In another humiliation for Keir Starmer’s widely loathed Labour government, this week the High Court in London ruled that its 2025 ban on the direct-action group Palestine Action under terrorism legislation was unlawful. The High Court judges found that most of the group’s activities, which have aimed to forcibly disrupt the operations of arms manufacturers and other organisations providing material aid to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, did not meet the definition of ‘terrorism’ under UK law. The government’s proscription of the group, the court said, was “a very significant interference” with the rights to freedom of expression and assembly.

The ruling proposes that the ban should be overturned, but its effect will not be immediate, and the government has announced its intention to appeal the decision. Since the proscription came into effect, more than 2,500 people have been arrested for protesting the ban; they remain in legal limbo.

For more on the decision, we spoke to Charlie Thomas, an academic whose research focuses on Palestine Action and the wider Palestine solidarity movement in Britain. In 2021, he was one of three actionists who occupied a factory accused of producing parts for attack drones used by Israel. He pled guilty to a charge of criminal damage and served four months in jail.

Palestine Action has been active for about five years. The court ruling says there have been 385 actions, of which “only three incidents” met the standards for “serious damage to property” under UK terrorism law. How would you describe the group – and what led the government to attempt to proscribe it?

Since 2020, Palestine Action have been primarily acting to stop the operation of Elbit Systems UK – the subsidiary of an Israeli company that is a major supplier of arms to the Israeli army. “Actionists” have repeatedly occupied sites of arms production and research, covered their facades with red paint, and inflicted serious damage on their infrastructure and equipment. Other firms who partner with Elbit have also been targeted, such as landlords, banks and logistics companies.

Actionists wanted to disrupt the military supply chains running between Britain and Israel. Direct action provided a method to do that, placing costs on arms companies and their enablers. Most of these activists, myself included, were happy to face criminal charges – seeing that as a small price to pay for meaningful intervention. But the government evidently felt that existing law was insufficient to prevent further actions, and moved to introduce harsher penalties for participating in direct action and even expressing support for it.

Since 2024, a number of figures have been pushing for Palestine Action’s proscription under the Terrorism Act 2000 – most notably the former Labour MP John Woodcock, who backed Boris Johnson’s Conservative party in the 2019 election, and was then given a peerage and appointed as the Johnson government’s “independent advisor” on political violence, a role that he retained for some time under the current Labour government.

In June 2025, shortly after four activists broke into an RAF base, Yvette Cooper, who was then home secretary, announced the intention to ban Palestine Action. She claimed people “don’t know the full nature of this organisation”, and the government briefed friendly journalists that the group was being covertly funded by Iran. What did the court reveal about the legal justification for proscription? Did the government act in part because it was frustrated that juries were sometimes acquitting activists?

It’s clear from the court transcripts that there was a complete disjuncture between the fairly technocratic legal arguments that Cooper made to proscribe Palestine Action privately, and the smear campaign that she ran publicly to justify these actions.

Undoubtedly, proscription was used not because there was a meaningful sense that Palestine Action could constitute a terrorist organisation under the government’s definitions (which are deliberately vague), but because it would expedite the process of destroying Palestine Action entirely.

In her initial speech announcing the proscription, Cooper leaves traces of the motivating factors – mentioning the need to defend “businesses and institutions” and the “defence enterprise”. The proscription was in part intended to assure private companies in the arms sector that their investments in Britain would be protected.

Though a number of actionists were found not guilty by juries, even before the proscription it was becoming more difficult to mount a defence in court on the grounds that actions were justified by opposition to genocide. In my own court case in 2023, the only defence the judge permitted us to use was one of consent. We would have had to argue that we believed the owner of the factory that we occupied and damaged would have consented had they known what the materials they were producing were being used to do.

We thought that making this argument would be difficult in front of a jury. The prosecution weighed on us with a plea deal, and we flinched – two of us pleaded guilty and served some of our sentence in prison. But actionists in other cases didn’t back down, instead pleading “not guilty” and battling it out in court. This made the attempt to “degrade” Palestine Action (as Cooper put it) a slow and ineffective one.

What were the grounds for the court’s ruling? Does the judgement give us any sense of whether the government is likely to win on appeal?

The court has effectively overturned Palestine Action’s proscription, though this does not come into effect immediately but will happen on 20 February. Strangely, the Met Police have come out and said that they will essentially continue to defy the stipulations of the proscription, as they had been doing to some extent, by refusing to arrest Defend Our Juries activists declaring their support for Palestine Action.

I want to be careful here, because I’m not a lawyer. Reading through the court ruling last night, some of the grounds for nullifying this proscription were incredibly technical. They seemed to argue that the government had not carefully met all the criteria required by the Terrorism Act 2000 to justify proscription. No doubt, this gives the government’s lawyers an opportunity to hammer out their weak spots and try again.

But the court specifically said that it did not judge Palestine Action to be “an ordinary protest group engaged in activities that fall within the well-established tradition of peaceful protest”. So while this was an important victory, it’s clear that this will remain an attack line for the government in the future.

Do you think the protests against the ban, which saw more than 2,500 people arrested for merely holding signs supporting Palestine Action, shaped the court’s decision? Has the ban brought more people into the movement?

I think the Lift the Ban campaign, which was organised by a group called Defend Our Juries, was an act of strategic brilliance.

Firstly, it lowered the barrier to entry for meaningful disruption. Participants didn’t have to travel far from their homes to arms factories, which are typically in rural or suburban areas. Nor did they have to make a tactical leap into direct action and sabotage. This allowed for mass participation.

Secondly, this mass participation put pressure on the legal system and its under-resourced infrastructure. By challenging the state to criminalise thousands of people under the Terrorism Act, the campaign called the government’s bluff, and undermined the case for proscription. If the government really believed that all these people arrested for holding signs were really “terrorists” who posed a serious threat to the country – as proscription stipulates – then it wouldn’t have released so many of them on bail.

I don’t think the proscription was intended to criminalise the Palestine solidarity movement. Instead, it was intended to isolate Palestine Action from the movement writ large, and channel discontent into traditional forms of protest, such as marches. But the Lift the Ban campaign effectively inverted this process, by linking Palestine Action to the mass politics of the streets.

How would you describe the changing nature of the Palestine solidarity movement in Britain since 2023 – and how did the proscription affect it?

The Palestine solidarity movement has shifted enormously since 2023. Firstly, we can see an escalation in protest activities: moving beyond marches, people have engaged in sit-ins in private institutions and public thoroughfares, blockades outside government buildings and arms factories, encampments across university campuses. This escalation does not emerge solely from Palestine Action: it responds to the escalating violence of the Israeli state in Gaza.

Secondly, this escalation emerged because slower institutional campaigns for boycott and divestment had largely proven unable to overturn bipartisan and unconditional government support for Israel. In my interviews with hundreds of activists across the Palestine solidarity movement, I’ve found people with varying political orientations, but nearly all of them were motivated in part by their experience in political campaigns that had very limited success, whether that was attempting to ban certain Israeli products from being sold at their universities or working to get Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party elected.

Finally, while I don’t think Palestine Action can claim sole responsibility for people’s decision to escalate their protest activities, its most significant impact has been a spatial one. Since 2023, there have been a litany of different local campaigns, from Lancashire to Luton, which have all targeted specific sites of arms production and research. Groups like Workers for a Free Palestine initially sought to blockade these same sites. Britain has a long and storied history of antimilitarism, but it has always been one carried out by small groups of dedicated activists, such as in the Seeds of Hope action in 1996, where four activists damaged a British Aerospace jet that was being exported to Indonesia for use against East Timor. What Palestine Action has done for the movement is reorient it towards arms factories, to sites where Britain is materially aiding war crimes in Gaza.

I doubt the court’s decision will see an immediate return to these sites by Palestine Action. And the judgement might even be overturned. But it does deny the government social legitimation: even if their appeal is successful, this ruling has exposed their dishonest and insincere justifications for the ban. No matter how small, this erosion of their legitimacy is a win for the Palestine solidarity movement in its struggle against the state.