When Everything’s Terrorism, Nothing Is

I've written about this before, but yesterday's mass arrests justify another bite of the cake.

The next time you hear ministers puff out their chests about “keeping Britain safe” by banning Palestine Action, remember this: their definition of terrorism is a mirror, and they’re staring right back at themselves.

The Terrorism Act says it’s terrorism to use intimidation or serious disruption to influence government or the public. Well, what else is proscription if not the state intimidating its own citizens? People have already been arrested simply for holding a sign or displaying a slogan. That isn’t safeguarding democracy – that’s leaning on it, hard.

And here’s the rub: property damage was already illegal. Spray-painting a wall, smashing a window, even vandalising an RAF plane – all covered under existing law with penalties severe enough to frighten any ordinary soul. The government didn’t need new powers. What it needed was a bigger stick and a scarier label. So it reached for “terrorist.”

This is where the irony bites. Protest is always about pressure. Sometimes it persuades with words, sometimes it disrupts with strikes or sit-ins. That pressure is the safety valve of democracy: it forces governments to listen when polite petitions have failed. But now ministers have decided that when it’s the wrong sort of pressure – on the wrong subject, from the wrong people – it’s not protest anymore, it’s terror.

And let’s draw the line clearly, because some will rush to muddy it. Supporting ISIS is bad. Supporting al-Qaeda is bad. These are groups that kill civilians, enslave women, terrorise whole populations. They are the reason proscription laws exist in the first place. To equate them with Palestine Action – a group of activists targeting property, not people – is not just sloppy, it’s obscene.

By blurring that line, the government cheapens the whole idea of proscription. It makes the word “terrorism” elastic, stretched to cover civil disobedience. And once you’ve done that, you’ve lost the clarity that makes public protection possible. Because if everything from ISIS to a pensioner with a placard is “terrorism,” then the term stops meaning anything.

That’s the irony: in trying to look tough, Starmer’s government weakens the very moral distinction it claims to uphold. Today’s suffragette with a hammer is tomorrow’s heroine in a history book. And today’s overreaching government? History has a name for them too.