I was born in the 70’s, so my really formative years were in the 1990s, in a world still shaped by the war in Ireland. I was a young man, a Celtic supporter, a Republican sympathiser, and I spent a lot of time in places where Republican culture and solidarity were openly on display.
I went to Wolfetones concerts where the ballads were sung without shame, songs that glorified the hunger strikers and the fallen volunteers, songs that named the British state as an enemy and called for its defeat.
When I went to university in the early 2000’s I hung the pictures of the hunger strikers on the walls of my room in student halls. I drank in pubs where money was raised for prisoners’ families. I was there when the buckets went round, I threw my money in, I saw the leaflets, and I knew exactly what I was looking at.
By any reading of the law, even then, this was dangerous ground.
The IRA was a proscribed organisation. To give money to them, to invite support for them, to even hint at backing their campaign, was to cross into the territory of “offences under the prevention of terrorism.”
Yet this was Britain in the 90s, and the police didn’t come storming through the doors of every pub in Glasgow or London Irish Centre with handcuffs ready. The laws were there, but they weren’t enforced in that way.
That’s what makes where we are now different. Less tolerant. More reactionary. Back then, the state knew it couldn’t arrest every young man or woman who sang Roll of Honour or Sean South of Garryowen.
It knew it couldn’t prosecute everyone who dropped a fiver into a collection for Republican prisoners.
The numbers were too great, the politics too sensitive. So, the law existed as a threat, a sword hanging above, used sparingly but always there, a reminder of where the lines were supposed to be.
But walking over that line almost always resulted in your being left alone. The power of the state was kept on a very tight leash.
Oh, if you were part of an IRA Active Service Unit, you were risking more than just your freedom. When Thatcher turned the SAS onto the volunteers the body count started to climb ever higher ... but for the guy on the street, the guy who wasn’t actively involved, the state didn’t trouble you one bit.
I was and still am, technically, a British citizen.
I lived in Scotland, under the Crown, under the Union Jack. And yet, at the same time, my sympathies lay with those who were blowing up soldiers, who were ambushing convoys, who were planting bombs under cars.
That’s the truth of it. I won’t sugarcoat it.
I looked at the world, and I saw an occupied nation across the water, a people denied their right to self-determination, who cared enough to fight, and I couldn’t escape the conclusion that armed struggle was both right and necessary.
In places across the world, it still is, and I still do.
Tyranny has always had to contend with resistance, and the greater the tyranny the greater the resistance will be.
The British state would have called me naïve, maybe even dangerous. But I wasn’t alone. Thousands thought like me. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Across Scotland, across England, across the Irish diaspora worldwide, there was support for the Republican movement.
Sometimes it was vocal and defiant, sometimes it was quiet and discreet, but it was there.
Yet the campaign was brutal.
Yet I never wavered in my belief that the British state bore the ultimate responsibility. It was Britain that partitioned Ireland. It was Britain that maintained a sectarian statelet. It was Britain that sent in troops in 1969 and escalated the conflict. If people fought back, was that really surprising?
The IRA didn’t just kill people. They blew up buildings, they targeted infrastructure, they destroyed property on a massive scale.
City centres in England were wrecked by bombs in the 90s. Manchester, Warrington, Canary Wharf — iconic attacks, designed to show the reach and the power of the movement.
The point was always the same: to disrupt, to hurt economically, to make the cost of occupation higher. But it was also about focussing minds.
In his book “To the ends of the Earth”, David Yallop spoke to a man he believed was Carlos the Jackal.
When he asked him why he bombed a cafe in Paris to highlight the cause of the Palestinian people, he was told that the French didn’t care about Palestine but they cared when you exploded a bomb in their midst ... and that made them think about the reasons why someone might want to do that.
Fast forward to today. Palestine Action climbs onto the roof of an Elbit Systems factory and pours red paint down the walls to symbolise blood.
They smash windows. They chain themselves to machinery. They shut down production. This is destruction of property to make a point. It is not killing people; it is not planting bombs in city centres. It is disruption. It is theatre. It is direct action against the tools of war.
The contrast isn’t lost on me. It shouldn’t be lost on anyone.
And yet, the government puts Palestine Action in the same bracket as Al-Qaeda, as ISIS, as the IRA.
Proscribed. Criminalised. To belong to it, to support it, to wear its badge, to retweet its message, have all become terrorism offences.
For a non-violent organisation, that is absolutely unprecedented. That they intend to prosecute to the fullest extent all those who do those things ... that is beyond belief. That’s new. And that is dangerous for all of us.
The argument is that Palestine Action are not non-violent because they damage property. That is the line. They are criminals, vandals, extremists.
But where do we draw the line?
The Suffragettes slashed paintings in galleries. They set fire to post boxes. They smashed windows. Were they terrorists?
By the definition the Home Office wants to use today, yes, they were. By the definition the media and politicians want to apply, they were extremists. Yet we celebrate them as heroes.
CND occupied bases. Greenpeace rammed ships. Anti-apartheid activists attacked the property of South African companies. If you take the government’s line on Palestine Action, all of them were terrorists too.
The truth is, property damage has always been a tool of protest. It shocks, it forces attention, it disrupts.
It is not the same as violence against people. To conflate the two is to criminalise a whole history of dissent.
The legal landscape has shifted, and in a very bad way. The willingness of the state to crush any and all protest which might disrupt our lives is a new and shocking development, and from a Labour government it’s reprehensible.
The Terrorism Act 2000 was already sweeping, but it was written with paramilitaries in mind. After 9/11, it was used to clamp down on Islamist groups. But now, it is being turned inward, against domestic protest movements.
That is the change.
We’ve seen it already with the Public Order Act, with injunctions against Just Stop Oil and XR. Now it goes further: not just banning protests, but banning the organisation itself. Proscription means prison for belonging, for supporting, for wearing a t-shirt or badge.
I grew up in that time when the IRA was proscribed, and still, concerts and collections went on openly. Republican activists chanted their slogans in town halls all across the North of Ireland when they won election as Sinn Fein candidates. The law was there, but it was used selectively. Intelligently.
In the end, peace came from that. The kind that lasts. It has lasted. All of us are grateful for that. None of us sought a return to the war. That’s what comes from seeing things through the lens of understanding, of tolerating what you may find intolerable, of being willing to compromise and then to talk.
Here, the suggestion is that the full weight of the state will be used to crush Palestine Action and anyone connected to it.
This is about politics, not law. It is about silencing dissent, and especially dissent that challenges Britain’s relationship with Israel.
I wrote before about the links between Israel and the main parties in Britain. Labour Friends of Israel. Conservative Friends of Israel. The influence of BICOM. The way money and lobbying flows into Westminster. The way politicians are recruited, trained, courted.
That’s the context. Palestine Action doesn’t just target Elbit Systems. It threatens that cosy relationship. It puts politicians on the spot. It makes visible the complicity of Britain in Israel’s war on Gaza, and that’s what makes it dangerous.
And so, proscription comes in not because Palestine Action is a terrorist threat, but because it is a political threat.
Because it makes too much noise, causes too much disruption, shines too bright a light on places where the darkness has allowed all manner of things to grow. And it’s not the only place where bad things multiply either.
Compare it to the far right.
Compare it to the anti-immigrant mobs that have been rampaging through towns and cities. Hotels attacked, asylum seekers threatened, streets filled with racists chanting about migrants.
These groups are not proscribed. These groups are tolerated.
They have recruitment meetings. Facebook groups. Social media empires have been built on them. A story in the papers today about how the followers of one particular gutter rat have targeted a black grandfather with white grandkids is only the latest atrocity; it’s the tip of the iceberg.
For the most part, the police stand back, politicians wring their hands, the media treats them as an unfortunate side effect of “legitimate concerns” and scum like Farage feed on the margins, with one foot always inside the bigots camp.
Imagine if Palestine Action activists had stormed a hotel and tried to burn it down. The proscription would have been instant and even deserved. But when it’s the far right? The state shrugs. That is the double standard. That is the hypocrisy.
So here we are.
Palestine Action is now an illegal organisation.
To stand with is a crime. To belong almost certainly means prison. At a recent protest, where 400 were arrested for the offence of “support” 80% of those taken into custody were over 60 and when I think of that, and those days when I sat in Irish bars and sang rebel songs, I am ashamed that I live in a place such as this, where such a thing can happen.
The politics now are different.
The target is not an armed group, not a paramilitary army, but a protest network. The crime is not bombing, but painting on walls and breaking some windows. And the punishment is not to be treated as a mere sympathiser but to be cast as a terrorist yourself, as though you had bombed or maimed or fired a gun.
Meanwhile, the far right grows, organises, marches.
And the state looks away.
Worse; it moves to appease their views in a grotesque race to see which party can inflict the most pain on those fleeing persecution only to find more of it when they get here.
That is the hypocrisy of “modern Britain.”
That is the real danger.
The threat is not from activists breaking windows at Elbit.
The threat is from the mobs on the streets, from the fascists emboldened, from the normalisation of hate.
The state knows this.
But the state chooses not to act against it.
Because the far right does not challenge power. It reinforces it. It lives alongside the structures of it.
Palestine Action does challenge power, and so it must be crushed.
That is the lesson of all of this.
That is what proscription really means.