Newsletter 250808 – Saboteurs, Palestine and Animal Rights Censorship
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We’re taking a long-planned late summer break at the start of September – which turns out to have been badly-timed, as there’s a lot of stuff coming up that we would normally be reporting on – not least, the next Defend Our Juries protest on September 6th, over the potentially unlawful proscription of Palestine Action as a ‘terrorist’ organisation.
We’ll also be missing actions at the Excel Centre in the run-up and opening of the biennial Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) arms ‘fair’. In response to the increasingly indefensible genocide in Gaza, the UK government asked Israeli government officials not to attend. Israel responded by completely withdrawing their planned pavillion. However, the dirty business will continue as usual, with Elbit Systems still hawking their cutting edge tech, advertised as ‘battle-tested’ on Palestinian civilians, and so a wide coalition of campaigners are expecting the largest protest blockade in the event’s history on the opening day, 9th September.
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Shut The System – direct action and sabotage
Anonymous direct action group Shut The System resumed actions this month, promising a ‘Summer of Sabotage’, which began with an overnight attempt to interfere with comms and other services at insurance and banking firms heavily supporting continued fossil fuel extraction. Then last week they smashed windows and sprayed red paint at the London office of right-wing lobbyists Policy Exchange. ICYMI, in our 2022 long read Hidden Forces, we exposed how these opaquely-funded lobbyists influenced the government to introduce the regressive legislation which sent so many peaceful climate protesters to prison, some with record-breaking sentences.
Shut The System released a statement that part of the reason for the action was to highlight the lobbyists’ role in the proscription of Palestine Action. In a public response, ex-Met police officer John Spencer (co-author of a recent Policy Exchange report calling for even more roll-back of human rights and bans on protest) called the action “an act of terrorism”.
Palestine protests
Live images of genocide, ethnic cleansing, destruction of infrastructure and now forced mass starvation continue to haunt citizens across the UK and abroad. We filmed at two noise protests this month, both outside the Foreign Office. The first was led by Jewish groups alongside London-based Israelis. Several hundred people attended, banging pots and pans for more than an hour. They stopped briefly in order to listen to a harrowing message from Ghazzah, from a Palestinian man there describing his search for food for his family. The second protest (several hours long during office hours) included speeches from doctors recently returned from Palestine.
In Austria, protesters staged a Palestine Action-style roof occupation at a company which manufactures engines for the Elbit drones that have terrorised Palestinians for many years. Read our report here. Of course, Palestine Action remains a proscribed ‘terrorist’ group here, at least until the judicial review of Yvette Cooper’s decision which will be heard at the High Court over three days in late November. Civil rights group Defend Our Juries continues its campaign to undermine the proscription. As mentioned above, we will miss what promises to be an even more historic action next weekend, but we reported on their August event which saw the largest mass arrest in recent UK protest history.
Corporate and state media coverage of the genocide continues to shock people who seek out the truth about what is happening, and this week Parents For Palestine held a child-led protest at the BBC to highlight the broadcaster’s complicity. They were escorted off the Piazza and police were called, but they managed to continue with a reading of the last will of Palestinian journalist Anas al-Sharif, who was targeted by the IDF earlier this month. Watch our film here.
Animal Abuse – A Chilling Australian Precedent Against The Right To Know
An industrial animal slaughter company in Australia has won a far-reaching injunction against an animal abuse investigation charity. Our staff writer Sul Nowroz reports on possible collusion between the Department of Agriculture and the Game Meat Company, where undercover footage revealed multiple and routine cases of serious animal abuse filmed over two weeks. An appeal court has banned the publication of the footage to protect the company’s reputation and profits, ordering destruction of files and potentially bankrupting the Farm Transparency Projecy charity with court costs. The precedent could prevent anyone recording commercial activities while on private land, even when as in this case, those activities are illegal. Although the footage was ordered destroyed, our article includes a clip of a Legislative Council member describing some of it under Parliamentary privilege. Read and watch the full report here.
OTHER NEWS
Digital ID – UK citizens have regularly rejected any form of mandatory ID system ever since they were abolished by Winston Churchill’s government in 1952 under the slogan “Set the people free”, due to widespread rejection of their authoritarian use after World War II. After the failure of an Identity Cards Bill in 2004, Tony Blair tried introducing the National Identity Act in 2006, but a successful campaign by NO2ID demonstrated again the deep public distrust of a centralised government database, leading to its repeal and the destruction of all collected data under the new Conservative government in 2010. The Tony Blair Institute released the report “A New National Purpose” in 2010, co-written by Blair and William Hague, which slips in encouragement for a biometric and digital national identity system in its section on AI infrastructure. A search of its 77 pages finds the word ‘privacy’ just one time.
Silkie Carlo at BigBrotherWatch warns that current thinking on digital ID “would be one of the biggest assaults on privacy ever seen in the UK”. Although the Reform Party has no clear policy on Digital ID, and Farage is reportedly against it, it has often been cited as part of a solution to “illegal immigration” and “benefit fraud” – both issues weaponised by the right-wing and populists. Apart from the fear of current or future government abuse and the dystopian ability to exert authoritarian control on individuals according to their race, religion, political affiliations and so on, there is also the very real problem that vast unaccountable unelected international corporations will push this agenda in order to directly profit from the gathering and sale of all our individual private data. If you are concerned by all this, join campaigns and exert pressure now. Big Brother Watch has been quite active in this sphere and are running this petition which may be worth a look.
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A glimmer of good news to end – despite the massive clampdown on peaceful protest and the right to defend oneself in court, there have been a couple of small victories recently among the many Just Stop Oil trials reaching court.
At Horsham Magistrates Court, Judge Amanda Kelly dismissed the prosecution’s attempt to use new Public Order legislation against eight people who locked on, in order to block one of the passenger security check-ins at Gatwick airport (July 2024). The eight (one of whom was only filming) were facing a potential 51 weeks prison sentence under Section 1 of the Public Order Act 2023, but the judge said there was insufficient evidence of ‘serious disruption’. The term ‘serious disruption’ had been redefined under recent legislation to mean ‘anything more than minor hindrance’.
And last week at Guildford Crown Court, a jury acquitted eight other JSO activists who had been charged with ‘public nuisance’ for attempting to blockade a petrol station on the M25 at Cobham. It was part of a co-ordinated action at three M25 services. In March this year, JSO announced an end to their campaign after the government acceded to their original demand of no new licences for oil and gas.
The last of the current crop of JSO prisoners have now been released, including social movement scientist Roger Hallam, whose theories have guided many recent protest movements in the UK. He was given a five-year prison sentence after a bizarre trial last year. Because Hallam had already been on remand for a long time before the hearing, he was recently released on licence, with lots of conditions on who he can communicate with and where he can live. Despite the restrictions, he has already been busy organising a movement of growing citizens’ assemblies with the potential of working with the new left-wing party announced by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. Find out more at Time To Assemble
