“Equating civil disobedience with terrorism clearly crosses a boundary compared to previous legal practice in the whole of modern Britain. Historically, terrorism implied a significant threat to national security.”
Britain is adopting measures that are more repressive than some of those applied in wartime, warns Richard Price.
Despite letters of protest from the Network for Police Monitoring and the Haldane Society (of which Keir Starmer was secretary in the 1990s) to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, signed by hundreds of lawyers and other legal professionals, the proscribing of Palestine Action has gone ahead following the failure of its legal challenge on July 4th.
Former New Labour cabinet minister Peter Hain declared himself “deeply ashamed” at the ban, and said that under this measure he would have been labelled a “terrorist” for campaigning against apartheid in South Africa in the 1960s and 70s.
Others said that suffragettes would have been banned as terrorists had such legislation been in force before the First World War. And to add insult to the injury to civil liberties, the vote to proscribe Palestine Action was tied to banning two obscure neo-Nazi groups.
Worse still, punitive sentences aren’t reserved for those carrying out acts of civil disobedience. Even passively expressing support for Palestine Action could result in a 14-year jail term. In the history of Western European democracies, you have to go a long way back to find anything even remotely comparable. In 1912, Victor Serge – then a 21-year old anarchist – was sentenced by a French court to five years’ imprisonment for solidarising in print with the members of the Bonnot Gang, despite having not taken part in their armed robberies.
Equating civil disobedience with terrorism clearly crosses a boundary compared to previous legal practice in the whole of modern Britain. Historically, terrorism implied a significant threat to national security. The Terrorism Act 2000 (passed under Blair) broadened the definition to include “serious damage to property”, and thereby created a peg on which to hang groups like Palestine Action. Parallel to that, in March 2024 Michael Gove announced his intention to broaden the definition of “extremism” to include a range of groups including the Muslim Association of Britain.
Alongside this has been a more familiar framing of external threats and the danger of war to justify renewed militarism and the curtailing of civil liberties. The government’s National Security Strategy 2025, published in June warns that Britain should prepare for the possibility of being attacked on its own soil, echoing NATO secretary general Mark Rutte’s comment that the British people had “better learn to speak Russian”. Keir Starmer has pledged to increase defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035 – the NATO target pushed by Trump. Britain is buying at least a dozen F-35A fighter jets capable of carrying tactical nuclear weapons. Defence plans include a 30% expansion of cadet forces. And so it goes on.
It took Simon Jenkins – a former editor of the Times and a conservative with at least a small ‘c’ – to spell it out: “Keir Starmer told the Commons last week that Britain was under a greater threat of attack than ever since the cold war. He offered no explanation. The politics of fear always has the best tunes and defence is never precise in its greed. What is precise is Starmer’s readiness to sacrifice Britain’s public services and its overseas aid to the cause.” The prospect of Putin’s tanks – which have so far failed to defeat Ukraine in three and a half years of war – rolling across Central Europe, defeating the combined armies of Western Europe and arriving on these shores is rather less likely that my local team Leyton Orient winning the Premier League. His primary focus, malign as it is, remains on the buffer states on the borders of Russia.
But rather than simply repeat the many eloquent words that have been spoken and written on the subject of Palestine Action, it might be useful to compare the actions of the British state in dealing with disruptive protest when it faced serious external threats, particularly those in wartime.
The picture of civil liberties in Britain during the First World War is a mixed one. The Defence of the Realm Act was passed four days after war was declared without a division in parliament. Its sweeping powers, according to one commentary, “authorised the government to do almost anything it thought necessary to help the war effort and protect the country”, including the operation of censorship, the outlawing of strikes, and prosecution for spreading disaffection among the forces and the civilian population alike.
Anti-war activists including John Maclean, Willie Gallacher, John William Muir and David Kirkwood were imprisoned. “Absolutist” conscientious objectors who refused to participate in any aspect of war-related work were treated harshly; others who agreed to perform non-combatant roles or serve in the ambulance service much more leniently.
Mention should also be made of the 16 leaders of the Easter Rising executed after perfunctory courts martial, and of the 306 British and Commonwealth soldiers executed for cowardice and other capital offences.
The mere expression of anti-war opinion, however, was not systematically suppressed, not least because the Asquith wing of the Liberal Party held strong reservations about the conduct of the war and the threat to free speech, and sat on the opposition benches from the middle of the war. In some areas, anti-war activists were more at risk from patriotic mobs than from the police. Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers Dreadnought, despite being periodically harassed by the authorities, was published throughout the war, as was the British Socialist Party’s The Call from 1916.
The Second World War again saw the government armed with an array of repressive measures. The Emergency Powers (Defence) Act 1939, passed shortly before the outbreak of war, gave the government extensive powers to issue Defence Regulations via Orders in Council, and a constant stream of these governed every aspect of wartime life. In addition to existing treason legislation, a new Treachery Act (1940) was passed, aimed at punishing assistance to the enemy. For workers, the most important measures were Order 1305, which banned strikes and lockouts and the 1941 Essential Work (General Provisions) Order, which authorised the direction of labour.
Defence Regulation 18B allowed for internment without trial and the suspension of habeas corpus, and was used to imprison about 740 fascists, including Oswald Mosley. But emergency powers were used sparingly against other shades of anti-war, pacifist and trade union dissent. Leading Scottish Nationalist Arthur Donaldson was arrested under Defence Regulation 18B by the police in May 1941, due to his support for the Scottish Neutrality League, and released after six weeks. Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru in Wales held a neutral position and a small number of its members received minor sentences for refusing to engage with military induction.
Trotskyists, who only numbered around 400 in 1944, published Workers International News throughout the war. Four members of the Revolutionary Communist Party were prosecuted under 1927 Trades Disputes Act in May 1944 at a time of miners and apprentices’ strikes, one of whom was released, and three jailed – two for 12 months and one for six months. All were released on appeal after 2½ months.
Up to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Daily Worker pursued a line midway between pacifism and revolutionary defeatism, and was duly suppressed under Defence Regulation 2D between January 1941 and September 1942. But no attempt was made to illegalise the Communist Party of Great Britain.
The Independent Labour Party contested a dozen wartime by-elections on a semi-pacifist platform, although it tended to sidestep directly opposing the war by appeals to “socialism” as the way to end the war, and calling upon the peoples of Europe to rise up against Hitler. But for all that its semi-revolutionary stance could have been framed as disloyal, it too remained fully legal. A small group of pacifist MPs met in the Palace of Westminster
unhindered.
Miners striking at Betteshanger Colliery in January 1942 were prosecuted under Order 1305. Three union officials were imprisoned and over 1,000 miners fined. In the face of the refusal to pay the fines and a shortage of prison places, the government retreated, reached a negotiated settlement, remitted the fines and pardoned those imprisoned.
These conciliatory moves – in the midst of a world war – reflected the need to retain the support of the labour movement and maintain war production in the fight against Nazi Germany, rebranded as a “People’s War”.
The Suez Crisis in 1956 marked the only occasion the Labour Party has officially opposed a significant war involving Britain. A major demonstration and Trafalgar Square rally on November 4th that year was allowed to go ahead unimpeded. Small demonstrations took place against the Falklands War in 1982, but even isolated chants of “Victory to Argentina” were met by police warnings, rather than mass arrests. The mass mobilisations against the Iraq War that culminated in the largest demonstration in British history on February 15th 2003 were impossible to suppress, not only because of their size but because they had the support of over 140 Labour MPs as well as the Liberal Democrats.
For all the ramping up of the alleged war danger, Britain is not at war, nor is it likely to be any time soon. And yet we are seeing measures that in some ways erode civil liberties considerably further – at least in their application – than those taken at moments of genuine national peril. Nor are we at the edge of a slippery slope but, as Owen Jones suggests, we having been sliding down one for the last two decades at an accelerating speed.
- Richard Price is a member of Leyton & Wanstead CLP.
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