THE iron fist of the British state is slamming down on those who dare to oppose genocide. In the whole year ending March 31 2025, according to the Home Office website, British police made a total of 232 arrests under the Terrorism Act 2000, a 12 per cent increase on the previous 12 months. The all-time record, according to the same page, for such arrests was 450 in 2018.

Last Saturday, the Metropolitan Police and other forces supporting them arrested at least 890 people at a single demonstration, on top of more than 500 a few weeks earlier. This is the largest mass arrest event by the Metropolitan Police in a decade.

The majority of those arrested were older, many of them pensioners, and a significant proportion were disabled, including Michael Higgins, who is blind — the second time he has been arrested — and disabled RAF veteran Steve Masters, who was filmed as police bodily carried him away.

Others arrested included young people, clerics, retired NHS workers, Muslims, Quakers, Christians, Pagans and a significant number of Jewish people, as well as those of no religion at all.

This is what democracy looks like in Britain today: the proscription of Palestine Action (PA), backed by authoritarian powers that would have shocked even the architects of the original Act. Hundreds more have been arrested at similar protests around the country.

And for what? For expressing solidarity with a group that’s been criminalised under the Terrorism Act, their actions branded more dangerous than the warplanes raining death over Palestine.

Previously, and for months now, others have been arrested and charged as part of the Starmer government’s use of the Terrorism Act against journalists and others who have written, spoken or protested against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Britain’s complicity in it.

But the new surge in arrests has come as people challenge the government’s decision to proscribe PA, despite the group’s stated aim of civil disobedience and use of non-violent tactics against Israeli arms manufacturers operating in Britain and, in a single instance, against a privately owned fleet of aircraft operating for the RAF providing logistical and surveillance support for Israel.

For supporting a group committed to direct action against British arms manufacturers supplying Israel, ordinary citizens now risk up to 14 years in prison. In the stroke of a pen, the right to protest was obliterated and peaceful dissenters branded as criminals.

It can be argued that Parliament — under the pretext of security — turned against its own people, forcing them to turn their backs in Parliament Square.

Pro-Israel groups such as Campaign Against Antisemitism and the BICOM offshoot We Believe in Israel have claimed credit for then home secretary Yvette Cooper’s decision to proscribe PA. Campaign Against Antisemitism wrote that it was “pleased that the home secretary has listened to our representations,” before going on to demand the proscription of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

We Believe in Israel thanked a list of pro-Israel groups for their assistance in the effort to secure the proscription: “This outcome is the result of sustained, collaborative effort. We wish to extend our deepest gratitude to those who stood with us in pursuit of truth and justice.”

Before the PA proscription, a move that was condemned by the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights and other human rights groups, Israel was also, apparently, involved in the prosecutors’ decisions about who should be prosecuted.

The Guardian revealed that emails released in response to a Freedom of Information request regarding the Filton 18 group of PA activists showed that the Attorney General’s Office shared contact details for senior police officers and the Crown Prosecution Service with the Israeli embassy during the police investigation into the group’s activities against a weapons factory owned by an Israeli arms manufacturer. The Fulton 18 have now been held in prison for over a year, with their trial still two months away.

The driver for the proscription of PA, and for the use of “process as punishment” through lengthy detentions before trial, appears to have been that many of its activists have been acquitted at trials for criminal damage, with juries exercising their legal right to decide that combatting genocide justified the means of painting or otherwise damaging arms factories and other facilities involved in it.

But PA’s non-violent methods — arguably except for one as yet unproven and vigorously denied allegation — appear to have meant that, to achieve and justify the proscription, the government had to mislead MPs and the public about the reasons for it.

The Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre’s (JTAC) assessment on the proscription, which was obtained by writer and former British ambassador Craig Murray and published in the National, arguably contradicts claims by Cooper and other government spokespeople that PA was planning acts of violence or any other act other than damage to the property of firms linked to Israel’s genocide.

Murray concluded that the JTAC report left Cooper’s case against PA “in tatters” and that Cooper “had consistently lied about PA in a panicked attempt to defend the proscription.” And, just as falsehoods were fundamental to the government pushing through the proscription, so they seem to be fundamental to the police and the state’s attempts to justify their repression of protests against it.

As police spent a whole day and much of the night arresting pensioners last Saturday, the Metropolitan Police X account put out a statement claiming that “officers policing the Defend Our Juries protest in Parliament Square have been subjected to an exceptional level of abuse, including punches, kicks, spitting and objects being thrown, in addition to verbal abuse.” Any such incidents would be captured on police bodycams and surveillance cameras, but none have yet been made public.

By contrast, social media platforms are awash with footage of police making apparently unprovoked attacks on protesters standing or sitting peacefully, including one showing two officers violently shoving two people backwards who were simply trying to film or photograph the scene as a phalanx of police marched through, frighteningly reminiscent of the notorious and equally unprovoked 2009 police killing of Ian Tomlinson. Photos showing protesters bleeding from head wounds at the demo are also in circulation.

Dozens of people have come forward to denounce the Met’s claims of violence and abuse by demonstrators, including journalists who were there for the duration to cover it, such as Steven Methven.

Methven said that in eight and a half hours at the protest, he saw no signs of any violence or abuse by protesters and that the Met’s claims were not only false but dangerous: “As someone who spent 8.5 hours at the protest reporting for Novara Media, the Met Police have dangerously misrepresented what happened.”

Methven went on to describe the police’s aggression and tactics: “Groups of 12 or more would charge into the square and make an arrest. There was a lot of belligerences. One officer shoved me so hard, another one had to come and apologise…

“Yes, there were people in the square who were shouting ‘shame’ at the police when they arrested veterans in wheelchairs and retired medical workers. But I saw, at most, only a couple of scuffles in Parliament Square, and they didn’t involve those holding signs.”

The UN’s human rights chief Volker Turk has condemned the proscription of PA and the subsequent policing of protest as completely incompatible with Britain’s obligations under international law because it “limits the rights of many people involved with and supportive of PA who have not themselves engaged in any underlying criminal activity but rather exercised their rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association. As such, it appears to constitute an impermissible restriction on those rights.”

And so, it can be argued that those who try to defend the indefensible and to excuse their disregard for international law habitually resort to falsehoods. That has applied to Israel’s claims throughout almost two years of its genocide in Gaza; it appears to apply equally to the attempts of the British state to protect and enable its perpetrators.

Today, British civil liberties are in the grip of a manufactured crisis. Peaceful citizens — ordinary people, including Jewish anti-genocide activists, pensioners, and scholars — have been redefined as terrorists. Even people in their 80s and 90s joined the civil resistance, proving the heart of popular opposition beats strong as ever. The state’s war is not just on Palestine — it’s on dissent, on assembly, on freedom itself.

It is my view that the real risk is not to national security, but to democracy. Step by step, the British Establishment is dismantling rights won through struggle and sacrifice. This is the opposite of democracy; this is naked authoritarianism. Silence is their weapon. The mass arrests, the legal bans, the kettling of peaceful protest — each tactic designed to intimidate, to silence, to fracture the solidarity needed to confront genocide and imperial complicity.

History is on the side of the people. From the anti-apartheid movement to the miners’ strike and beyond, popular resistance and dissent have always been met with repression — but never defeated.

Claudia Webbe was previously the member of Parliament for Leicester East (2019-24). You can follow her at  www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and x.com/claudiawebbe.