The Palestine Action Ban Has the British State Chasing Its Own Tail

Por Steven Methven — Novara Media

The logic of the British state – never its strongest point – has been increasingly snarled by former home secretary Yvette Cooper’s cosmically absurd proscription of direct action group Palestine Action last year. 

Of course, Cooper can’t take all the blame. Her successor Shabana Mahmood and newish prime minister Andy Burnham have continued to uphold the farce of labelling this century’s suffragettes (though, frankly, much milder ) a terror group. Knitting knots, the lot of ‘em.

This weekend, however, that warped logic birthed a downright novel contradiction, one that appears to have emerged from a clash between the establishment’s drive to protect its own and a spouse wielding the modern terrorist’s most deadly weapons: a keyboard and a moral compass.

Last week, journalist and writer Sarah Helm posted a two line message on X: ”God help us authors who support Palestine and Palestine Action. Sounds like Adam would have all our books swept off the shelves in a jiffy.”

The ‘Adam’ there was Adam Boulton, who in an interview on Sky News accused Irish author Sally Rooney of taking “a very strong pro-Palestine and, I have to say, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish stance”. We don’t need to get into Boulton’s own chop logic, but suffice to say Rooney’s unlikely to be too bothered by smears from an Englishman who once told some of  “you Irish” to “get over themselves” over their attachment to the Good Friday Agreement. 

Helm’s post was a reference to the news that Rooney’s books would no longer be sold in the UK . That decision, reached by her publisher and endorsed by Rooney, flowed from her widely-stated belief in the wrongness of Palestine Action’s proscription, as well as her pledge to continue to support the group, including through the donation of any UK royalties . Quite the blow for the BBC and British booksellers . 

Rooney lives in Ireland, where, unlike in the UK, she’s free to speak her mind and spend her money in accordance with her opinions around Palestine Action. Helm, however, does not. And this is a country where a Plasticine Action t-shirt can get you arrested.

But the risk was also high for her husband. Helm, you see, is married to none other than Jonathan Powell, the government’s national security adviser . We mere mortals can hardly imagine the level of security clearance Powell, also the decade-long chief of staff to then-prime minister Tony Blair, must have achieved to get that job. Nor can we begin to ponder the sonic boom that rolled through the Whitehall national security establishment when it turned out that, maybe, the boss’s wife was a terrorist sympathiser. 

We obviously can’t know Helm’s intentions in writing a post that was very quickly reported to the police . But I like to imagine a razor sharp act of civil disobedience: the leveraging of an intimate relationship to embarrass the state in just ten words. And let’s make no mistake – it will be an embarrassment to the government, and a deserved one too. If it wants to make fools of us – our political history, our rights and our freedoms – then it’s only fair that, once in a while, someone makes a fool of it too. 

Of course, there is no world in which the wife of the country’s national security chief could actually be found to have committed a crime under the Terrorism Act. Using a legal cosh, despite contrary advice , to constrain the freedoms of the masses in order to satisfy a rogue ally is one thing. Bringing that cosh down on the heart of the security establishment an unthinkable other. 

On Saturday, Helm was cleared of any wrongdoing by the police. “The post was assessed by specialist officers and it was determined that it did not meet the criminal threshold,” the Met police said, “No further police action will be taken.” 

Interesting, isn’t it? 

Don’t get me wrong – I’m delighted for Helm. But the decision not to act does suggest a much greater deal of discretion available to the force than we’ve seen deployed so far. And it’s the Guardian’s understanding that the police found “insufficient evidence that the post was capable of encouraging support for a proscribed organisation”. 

Lawyers for the thousands of Defend Our Juries protestors who’ve been arrested for holding signs will be eagerly examining this new line of defence. What exactly, they’ll be wondering, is the mysterious measure of whether a speech act is capable of encouraging support? I can’t find it in the Terrorism Act itself , which makes no mention of what a statement of support might do. Rather, the crime is committed when the person who makes it is reckless about what it might do. 

Proving recklessness is, I’d have thought, a pretty low legal bar; proving the capacity of a statement to actually encourage support is much higher. As those cases come to court, Helm’s clever trouble-making – if that’s what it was – may not yet be over. 

Posting on X after she was cleared, Helm appeared unrepentant. “Thanks to all supporters,” she wrote , “As an 83 yr old survivor of the Nakba and one of my many friends in Rafah (now obliterated) said to me when I was last there, ‘keep writing Sarah we need all the pencils we can get’.” 

Very true; and the sharper the pencil, the better. 

Fonte: Novara Media