Scores Arrested Under the Terrorism Act Outside Labour's Conference
More than 250 people sat outside the conference centre in Liverpool holding signs reading “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” Officers warned each of them that they were supporting a proscribed organisation, asked whether they intended to continue, then arrested them one by one. Arrests reached double figures within an hour of police moving in and carried on for hours, the first being an elderly man sitting under a tree.
This is the collision the proscription was always going to produce: a terrorism power, written for organised violence, being used on pensioners with placards outside the governing party’s conference. More than 3,600 people have been arrested since Palestine Action was banned in July last year, and the organisers were explicit about what they wanted from the week: the Prime Minister should “bin the ban”, because continuing it is “illogical, unsustainable and immoral”. Amnesty International’s chief executive in Britain, Kerry Moscogiuri, called the arrests of “grandparents, teenagers and everyone in between” a “truly shameful attack on freedom of speech”. Demonstrators cheered each arrest and chanted for Palestine. The political difficulty is that every arrest is made in the Home Secretary’s name while more than a hundred of her own MPs are already in revolt over migration. Watch whether the ban is reviewed.