I support Palestine Action.
By just writing and publishing the above terse sentence, I have committed a crime under the Terrorism Act 2000.
Presumably, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has already despatched the police to my door and they are preparing to kick it in and take me away. If this is the case and if it is possible, I would like your shiniest handcuffs, a single cell with plenty sunlight, and access to the prison library please. Thank you in advance.
Should I be nicked, I will demand all my rights, cause the maximum amount of inconvenience short of earning myself a kicking, and demand that one of my friends snap a picture of a handcuffed and defiant Alan having his head pushed down into the police car - it will make an excellent byline photograph. We could even arrange for me to be picked up at a Chinese restaurant, to help the whole thing go viral.
I will not resist, but you do have to come and get me.
And you will have to take me away physically.
What I have just done is a crime because Palestine Action is a “proscribed” organisation. According to the UK Government, this means that it is a criminal offence “to be a member… or to invite or recklessly express support for them.”
Ok, I’ll rephrase the above…. I support Palestine Action, in a reckless way.
Does that work?
Palestine Action rose to prominence recently for committing some minor acts of vandalism on some military sites, doing some other scruffy protesting, and not much else. For this litany of tomfoolery, they have been suspiciously lumped alongside the absurdly camp-sounding neo-Nazis of the Maniac Murder Cult (MMC) and the unfortunately initialism-ed Russian Imperial Movement… or RIM.
Presumably that means anyone working on their case has a RIM-job?
Say whatever you want you want about Palestine Action but to place them alongside Russian fascists and home grown far-right nutters is to do them a disservice. They’re just scruffy do-gooders who have taken a particular political stance on an important topic and one or two of their number have committed some low level offences. They do not belong on the list of genuinely dangerous people and the Home Secretary, being an intelligent woman, knows this.
But the arrests have begun for this crime of thought and speech. More than a dozen people were nicked in Norwich on these absurd grounds, 25-year old promising law student Paddy Friend was one of many arrested during a peaceful protest in Parliament Square, joining Colonel Chris Romberg who was similarly taken away by the cops.
Even your mum’s favourite bestselling author Sally Rooney faces having her collar felt, for promising to fund the organisation. You will note that she has not actually given them anything yet.
Perhaps the most absurd story, so far, is that of Miles Pickering, who looks so much like someone playing Bill Bailey in a biopic it’s distressing. Miles was one of 532 people arrested at the same demonstration at which they took Paddy Friend away. The grounds for his arrest; wearing a t-shirt with “Plasticine Action,” on it. Rumours that Morph has gone into hiding are as of yet unconfirmed.
This is, of course, absurd - particularly when it is happening in the home country of Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, J.S. Mill, John Locke, John Milton, Adam Smith, and the other bricks and mortar that used to make up the wall of free speech that was built around each freeborn British subject who gratefully inherited freedom under the law from his forebears on the condition that he pass it on intact to his children.
Alert readers will have noticed that they cannot be sure whether or not I really support Palestine Action, and have therefore contravened the Terrorism Act with the possible consequence of a 14-year prison sentence.
In that, they are correct. They do not know, and neither does any police officer, intelligence officer, judge, or anyone else. But I have said I do in print… recklessly… and that is enough by the standards of this stupid law.
We now live in a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and its constituent parts, in which people are are arrested for teaching dogs to do tricks, locked up for saying admittedly vile things on social media, and now for merely saying they support groups like Palestine Action. Free speech may not be dead, I’m not sure it’s possible to kill the impulse to speak and write freely entirely, but it is very, very ill.
At the heart of the problem is an intellectual sleight of hand, or an anti-intellectual sleight of hand if you prefer? Through our increasingly paranoid and afraid society, we have allowed saying something to be conflated with actually doing that thing or causing it to be done by another person.
If we are to save our right to say whatever we like in public and in print, that balance must be redressed. It needs to be made clear that even saying, “Let’s Kill Bob!,” is not the same as the speaker wielding the knife and cannot be said to be responsible for Bob’s murder - responsibility for that lies with the killer himself alone.
To say otherwise is to abdicate responsibility for yourself and to believe that you can be made to do something heinous by mere words without your consent. It is to declare yourself a slave, a drone, or a moron, depending on your point of view.
In the end, it does not matter if I or anyone else support Palestine Action. My own position on the Middle East conflict is probably more nuanced and caveated than theirs, with praise and condemnation allocated where I see them needed. But what I do unreservedly and unequivocally claim is the right to say I support them. And to say anything else I bloody well like!
I make this point, knowing full well its ridiculously criminal nature, because the right to say whatever I want is not just important to me; it’s everything. I don’t know how to earn a living or have a life except through writing and speaking. It is my trade and my leisure, what I wake up with in the morning and how I fall asleep at night. To be told that any part of the English language is off limits to me, and by extension anyone else, is so disgusting to me that I have ended friendships over it. The list of matters over which I will gleefully go to prison is short, but freedom of speech will always be on it.
Therefore, for as long as it remains the clearest possible distillation of the Orwellian notion of thoughtcrime to do, and so long as people are being arrested for it, I will continue to say that I support Palestine Action.
I can be contacted at alangrantwrites@gmail.com to discuss the details of my arrest. Or maybe deploy one of your constables or detectives find me, they seem to have time on their hands.
Alan Grant is a writer and columnist.
when people complain about British free speech but make jokes about Russian nazis that is a concern
Palestine action are indeed linked to russian terrorists. in fact on x you are harassed by iranian bots from the same network.