For a newspaper that uses Orwell’s “The enemy of nonsense” as a motto/mission statement, the Observer doesn’t half print a lot of it.

Yvette Cooper’s article “Palestine Action’s violent criminality is not lawful protest” (Observer 17/8/25) is a case in point.

What is revealing about it is the extent to which she has to use arguments that distinguish the mass protest movement from the NVDA tactics of PA, while trying to elide the distinction between NVDA and “terrorism”. This is a victory of sorts, because one of the aims of this action was precisly to make this smear spread, as we saw with some of the clumsier police actions in the immediate aftermath of the ban; which might be interpreted as taking an over enthusiastic interpretation of it, but could also be seen as testing the water for how far they could go and how much they could get away with.

Let’s see what she says and examine it.

“Faced with the intolerable scenes of suffering and devastation in Gaza, people across the country are feeling desperate and angry about what is happening and many have joined protests on the streets”. Quite so. Where have you been Yvette? Why have you not joined us if you think that these “scenes” are “intolerable”? More to the point, why does your government tolerate it, continuing with arms shipments, trade, spy flights? Why is there no meaningful pressure on Israel (who you don’t mention in this sentence) to stop?

“Each month the police work with organisers to facilitate safe, lawful protests, and will continue to do so.” The experience of the march organisers is that the police have increasingly placed restrictions on where marches can assemble, their routes, whether they can march at all, and, at the end of one, they arrested the head stewards and General Secretaries of PSC, CND and Stop the War when they tried to walk to the BBC to hand in a letter. This is not facilitating lawful legal protest. It is harassing it.

“Hundreds of thousands have joined pro Palestinian protests, while only a tiny minority have been arrested for breaking the law”, despite the very tight restrictions on protest that are now law and the attempt to interpret slogans like “from the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free!” as “antisemitic”, as if Palestinian freedom is incompatible with Jewish freedom, a contention that is zero sum communalism; and as if Palestine can be free somewhere else. Anywhere but Palestine in fact.

“Anyone who wants to protest against the catastrophic humanitarian situation and crimes against humanity in Gaza, to oppose Israel’s military offensive. or to criticise the actions of any and every governmnet, including our own, has the feedom to do so.” This is posed as though this “freedom” (under the constraints above) is a concession we should be grateful for from a government that has no complicity in the “catastrophic humanitairian situation and crimes against humanity “ being carried out by UK ally Israel in Gaza (and the West Bank).

But, lets bank that. Write it down and show it to any over zealous copper who thinks otherwise, because when she writes; “The recent proscription of the group Palestine Action does not prevent those protests, and to claim otherwise is nonsense” she seems to be unaware that police on the ground, in Kent and elsewhere, have interpreted it as exactly that. If she is backing off from that, good. Carve it in stone. The attempt to chill debate and undermine mass support and mass actions from fear of being accused of terrorism has failed already, not least from well deserved ridicule. The passive voice in her sentence is a bit of a giveaway that she is trying to distance herself from the decision. It is something that simply happened, like the genocide in Gaza, nothing to do with me, Guv’.

However, although she is in a hole, she is still digging. In trying to maintain the argument that NVDA is “terrorism” she has to use arguments that are deeply shallow.

“A group that has conducted an escalating campaign involving not just sustained criminal damage, including to Britain’s national security infrastructure, but also, intimidation, violence, weapons and serious injury to individuals” she runs together the overwhelming majority of actions with one case, in which one individual who, in the Observer’s words, “faces charges of GBH and 2 charges of ABH against two police officers …the only significant acts of violence against a person in the group’s 365 actions since it was founded in 2020.” We should also note that the defendent has pled not guilty. Nevertheless, the Home Secretary seems to have concluded

1. that if charged they must be guilty

2. that if guilty, these actions are characteristic of the group as a whole (which it is evident that they are not)

3 that this level of violence (what you’d find outside quite a lot of pubs on a Friday night) is the same thing as “terrorism”.

This lack of a sense of proportion is the nub of the matter. It is always reassuring when the “grown ups in the room”, those responsible for supposedly keeping us “safe”, can’t tell the difference between firecrackers and hand grenades, pots of paint and Improvised Explosive Devices. Arguing, as Cooper does, that “the UK’s world leading counter terrorism system” (close your eyes and it could be Boris Johnson) advised her that PA could be proscribed under the “tests in the Terrorism Act 2000” simply exposes the attempt of that Act to blur necessary distinctions that the person in the street (or Clapham Omnibus) can see plainly, but the Act intends to smear. Regardless of the loose, baggy definition of “terrorism” in the 2000 Act, taking NVDA against companies that produce weapons systems to try to prevent a genocide is a long way away from putting a bomb on a tube train; and everyone knows it.

This is evident in her line, having listed charges that are being prosecuted and defended under ordinary criminal law, that these are considered, in “the assessment of the Crown prosecution Service, a terrorism connection”. What exactly does that mean?

• Is it that the actions had a “terrorism connection”? In which case any other defendent charged with such actions should reasonably expect to be charged as a terrorist too.
• Or, is it that the group had terrorism connections. in which case, what are they? Cooper doesn’t say. Perhaps because she’s chancing her arm here, as she is with her dark hints of secret briefings from the ever reliable Intelligence Services (the team that brought us Weapons on Mass Destruction in Iraq) about what PA is really up to (as opposed to what it has actually done. There is no repeat of the story the Home Office put round that PA had funding from Iran; quickly dropped because they knew it wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny. If the state has to lie about something like this, as it has so obviously done, it is a sign that they realise that they are standing on thin ice.

So, as it stands, the wheels look like they will be coming off this particular bus before they have gone round and round much further.

Coming back to the basics, when Cooper says that there will be “desperate calls for peace in the Middkle East”, I think its reasonable to ask “where are yours?” especially, as she says “the humanitarian crisis worsens, the conditions for hostages deteriorate, the prospects for peace are diminished, and the scenes of children being shot and starved get ever more horrific.” As Cooper is a leading member of a government that is allied to Israel, the state that is doing all this, again, I think its reasonable to ask, what the f*** are you doing to stop it?

The agenda she puts – ceasefire, hostage release (not that she notices any Palestinian hostages) “urgent humanitarian aid” – is what the mass demonstrations have pushed for for nearly two years, and her government has been dragged kicking and screaming to go along with, but it is totally without pressure on their part; and is posed as a regretful word in the ear of an ally that has gone too far under understandable provocation and should be restrained in its own interests.

Where is the arms embargo? Where are the sanctions? Where is the removal of military and intelligence cooperation?

Instead, we have the threat to recognise a “Palestinian state” as a token gesture instead. This is in the context of proposals for a Bantustan – or a series of them -under strict Israeli and allied tutelage.

To shout down dissent as “terrorism” in this context is both desperate and ridiculous and, far from frightening opposition, Cooper finds that she is being laughed at. Truly fatal.