This is the first of what I intend to be a series of posts about my experience of the Defend our Juries (DoJ) 'Lift the Ban' campaign. As a starting point, my motivation, you can see where I am coming from in a book review that I wrote for Sofia magazine The Notion that the Polite, Western Liberal Ever Stood for Anything At All.
Note: I shall be coming back to edit this from time to time.
It is difficult to convey quite how law-abiding and obedient I have been in my life. I once got a fine for inadvertently doing 36 mph in a 30 mile zone in Bletchley but that's about it. And yet earlier this year (2025), at the age of 67, I was arrested under Section 13 of the Terrorism Act.
On 9th August I joined the more than 500 protestors in Parliament Square and as Big Ben struck 1pm I wrote on a blank placard the words "I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”. We sat in silence (most of us) holding our placards and facing away from the Palace of Westminster to symbolically turn our backs on Parliament. For a while nothing happened and then small groups from the vast hordes of police surrounding the square moved in and took out some individuals. I was bizarrely reminded of a wildlife documentary as predators move in on flocks or herds of prey and select their victim. The arrests then picked-up pace. Some protestors resisted by ‘going floppy’ so they required several police officers to carry them, but many of us, myself included, allowed ourselves to be led away by a single officer. I was taken to one of the many police vans surrounding the square and thence to a nearby temporary 'triage' point set up by the Met Police in order to try to process us as quickly as possible. As recommended by the organisers of the protest (DoJ) I refused to give my details and, because I've never been arrested before they didn't have a record of who I was, they had to take me to a police station. Unfortunately the station I was taken to (Kentish Town) was having problems with their computer system so we queued outside for more than three hours (having already spent a couple of hours queuing for the triage) and I didn't get locked up in a police cell until about 8 pm. I was eventually released on bail at 12:30am the following morning.
The experience was surreal at times. Even while treating me as a criminal the police were respectful (maybe my ‘Church of Christ the Cornerstone’ t-shirt helped). The young constable who arrested me seemed quite nervous and I wondered if I was the first person he had ever arrested. He'd written the words he had to say to me ("you do not need to say anything but anything you do say..." - familiar to me only from watching police dramas on the TV) on the palm of his hand. The advice from DoJ was not to say anything after being arrested so we didn’t talk much, but because of all the delays we were together for about six hours in all and I found it impossible not to try some conversation with him. I maybe said more than was advisable but he was friendly and even kept me up to date with the MK Dons score (I'm a season ticket holder). When we finally parted ways at 8pm we shook hands and he said that he hoped never to see me again – for the best of reasons. In Kentish Town police station the officer taking my fingerprints struggled to get the machine to work and I sympathised as he complained about the poor equipment at that station. He assured me that it wasn’t like that in his own police station. After he’d taken my fingerprints as best he could, a DNA sample and several photos, he thought I could be released. But on learning that they were not ready to do that yet he said he’d take me back to my ‘room’ as though I was in a hotel – but he still locked the door of Police Holding Cell Number 6 behind me. But I was a long, long, way outside of my comfort zone, spent much of the time bewildered and occasionally it was undeniably frightening. When first locked in the cell, more than six hours after being arrested, I’d had no way of knowing the time, I’d not yet been allowed my one phone call so neither my wife nor any of my friends knew where I was (but would have realised I must have been arrested), I was hungry, having had nothing to eat for 12 hours (because the cafe at Westminster Hall doesn’t accept cash, but that’s another story) and I didn’t even have anything to read because they wouldn’t let me have my copy of the London Review of Books back until they’d taken the staples out of it.
I was arrested (and have now been charged - I'll write about that another time) under Section 13 of the Terrorism Act which has a maximum penalty of 6 months in jail. So why did I do it? Specifically, it is because I do not think that what Palestine Action does is terrorism and they should never have been proscribed. I agree with their aims - to stop Britain's complicity in war crimes and genocide - even if I would be unlikely to use their methods. As I see it, they are damaging property (and they should be charged for criminal damage) in order to draw attention to the fact that Britain is complicit in the genocide being committed by Israel against the Palestinian people.
In his book, One day, everyone will have always been against this, El Akkad quotes a Palestinian poet Rash Abdulhadi:
Wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, do it now. If it's a handful, throw it. If its a fingernail, scrape it out and throw. Get in the way however you can.
(See my review of the book in Sofia Magazine.)
I hope that the symbolic (and real) act of my getting arrested throws a few grains of sand into the machinery of genocide. But it is also about a broader issue to do with what has been happening in the UK in recent years because it was known at the time that the terrorism act was defining terrorism far too broadly, and could be misused.
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