A judicial review overturning the Labour government’s proscription of Palestine Action was a very welcome surprise to pro-Palestinian campaigners last week.
Home secretary Shabana Mahmood has indicated that she intends to appeal the decision; the law remains in force for now and is creating plenty of debate. Missing from these discussions, though, is the court ruling’s broader significance, especially when considered in the context of the historic role of nonviolent direct action.
Under the law, ‘nonviolent’ means an incident involved no violence to people but may have caused disruption or damage to property. It is best explored at two levels: the frequency at which protesters are acquitted in jury trials, including recent examples relating to Gaza, and the much wider issue of whether direct action can be an important part of historic and long-lasting social change.
On the former, there have been many examples of juries in Britain delivering unexpected results, which are often described as ‘perverse’ and almost always surprise, or even anger, the presiding judge. Two notable examples were the 1985 Old Bailey trial of whistleblower Clive Ponting, and that of two peace campaigners, Michael Randle and Pat Pottle, in 1991.
Ponting was a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Defence during the Falklands War in 1982, who passed on information on the British Royal Navy’s controversial sinking of the Argentinian cruiser, the General Belgrano, which killed 300 men, to Labour opposition MP Tam Dalyell. At trial, the defence argued that the public had the right to know about a government cover-up, the jury agreed and Pointing walked free.
Six years later, Randle and Pottle were tried for aiding the escape to the Soviet Union of the MI6 spy George Blake, who had been imprisoned for working as a double agent. Randle and Pottle met Blake in Wormwood Scrubs prison while they were serving sentences for breaking into a nuclear base; their motive for helping him was not that they thought he was innocent, but that it had been unfair for a judge to rule that three of his multiple 14-year prison sentences would run consecutively. This put him away for 42 years, then a record for a non-life sentence, which Randle and Pottle considered inhumane. The jury found in their favour, and the pair were acquitted.
More recently, there have been notable examples of acquittals related to trials of antiwar activists.
In January 1996, four women from Seeds of Hope East Timor Ploughshares, an anti-nuclear weapons group, were tried at the Old Bailey for damaging a Hawk attack aircraft due to be exported to Indonesia. The women argued the planes would be used in the control of dissent in East Timor as the people there sought independence. The women readily admitted causing the damage but argued that they were acting to prevent a much greater crime, a claim that the jury accepted, to the very evident displeasure of the judge.
One of the women, Andrea Needham, later wrote a gripping book, The Hammer Blow: How Ten Women Disarmed a Warplane, which really deserves to be made into a film.
Another, Angie Zelter, was also involved in a 1999 direct action with two other women to damage Maytime, a floating laboratory stationed in Scotland’s Loch Goil and used to maintain Trident nuclear missile submarines. That trio also used the “greater danger” argument at Greenock Sheriff Court, which the jury and Sheriff Margaret Gimblett accepted and acquitted them. The decision caused consternation within the Scottish legal system, was appealed and reversed by a Lord Advocate’s Reference, but the women were not retried.
Much more recently still, there have been numerous instances of yet more ‘perverse’ juries relating to Gaza. Just ten days ago, a ten-week trial at Woolwich Crown Court acquitted six Palestine Action activists of aggravated burglary over alleged damage at a UK base of Elbit Systems, an Israeli-owned defence firm. Jurors were unable to reach verdicts in relation to further allegations.
After the verdict, the defence team at Doughty Street Chambers, which was acting for one of the defendants, noted: “This trial is the first in a series of prosecutions relating to Palestine Action’s direct action at Elbit Systems in Filton, Bristol on 6 August 2024. Elbit Systems is Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer. Six Palestine Action activists entered Elbit’s building in the early hours of the morning in order to disrupt the supply chain of weaponry to the IDF for use in Gaza.”
This morning, prosecutors confirmed they would seek a retrial for the six over aggravated burglary charges, with a court date set for February next year.
On the much wider issue of the impact of nonviolent direct action on major issues of social change, there are far more examples than are commonly realised. Take just four: women’s suffrage, decolonisation, the US civil rights movement and the end of the Cold War. Nonviolent direct action played a major role in all of these, even if there were many other factors involved.
In the suffrage movement in the UK, there was some personal violence by activists, but it paled into insignificance compared with the violence used against them by police and prison officers. Regarding decolonisation, the large-scale use of nonviolent action against British rule by Gandhi’s followers in India in the 1930s and 1940s, not least the famous Salt March of 1930, exposed the coercive nature of British colonialism to global audiences. It gave hope and example to many anti-colonial movements across the world in the following decades.
Then the US civil rights movement of the 1950s involved an extended campaign of nonviolent protest against racism, especially across the southern states. It stretched over many years and involved often courageous instances of nonviolent action in breach of existing laws of rigid racial segregation. This was commonly in the face of both official and unofficial armed opposition that sometimes even cost campaigners their lives.
Finally, in the late 1980s, as the collapse of the Soviet Union was beginning, a whole pattern of citizen movements often involving massive public demonstrations spread rapidly across Eastern Europe and hastened the collapse of the whole system.
That brings us back to the UK and the experience of more than 30 mass rallies in London over two years in support of the Palestinians and opposing the UK governments in their policies towards Israel.
These rallies, often involving hundreds of thousands of people, have been largely ignored by the mainstream media but have worried the authorities and were likely a factor in the decision of Keir Starmer’s government to proscribe Palestine Action.
For that reason alone, the ruling of last week’s judicial review has a wider significance, even as it leaves the Labour government with yet one more problem.
