UK Politics

Tim Sigsworth 19 January 2026 2:48pm GMT

The White House has told Britain to stop arresting people who express support for Palestine Action.

Sarah Rogers, Donald Trump’s free speech tsar, said the arrests were “censoring” free speech and did “more harm than good”.

More than 2,000 people have been arrested for expressing support for Palestine Action since it was proscribed as a terror group in July last year.

Ms Rogers, the US state department’s under-secretary for public diplomacy, said that the public should be allowed to say they back the group.

“I would have to look at each individual person and each proscribed organisation,” she told Semafor. “I think if you support an organisation like Hamas, then depending upon whether you’re coordinating, there are all these standards that get applied.

“This Palestine Action group, I’ve seen it written about. I don’t know what it did. I think if you just merely stand up and say, ‘I support Palestine Action’, then unless you are really co-ordinating with some violent foreign terrorist, I think that censoring that speech does more harm than good.”

Palestine Action was proscribed in July 2025 after its activists broke into RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire and vandalised military aeroplanes.

In a campaign of vandalism and trespass protesting the war in Gaza, it has targeted businesses that it claims are linked to Israel.

Anyone who expresses support for the group – which is often done on a piece of paper – faces arrest and a maximum prison sentence of six months.

Ms Rogers has been an outspoken critic of Sir Keir Starmer’s Government and freedom of speech in Britain since taking her position in October last year.

She has criticised the Prime Minister for cancelling local elections, curbing rights to jury trials and not banning cousin marriage.

Ms Rogers also compared Britain under Labour to Vladimir Putin’s Russia after the Government threatened to ban Elon Musk’s X over the creation of naked images of women and children by its AI service, Grok.

She also said British police forces were wrong to arrest people for using the phrase “globalise the intifada”.

The Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police (GMP) said last month that anyone chanting the slogan would face arrest in a more robust approach to pro-Palestinian protesters following the Bondi Beach and Manchester synagogue terror attacks.

“I’m from New York City where thousands of people were murdered by jihadists,” Ms Rogers said, referring to the 9/11 terror attack. “I don’t want an intifada in New York City, and I think anyone who does is disgusting, but should it be legal to say in most contexts? Yes.”

In December, Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist, was arrested in London for expressing support for Palestine Action. She was later bailed until March.

The group is in the midst of a legal challenge against its proscription and critics of the ban have argued the group is not comparable to violent terror groups such as Al-Qaeda or the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

Proscription ‘is draconian’

Amnesty International, the charity, has said the group’s proscription is an example of “problematic, overly broad and draconian restrictions on free speech”.

A number of the group’s activists embarked upon a hunger strike while being in prison on remand as they awaited trial.

Scottish prosecutors have offered to drop charges against some supporters of Palestine Action if they accept a £100 fine.

Adam McGibbon, who refused the offer, said: “The fact that the authorities are offering fines equivalent to a parking ticket for a ‘terrorism offence’ shows just how ridiculous these charges are. Do supporters of Islamic State get the same deal?

“I refuse to pay this fine, as has everyone else I know who has been offered one. Just try and put all 3,000 of us who have defied this ban so far in jail, Shabana Mahmood. Have you got the space?”

Mr McGibbon was among those arrested at a mass rally on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile in July 2025.

Lord Walney, co-chairman of the all-party parliamentary group for defending democracy, said: “It is unfortunate that Sarah Rogers says she is unaware of the history of violence and organised sabotage that led the UK Government to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.

“The president has spoken out in strong terms against far-Left violence and intimidation in the US and it is obvious he would in no way support these extremists damaging RAF jets, smashing up defence factories and attacking security staff with sledge hammers here in the UK.”

A spokesman for the Home Office said: “Palestine Action has conducted an escalating campaign involving not just sustained criminal damage, including to Britain’s national security infrastructure, but also intimidation and alleged violence and serious injuries to individuals. That kind of activity puts the safety and security of the public at risk.”

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7364529

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/20625

Three British activists jailed for alleged involvement with the banned anti-genocide group Palestine Action ended their monthslong hunger strike late Wednesday after the UK government rejected a $2.7 billion contract for a subsidiary of Israel's largest weapons maker, Elbit Systems.

Prisoners for Palestine (P4P), which represents the hunger strikers, said that Hamran Ahmed, Heba Muraisi, and Lewie Chiaramello would accept food again. Muraisi hadn't eaten in 73 days, while Ahmed refused food for 66 days and Chiaramello, who has Type 1 diabetes, fasted every other day for 44 days.

"It is definitely a time for celebration," Chiaramello said Thursday. "A time to rejoice and to embrace our joy as revolution and as liberation."

P4P spokesperson Francesca Nadin told the New Arab that the hunger strike "will be remembered as a landmark moment of pure defiance; an embarrassment for the British state."

"Banning a group and imprisoning our comrades has backfired on the British state, direct action is alive, and the people will drive Elbit out of Britain for good," P4P added. "This is just the beginning. Even though the people who have just finished their hunger strike will have some time to recover, they’re also really motivated and want to continue doing as many things as possible."

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P4P said other hunger-striking members of the "Filton 24"—Teuta Hoxha, Jon Cink, Qesser Zuhrah, and Amu Gib—were also accepting food following the UK government's announcement that it would not award a military training contract to Elbit Systems' British subsidiary.

The end of the strike came as Ahmed, Muraisi, and Chiaramello suffered deteriorating health, with Muraisi telling a friend earlier this week that she was "dying."

Two dozen alleged Palestine Action activists are accused of breaking into Elbit Systems' research and development facility in Filton in 2024. Alleged members of the group also staged direct action protests targeting other UK weapons factories that export arms to Israel as it wages a genocidal war in Gaza.

P4P hailed the contract cancellation as "a resounding victory for the hunger strikers, who resisted with their incarcerated bodies to shed light on the role of Elbit Systems, Israel's largest weapons manufacturer, in the colonization and occupation of Palestine."

British lawmakers voted last year to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist group after some of its members allegedly vandalized aircraft at a Royal Air Force base in Oxfordshire. Members of the group also allegedly vandalized US President Donald Trump’s golf course in Turnberry, Scotland. Because of the vote, the nonviolent group is on the same legal footing in Britain as Al-Qaeda and Islamic State. Joining or supporting Palestine Action is punishable by up to 14 years behind bars.

Since Palestine Action was banned, more than 2,000 people have been arrested for supporting the group, often while simply holding signs.

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

The watch list, drawn up before Mr Jenrick’s defection, and seen by The Independent, includes former ministers and veteran MPs Suella Braverman, Sir John Hayes, Mark Francois, Esther McVey, Andrew Rosindell and Sir Desmond Swayne.

Also included on the list are MPs from the 2024 intake – Katie Lam, Bradley Thomas and Lewis Cocking, as well as shadow ministers Matt Vickers and Joy Morrissey.

1. September 2024: Farage says Jenrick believes in nothing
2. October 2024: Farage brands Jenrick a hypocrite
3. April 2025: Farage versus Robert Generic
4. May 2025: Jenrick says Farage has had too many pints
5. August 2025: Jenrick claims he’s got Farage rattled
6. August 2025: Farage calls Jenrick a fraud
7. September 2025: Don’t let Farage run a school, says Jenrick

From the classrooms of Birmingham to the pages of Britain’s most powerful newspapers, one word has taken on extraordinary political weight: Islamist.

It is routinely presented as a neutral descriptor; a technical term separating religion from politics. But in practice, it functions less as analysis and more as accusation.

Once deployed, it renders Muslim political agency inherently suspect, irrational or dangerous. The term does not merely describe; it condemns.

British news is now firmly in the grip of what can only be described as an Islamism conspiracy theory: the idea that Muslims, imagined as a monolith, are hell-bent on undermining the state and “western civilisation” itself.

This same assumption now underpins the Prevent programme, where opposition to British foreign policy, anger over Gaza, or even robust expressions of Muslim identity are routinely framed as indicators of “Islamism”. Muslim political consciousness itself becomes the danger.

That assumption was on full display in the political mobilisation around the banning of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from a football match in Birmingham, amid well-documented concerns over racist chanting and public disorder. What should have been a routine policing decision was rapidly transformed into a national scandal.

Rather than confronting its own actions, the government has sought to divert attention from the central issue: the UK’s role in the Gaza genocide. Throughout Israel’s assault on Gaza, the UK has provided sustained political and diplomatic support, supplied vital components for F-35 fighter jets, and conducted R1 surveillance flights over Gaza. Taken together, these actions render the British government not merely complicit, but materially involved in the violence itself.

The British government is complicit in Israel’s systematic unmaking of Palestine, including its illegal occupation, its system of apartheid, and its role in the Gaza genocide, and Palestine Action has directly challenged this complicity. Where public order and civil disobedience laws once failed to suppress this activism, the state escalated to the use of exceptional anti-terror legislation.

The government has since resorted to the Terrorism Act to preemptively criminalise activists and expose them to sentences of up to 14 years’ imprisonment, a level of punishment grossly disproportionate to non-violent direct action. This disproportionality and choice of legislation signal a political motive.

The application of the Terrorism Act 2000 to non-violent direct action strips activists of ordinary legal protections and subjects them to an exceptional penal regime, including extended pre-charge detention, heightened surveillance powers, restrictions on association and expression, and dramatically increased sentencing exposure. Such measures are ordinarily reserved for acts involving mass violence, not protest aimed at preventing harm.

The use of anti-terror law in this context does not merely criminalise conduct; it redefines dissent itself as a security threat, preempting fair adjudication and conditioning the public to accept extraordinary punishment for ordinary political opposition.

Charities say employers will still be able to certify themselves without employing "a single disabled person".

Britain’s export, representation as a paid badge.

Previous cases

Three Palestine Action-linked prisoners ended a 73-day long hunger strike after the government decided not to award a multi-billion-pound contract to the UK subsidiary of Israeli arms company, Elbit Systems.

Four others who paused their hunger strike agreed not to resume it.

Heba Muraisi, Kamran Ahmed, and Lewie Chiaramello were the last remaining prisoners on hunger strike.

Teuta Hoxha, Jon Cink, Qesser Zuhrah, and Amu Gib, who paused their strikes late last year, also agreed to end their hunger strike.

Muraisi, Ahmed, and Chiaramello agreed to end their hunger strike late on Wednesday after news broke that the British government had agreed not to award a £2bn contract to Elbit Systems.