Team and the previous Springbok Rugby Tour, told the Lords that if these powers had been in force then they would have been used against campaigners against Apartheid in South Africa.

Hain also drew attention to the fact that the Suffragettes had been branded extremists and terrorists in their time. They had even planned to plant bombs in Lloyd George’s new house.

It is a mark of the degeneracy of Starmer’s Labour Party  that they could introduce a proscription order whose effect is to defend a genocide in Gaza happening before our eyes. There is no principle that this so-called human rights lawyer is not prepared to break in order to appease the United States and the Israel lobby.

What of Palestine Action?  There was a large demonstration of over a thousand people today outside the Palaces of Injustice in The Strand with their mock gothic architecture. For once the Met didn’t try attacking any demonstrators, at least not while I was there.

Predictably enough the High Court turned down the application to delay the implementation of the legislation although it is due to go to the Court of Appeal. However I don’t hold out much hope that this reactionary court will overturn the lower court’s decision.

What next?  Well Palestine Action held a packed 1,000 strong Zoom meeting tonight under the title of The Plan but there was little evidence of such a plan although I was told that this was because of the presence of police and other spies. The meeting itself lasted less than an hour.

It remains to be seen whether or not there will be deliberate attempts to make the legislation unworkable by simply flouting it or whether Palestine Action will continue its work of attacking Elbit factories but not in the name of Palestine Action. One name that has been proposed is Yvette Cooper, the trollope who, as Home Secretary, brought the order forward.

What is certain is that the proscription of a direct action protest group marks a new low for a government led by an empty suit which has attacked claimants, the disabled, parents with more than two children and protesters. It is laying the basis for Farage’s Reform party at the next election which is why the decision of Zara Sultana to resign from the Labour Party is so welcome.

It is to be hoped that Jeremy Corbyn abandons his usual indecisiveness and hesitation and comes out in support of Sultana’s decision. It is also to be hoped that other left-Labour MPs like John McDonnell follow suit.

What is needed however is a broad based campaign to roll back the ongoing attack on democratic rights, not just by Starmer but the previous Tory government too.  It is no surprise that those who are supporting genocide in Gaza are eager to clamp down on democracy at home.

Tony Greenstein

Palestine Solidarity Campaign Hauls Up the White Flag on Palestine Action’s Proscription

 Our Slogan Should Be 

'We are all Palestine Action'  

Frank McGinnis, Barrister at Garden Court Chambers, on Palestine Action

I have just been sent a copy of a message from Lambeth & Southwark PSC to its members/supporters re the proscription of Palestine Action. I don’t know whether it derives from PSC nationally but I suspect it does. It says:

 " 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."

 This is the very opposite of what is required. Meek compliance with the law rather than a refusal to comply with it will guarantee that the ban on Palestine  will be accepted.

Our slogan should be 'We are all Palestine Action'.  Palestine Action has been proscribed because it is the most effective group campaigning against the genocide. At a time of Genocide it is incumbent upon us to take risks and to defy the government when it outlaws free speech.

When you embed a lie within the law, it renders the law illegitimate and worthless. If thousands of people take up the cry that we are all Palestine Action then the law will be rendered inoperable. If we meekly comply with the law then we will do what this genocidal Labour Government wants us to do.

There comes a time to make a stand and that time is now. Free speech is the basis of all our democratic rights. Without it there is no democracy.

The proposed law the dictat of an unpopular government. It has no popular mandate and has been met with an avalanche of opposition stretching well beyond the usual suspects. From the Chartists to the Suffragettes to the Pentonville dockers, when the law is bad then the only way to change it is to break it.

Instead of advocating compliance PSC should be encouraging MPs in Parliament to say that they will declare themselves supporters of Palestine Action in the Commons protected as they are by parliamentary privilege.

For PSC to wave the white flag now is unforgivable and should be opposed. If thousands of us refuse to comply the law will be rendered inoperative. When Palestinians are dying in their thousands we have to also make sacrifices.

The time for token actions, which is the favourite action of PSC is over. If PSC had defied the Police over the demonstration at the BBC in January the Police's right to ban demonstrations on  grounds of 'antisemitism' would have been brought into sharp relief.

There is a time for civil disobedience and the time is now.  They cannot imprison and prosecute thousands of us.

We should ask left and socialist groups to carry the message on the front page of their papers that ‘We Support Palestine Action’. This is a Police State Law and should be treated as such.

Solidarity

Tony Greenstein

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Which way forward for the Left? a mass Communist Party or a broad left socialist movement?

 Is it possible to salvage anything from the Corbyn Project or is the socialist left destined to talk to itself?

Register in advance for this webinar here or here

Tonight we had the launch meeting of the new Socialist Labour Network (LAW/LIEN) and 150 people attended. Ian Hodson, President of the Bakers Union was the guest speaker.

The process of forming a new organisation began at the end of November when All Members Meetings of Labour-in-Exile-Network and Labour Against the Witchhunt voted to merge into a single organisation. Both LAW and LIEN had been proscribed by Labour’s National Executive Committee last July 20^th.

Orgreave when the Police were used as Thatcher's cavalry to destroy the strike

The decision of the 2 organisations to merge was taken in the teeth of opposition from Labour Party Marxism which is the Communist Party of Great Britain in the Labour Party. 5 of the 6 members of LAW’s Steering Committee were also opposed to the merger and 4 of them explained their reasons in a statement Why we resigned.

This was accompanied by an article both in Weekly Worker and on the LPM website Something serious is needed: confronting Tony Greenstein and Merging into a cul-de-sac. I replied with Not a liquidation? and Self-declared heretic replies.

The fact that the CPGB and its leading theoretician Jack Conrad felt the need to personalise a political disagreement suggests that the CPGB is finding it difficult to mount a sustainable argument.

LPM insisted, contrary to all the evidence, that what was being proposed was not a merger but a liquidation and notwithstanding the evidence they have continued to insist that this is the case.

My article, for which I had provided a heading ‘Why the merger of LAW and LIEN is not a liquidation’ was retitled Not a liquidation? It was also accompanied by a subheadline ‘Abandoning any pretence of class politics, Tony Greenstein defends what he calls the ‘merger’ of LAW and LIEN and advocates yet another ‘transitional’ halfway-house broad front’

Despite Conrad admitting that ‘LAW has done very little, has been paralysed even’ my argument that LAW had not been liquidated was described as ‘clearly a pedantic attempt to pull wool over eyes.’ Conrad continues to argue that

‘while the words ‘liquidation’ and ‘closing down’ did not appear in motion 1, only someone who wants to cover up, to obfuscate, to hoodwink, would object to such an assessment.’

Such an unnecessary expenditure of verbs! To allege that your political opponents are, effectively, lying is not the way to conduct a comradely debate. And the evidence for such an assertion?  Zilch.

Black Lives Matter demonstration in Brighton

As far as the CPGB and other far-left groups are concerned the key task is to form a revolutionary socialist or communist party with which capitalism can be brought to an end. And suffice to say they have the key to the holy grail.

Many of us saw the Corbyn movement as a quite momentous political event. Hundreds of thousands of people joined the Labour Party. It made a profound effect politically and at the 2017 General Election, millions of people voted for a radical, not revolutionary, manifesto.  But for the sabotage of Labour’s right-wing, Corbyn could have won. As it is he obtained the largest swing since 1945 for Labour. One thing is for certain.  It put the frighteners on the British establishment. It also showed the potential for radicalism in Britain.

Elbit's factory in Oldham - they've had enough and are closing

But to the CPGB what happened under Corbyn Project was merely a diversion. An inevitable failure. Jack lays out his stall thus:

‘What needs to be understood is that socialist - ie, Marxist - parties, are built top-down, not bottom-up. What is primary is the programme: ie, theory. It is from there to the masses and in the process, of course, theory is enriched, concretised, taken to new heights. It should also be understood that Marxist parties do not require revolutionary conditions in order to grow. They can grow in peaceful, seemingly almost uneventful, conditions.’

The idea of even thinking about building a socialist movement outside the Labour Party is given short shrift. It is what they call a half way house, a Labour Party Mark II. What is needed in their eyes is to jump from a small revolutionary group to a mass revolutionary Communist  Party without even pausing for breath.

Labour needs be refounded as a united front of a special kind and politically armed with a Marxist programme and put under a tried and tested Marxist leadership.

BLM demo in Chichester, a town 30 miles from Brighton

What then of the Corbyn movement itself?  Jack doesn’t pull his punches.

what was notable about them - especially, sad to say, the younger generation - is that they were not politically determined, not politically educated and therefore did not fully engage. They voted Jeremy Corbyn against Owen Smith, but had not much of a clue when it came to national executive elections.

My own view is that we are not in revolutionary conditions or a pre-revolutionary period. On the contrary we are in a period of deep reaction, symbolised by Brexit, which was a project of the Right and far-Right.

Black Lives Matter demonstration in Brighton

We need to look to our strengths and weaknesses. Trade union strike action has been at an all time low. Unions today are half the size they were under Thatcher.  Yet at the same time we have seen the rise of social movements like Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and direct action groups like Palestine Action. The question for socialists is how we can relate to and generalise from the specific. We need to be able to make the connection between climate change and environmental destruction and the nature of capitalism and how it operates. In other words socialism needs to be made relevant.

Only this week we learnt that Palestine Action had chalked up its first victory, the closure of Elbit’s factory in Oldham. I have a personal investment in this campaign as I’m presently out on bail for taking part in an action. It demonstrates that direct action can work. It is no accident that Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which is controlled by the former Trotskyist Socialist Action denounced Palestine Action in the strongest terms.

Black Lives Matter demonstration in Brighton

Other issues include a theoretical assessment of the period we are in, the decline of trade union power, the conservatism of a working class that is supposed to be the agent of revolutionary change and asking questions such as whether revolution is even possible in the heart of the imperialist beast.

Come to the debate and take part!

Tony Greenstein