UK Politics

On 5 January I will go on trial at Kingston Crown Court charged with an offence under Section12 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The maximum penalty if found guilty is 14 years in gaol. There are others due to follow me.

You might be forgiven for thinking that my ‘offence’ was preparing a bomb intended for the Israeli Embassy. In fact, it was disagreeing with government policy and received opinion.

I was arrested on 20 December 2023 by Counter-Terrorism Police in a dawn raid under the Terrorism Act 2000. My ‘crime’ was posting a tweet, one month previously, saying that I supported the Palestinian resistance against the Israeli Defence Forces.

The anti-terrorism police are reminiscent of the Thought Police (Thinkpol) in George Orwell’s 1984, who spent their time hunting down “thought crime.” Britain’s equivalent of seized my electronic devices – computers, laptop, mobile phone etc. When I applied to the courts to recover these items, the police justified their retention by saying that they provided a ‘highly relevant insight’ into my mind.

The aim of Orwell’s Thought Police was to enforce mental conformity, ensuring citizens police their own minds. In his Expert Witness Statement in the Case for the Deproscription of Hamas, Jonathan Cook, a journalist who has worked on The Guardian, The Observer and The Times amongst other papers and a recipient of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism in 2011, wrote:

Over the past several months, I have been watching with growing professional alarm – and personal trepidation – what I can only describe as a campaign of political intimidation and persecution of a number of journalists in the UK. The journalists who have been targeted share one thing in common: they report and comment on Israel’s actions in Gaza from a critical perspective that judges those actions to be genocidal…