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One glaring lie: The Court of Appeal claims suffragettes operated “transparently in the open”, while Palestine Action is “a covert organisation that operates using secret cells”
In my earlier, short assessment of the Court of Appeal’s endorsement of the Labour government’s proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization, in which, refuting the High Court’s earlier ruling that the proscription was unlawful, they very carefully deferred to the authority of the home secretary and her “expert advisors”, and made a show of recognizing the importance of the human rights they were curtailing, I missed out a glaring lie in the judgment; namely, that, as the Court described it:
“It is, nonetheless, a fundamental mistake to overlook the fact that Palestine Action overtly promotes unlawful violence amounting to terrorism. It is not, as it claims, a direct action civil disobedience protest group like the suffragettes operating transparently in the open. It is a covert organisation that operates using secret cells to avoid the detection and prosecution of those using violence to destroy the property of third parties. Palestine Action’s activities have caused injury as well as property damage.”
The lie, of course, is that the suffragettes were “a direct action civil disobedience protest group … operating transparently in the open.”
As John McEvoy of Declassified UK noted on X, “The suffragettes launched a sustained campaign of arson and bombing, employed anti-surveillance tactics to evade police, and attacked politicians.”
The suffragettes were clearly more violent than Palestine Action, but time has sanitized their violence, because, of course, what they were fighting for — votes for women, as part of sustained struggle for equality — was ultimately successful, as the woman reading out today’s ruling in the Court, Lady Chief Justice Sue Carr, must be well aware of, as she would not have her job had the suffragettes not been successful.
By lying about the suffragettes, the Court allowed a chink of light into their otherwise dark repudiation of any kind of direct action that involves significant criminal damage to achieve a political aim.
At what point, I wonder, will it be recognized that undertaking actions akin to, but less grave than those of the suffragettes — and with the aim of damaging or destroying weapons to be used in a genocide rather than to secure votes for women — was morally right, as the suffragettes’ actions obviously were.
