Dubbing tame pensioners ‘terrorists’ makes a farce out of the Terrorism Act and freedom of speech

It’s a funny old world when it appears that Margaret Thatcher had a greater sense of individual liberty than Keir Starmer, writes Alan Rusbridger, who reflects on the government’s decision to burden the overstretched prison estate with an influx of rosy-cheeked grannies

How upsetting for JD Vance to find himself holidaying in a country where terrorism rages out of control and where an autocratic leader orders people to be grabbed off the streets for voicing even the mildest form of dissent.

We know the US vice-president cares about these things. Only last week, he warned that the UK must not go down the “very dark path” of losing free speech. And a few months ago, he spoke of his concern at the “backslide away from conscience rights” in Britain. So we can only imagine his dismay, over breakfast in the Cotswolds, to read of the rounding up of hundreds of mainly older people for daring to scrawl a few words on a piece of cardboard. And how to calibrate his alarm after learning that they were all suspected terrorists?

That’s right – literally hundreds of terrorists roaming the streets barely 90 minutes up the M40 from the agreeable country house in the village of Dean where he has come with his family for a bit of R&R.

His officials will doubtless brief him as to what on earth is going on. They will tell him that there is a group called Palestine Action, whose members have been going round mounting vigorous protests against what they view as the Starmer government’s support for the situation in Gaza. The protests have included spray-painting military planes at an RAF base.

Vance will not like the sound of these people. But even he might concede that they are acting, perhaps, out of conscience, and that – as he argued only in February – the right to freedom of conscience should be protected. How would he react to being told that these elderly protesters had been labelled terrorists by a piece of rushed legislation last month? And that the effect of the new law is that it is now a terror offence even to voice support for the banned group? Surely he’s with George Orwell: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

The background to this outbreak of terror on the streets of London? More than 500 well-meaning protesters were arrested under Section 3 of the Terrorism Act 2000 for holding placards indicating support for Palestine Action. Around half of them were aged 60 and above, including almost 100 people who are in their seventies – and 15 who are in their eighties.

Never mind free speech, it is difficult to imagine a bigger waste of stretched police time than deploying thousands of officers to haul harmless old people off the streets. And it is straightforwardly bonkers to order such draconian action when the entire prison system is close to collapse. And yet prison governors were ordered to trigger “capacity gold command” at the prospect of an influx of demonstrators swamping the available cells.

And may God help the court system as it struggles to process these pesky protesting pensioners. Only recently, Ministry of Justice figures showed a backlog of more than 76,000 cases in the Crown Courts, and 310,304 outstanding cases in the magistrates’ courts.

Now, it is perfectly reasonable to deplore the behaviour of Palestine Action – especially when its members inflict costly damage. But there are already numerous laws in place to deal with such criminal behaviour – and the protesters understand that they could well spend a lengthy stretch inside for acting on their conscience. That doesn’t deter them.

You may similarly deprecate the group’s beliefs. But it is perfectly reasonable to believe that Israel is, in fact, committing genocide in Gaza, and to object vehemently to the UK assisting in that mission in any way at all.

It is worth reading a lengthy and densely argued op-ed column that appeared recently in The New York Times, by Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. He is an Israeli-American scholar who’s been described by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum as one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide.

A women holding a sign in support of Palestine Action is detained by police outside Parliament Square on Saturday (PA)

“My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people,” he wrote on 15 July. “Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the IDF as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognise one when I see one.”

Again, you may disagree with Bartov. But if he, with his background and expertise, can legitimately make such an argument – and in an international publication of repute – then why not the thousands demonstrating in London and other cities this past weekend? Why should the British state be so alarmed by these beliefs – and by people who feel impelled to act on them – that it decided to introduce draconian laws that would predictably lead to apple-cheeked Quaker grannies being carted off to police cells? And if Quaker grannies are now termed terrorists, doesn’t that devalue the whole currency of terrorism?

If you don’t have the time to read Bartov’s piece, I suggest you read a magnificent letter to The Times from a retired wing commander named Andrew Brookes, who was UK commander of RAF Greenham Common cruise missile base in the 1980s. Older readers will remember the heady days when the base was under virtually constant siege from women who repeatedly cut the perimeter fence.

“We had a strong Ministry of Defence police presence to stop intruders, often in a rather Benny Hill fashion,” wrote Brookes. “The intruders were left in no doubt that if they tried to infiltrate the secure storage area with its 96 nuclear warheads, they would be shot by US Air Force military police, who were a mean crowd. There were thousands of such protesters ‘threatening’ the base, but their freedom of speech was always respected and I never heard anyone in Whitehall or the Pentagon suggest that they should be classed as terrorists.”

It’s a funny old world when it appears that Margaret Thatcher had a greater sense of individual liberty than Keir Starmer, who once upon a time defended protesters who, similarly motivated by conscience, broke into RAF bases.

And Vance? Is his respect for free expression in the UK unconditional, or is it limited to speech he approves of? If it’s the former, will we see him break off from his holiday to denounce the bully-boy tactics being deployed against people who feel they cannot remain silent in the face of genocide? Stranger things have happened.