Justice lies sleeping

TetleysTLDR: The Summary

The UK government, under Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, is using the Terrorism Act 2000 to arrest hundreds of peaceful protesters, including pensioners, for showing support for Palestine Action.  This is widely seen as political suppression to protect Israeli interests, given the government’s heavy funded links to the Israel lobby.Cooper has publicly branded PA as ‘violent terrorists’ without presenting credible evidence, hiding behind sub judice. C ritics argue that if evidence existed, it would dominate headlines.   Activists warn the government may stage a false flag to fabricate proof.It is further alleged Cooper has effectively instructed the Met to engineer disorder by disproportionately arresting the elderly and vulnerable, hoping to provoke protests into ‘violence’ for political gain.  This exposes the state’s Achilles’ heel: it has no real power over passive, non-violent disorder, and every heavy-handed move erodes public trust and control.Legally, these actions risk breaching ECHR Articles 10 & 11, the Human Rights Act 1998, ICCPR Article 21, and potentially Rome Statute Article 7 on persecution. In plain terms: it’s the weaponisation of British law for foreign political interests - a hallmark of authoritarianism.

TetleysTLDR: The article

Policing by Proxy: How Britain’s Terror Laws Are Being Weaponised to Silence Peaceful Protest 

When our police haul peaceful protestors including 78-year-olds, blind individuals, and pensioners into custody.  When they do this by the hundreds, not to uphold public safety but to shield the political and economic interests of a foreign state, the rule of law isn’t simply weakened, it’s executed in broad daylight. 

On 9 August 2025, London saw the largest mass arrest by the Metropolitan Police in over a decade: between 500 and 600 people detained in a single day for showing support for Palestine Action, an organisation recently proscribed under UK terrorism laws.  Many were elderly; some were frail; all were peaceful (The Guardian, 15 Aug 2025). 

Over 700 arrests have now been made under the Terrorism Act 2000 in connection with genocide protests and the protests about Governmental over-rach with regards to teh proscribed group Palestine Action.  Some of these arrests were for nothing more than wearing a 'Free Gaza”'t-shirt (The Times, Aug 2025). 

The Peelian Principles, set out in 1829 by Sir Robert Peel, the founder of the Metropolitan Police, remain the moral foundation of British policing. They stress that the police’s legitimacy rests entirely on public consent, not fear and that officers are citizens in uniform, enforcing the law with the public, not upon them. Key among these principles is the idea that the test of police efficiency is ‘the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it’.  The mass arrests of peaceful pensioners under terrorism laws shred this compact. When policing becomes a tool of political enforcement rather than impartial service, it ceases to be Peelian and becomes authoritarian. 

Yvette Cooper has crossed the Rubicon: this is not policing by consent, this is policing by proxy - enforcement not for the British public, but for a foreign-aligned political agenda.  

The Terrorism Act and the rule of law 

The Terrorism Act 2000, Section 1, defines terrorism as the use or threat of action designed to influence the government and intended to advance a political, religious, or ideological cause and involving serious violence, serious damage to property, endangerment of life, or serious interference with electronic systems.

A pensioner holding a placard, or a retiree in a Gaza t-shirt, clearly fails to meet this threshold. Applying terrorism powers to such individuals is not law enforcement – it is the political weaponisation of criminal law.

Historical Parallels: Repression in new clothing 

This misuse may also violate Article 10 (freedom of expression) and Article 11 (freedom of assembly) of the European Convention on Human Rights, both incorporated into domestic law under the Human Rights Act 1998. As the Equality and Human Rights Commission warns, such heavy-handed tactics risk deterring lawful protest and 'undermining public confidence' in human rights protections (source) 

We have seen this before. The suffragettes were arrested under ‘public order’ pretexts.  Anti-apartheid activists were smeared as subversives.  Thatcher’s police at Orgreave used riot powers to batter the miners into submission. The terminology changes ‘public order’, ‘extremism’, ‘terrorism’: but the aim remains constant - silence dissent when it threatens entrenched power.

Today, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper repeats this authoritarian tradition. Critics accuse her of gaslighting the public, conflating non-violent direct action with criminal terror to defend the proscription of Palestine Action (source) 

Yvette Cooper insists against all the available evidence, that Palestine Action are a violent terrorist group.  Yes, they have committed criminal damage, but of course we have laws for that.  The public can see exactly what this is: a Home Secretary, heavily backed by the Israel lobby, in a Government equally funded and influenced by pro-Israel money, using English law to enforce Israeli interests on British soil.  Cooper hides behind the fig leaf of sub judice, claiming she can’t explain why PA are ‘violent’, but if such evidence truly existed she’d be shouting it from the rooftops and it would be splashed across every front page. The fact it isn’t speaks volumes.  Activists warn that the Government may be laying the groundwork for a staged ‘false flag’ incident to manufacture the evidence it so obviously lacks, the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook.  

But hang on a minute.  Let's just for one moment give Yvette Cooper the benefit of the doubt.  If she did have information that would prove beyond reasonable doubt that PA were not a none-violent organisation, then surely this was part of her decision making process in proscribing the group.  

If this was the case, and there was damning evidence, then the combination of holding back that information and using the full force of the law against peaceful protestors, many of them pensioners, then she shows a major failing in her duty of care to people who have came out in good faith protesting what they thought quite reasonably was Governmental over-reach.  Such a derogation of power and abrogation of responsibility that directly results in hundreds of arrests would mean that she was not fit for office.   

It could be argued that Yvette Cooper has effectively instructed the Metropolitan Police and security services to engineer disorder: a strategy that has been used before by Governments. That would explain the police’s cowardly habit of punching down: targeting the elderly and vulnerable with disproportionate arrests. The calculation is simple: provoke outrage, trigger a reaction, and then use that reaction as proof of violent protest. This tactic exposes Cooper’s Achilles’ heel, that the state has no real power over passive disorder. The more people simply refuse to play the role of the angry mob, the more it makes her only the more desperate to portray them as one.   

She’s desperate to cast them as enemies within, but the more obvious it becomes that they aren't, the more obvious it becomes that the government is losing its grip on the narrative, and with it, its grip on power.  It is our Government acting on behalf of a third party pariah state, and not protesters, that are the real enemy within. 

And then there is the policing of the far-right.  The ones that scream about free speech and two-tier policing.  Well it’s looking more so every day that suppression of free speech and two-tier policing are indeed a thing.  But not on the violent protests of the far-right:  they are handled with kid gloves.  When peaceful pro-Palestinian activists, many elderly, some disabled, take to the streets, the state rolls out the full weight of the Terrorism Act.  Hundreds are detained, some for nothing more than wearing a ‘Free Gaza’ t-shirt, or in one case the hilariously tragic arrest of a man wearing a Plasticine Action T-Shirt, extolling the virtues of the children’s character ‘Morph’ over AI, the Met’s approach is aggressive, pre-emptive, and designed to intimidate.

Contrast that with the policing of violent far-right demonstrations. In recent years, marches by groups such as the EDL, For Britain or Tommy Robinson’s supporters have seen masked thugs smashing windows, hurling missiles at police, and openly using Nazi salutes. Arrest numbers? Often a few dozen at most at any single event, with the bulk quietly released without charge within 24 hours.

Example:

• Palestine Action protest, London, August 2025. Over 500 arrests on a single day, many elderly or retired participants; protesters recorded no violence. Facebook+2Essex Police+2The Guardian+12The Guardian+12Wikipedia+12

versus

• Far‑right riot, London, September 2023. Violent clashes, racist abuse, assaults on officers; 62 arrests, most released without charge.
• The Southport Riots, July–August 2024. Sparked by false rumours blaming migrants for a deadly stabbing, riots spread across multiple towns. Around 1,840 arrests altogether and over 1,100 charges; at least 130 police officers injured. Wikipedia+1
• Immigration hotel riots, Knowsley, February 2023. Far‑right mob attacked a hotel housing asylum seekers, setting fire to a police van, hurling rockets and rocks. Only 15 arrests made, with almost all suspects released shortly thereafter.
• Epping protests, July–August 2025. Triggered by allegations against an asylum seeker, protests outside the Bell Hotel turned violent with bottles and rocks thrown, eight officers injured, at least 16 arrests in mid-July. But by August, events have largely calmed: protests on 8 August were mostly peaceful, with two arrests only. The StandardWikipedia+4Wikipedia+4Wikipedia+4

The difference isn’t in the law. Criminal damage, assault, and incitement to racial hatred are all arrestable offences: the real issue here is in the political will. Peaceful dissent against government foreign policy on Israel and protest against the murder of children is treated as a far greater threat by the state than actual public violence from the far right. 

This isn’t public order policing, it’s political policing.  When the state comes down harder on banner-waving pensioners than on Nazi-saluting hooligans, it’s not about safety. It’s about protecting the government’s friends and punishing its critics. TetleysTLDR:  The state prefers hate to hope 

International Law: from democratic deficit to state capture  

Suppressing peaceful assembly to protect the interests of another state may breach Article 21 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which the UK is a signatory. This guarantees the right to peaceful assembly, subject only to restrictions necessary in a democratic society for national security, public safety, or public order: criteria that mass arrests of elderly protestors clearly do not meet.

In more serious terms, systematic persecution of a political movement opposing war crimes could fall within Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which defines 'persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political grounds' as a crime against humanity. If those protests oppose internationally recognised breaches of humanitarian law,  such as violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention in occupied territories, then the UK, by suppressing them, risks complicity in those breaches and Parliamentarians directly involved and compicit risk prosecution. 

Evidence and legal breach table

The chilling effect and the legal right to resist 

Civil society organisations including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and the Quakers have called on the Attorney General to suspend prosecutions until the High Court rules on the legality of the proscription in November 2025.  This is not just about fairness, it is about whether the UK can still claim to be a functioning democracy under the rule of law. 

And here’s a real point: The Quakers, a religious group who’s hallmark is peace and conscientious objection have also been arrested under article 13 of the Terrorism Act.  The Quakers.  THE QUAKERS!  This is where we are now.  Where the famously uncontroversial Society of Friends are viewed as subversive.

If Westminster’s priorities are treasonously being dictated from abroad and bought and paid for by a foreign power, and British policing is acting as an enforcement arm for foreign objectives, then the British public has not only a moral right but a legal right, under Article 1 of the ICCPR, to resist the erosion of their sovereignty.

So the question is unavoidable: who the hell is running this country?

Because if the answer is not the British people, then democracy in Britain is not in danger, it’s already been breached.  

If our country is being ruled in the interests of a toxic foreign power, then our Government rules outside of the democratic and constitutional principles that allow it to govern.  In this case we have policing without consent and our laws have become meaningless. 

And all because our Government is sucking at the teat of Zionism at a time when Israel is turning the Middle East into an abattoir.  

Footnote:

It is clear the toxic over-reach of this Government will not start and end with Gaza protests. The danger in the Government’s attitude towards Gaza protests lies not just in its immediate suppression of Palestinian solidarity, but in the precedent it sets for every movement they dislike.  Once the machinery of state repression is normalised against pro-Palestine demonstrators, it can be, and will be turned against climate activists, trade unionists, women marching for reproductive rights, trans campaigners, gay marriage or anyone who dares to challenge power.  What is being built is not a narrow response to one cause, but a permanent architecture of silencing: an attack on dissent itself and the crushing of hard fought for human rights by a Government that is out of control.

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