Aletho News

Palestine Action Proscription: We Fight Back

By Craig Murray | July 1, 2026

I publish below in full the Note we have submitted to Court today to re-establish the separate Scottish judicial review of the proscription of Palestine Action. Not only is the state doubling down on prosecution of pro-Palestine activists, a new National Security State Threats Bill is being fast tracked through parliament to extend the attack on free speech.

Under this bill receiving a benefit including “information” from a state entity designated as “hostile” by the Home Secretary will be a crime bringing up to 14 years in prison. So publishing casualty figures from Iranian sources, for example, will be terrorism. Publishing information about Ukrainian attacks on Russia will be illegal.

This is the relevant clause of the Bill. My emphasis:

17C Obtaining etc material benefits from a designated body
(1) A person commits an offence if—
(a) the person—
(i) obtains, accepts or retains a material benefit which is not an excluded benefit, or
(ii) obtains or accepts the provision of such a benefit to another person,
(b) the benefit is or was provided by or on behalf of a designated body, and
(c) the person knows, or having regard to other matters known to them ought reasonably to know, that the benefit is or was provided by or on behalf of a designated body.
(2) A person commits an offence if—
(a) the person agrees to accept—
(i) a material benefit which is not an excluded benefit, or
(ii) the provision of such a benefit to another person,
(b) the benefit is to be provided by or on behalf of a designated body, and
(c) the person knows, or having regard to other matters known to them ought reasonably to know, that the benefit is to be provided by or on behalf of a designated body.
(3) Material benefits may include financial benefits, anything which has the potential to result in a financial benefit, and information…

Please note there is specifically no public interest defence, no journalism defence and it is to be illegal to receive true information. It is not about the spread of disinformation, it is about the spread of information contrary to the British state narrative. Receiving information from a designated enemy of the UK is the offence, whether you publish it or not.

There in no modern precedent for this in peacetime. It is being forced through all its parliamentary stages – three readings, amendments and two Lords sittings – in a single day. I have repeatedly said that liberal democracy has collapsed. I do not need further proof.

Under the current legislation, yesterday prominent international lawyer Dan Kovalik was detained in Liverpool, his phone and laptop seized and he was questioned about his support for Palestine. Dan is a lawyer. He is entitled to lawyer/client confidentiality. His clients include the President of Colombia and other international figures. The UK is a rogue state.

The UK state is currently attempting to gaslight us with a concerted campaign of messaging about a few millions in aid to Gaza – much of which is concentrated on assisting ethnic cleansing by various medical and educational routes for people to leave Gaza. But with Labour Friends of Israel member Andy Burnham to take over as PM with former Chair of Labour Friends of Israel James Purnell as his Chief of Staff, support for the Genocide will continue unabated.

The absurd National Security (State Threats) Bill shows that attack on dissidents and free speech will continue at home too. The debanking by Lloyds of The Canary is another prong of the extraordinary destruction of civil liberty under New Labour.

So I am determined not to bow to the sisting of the Scottish judicial review and we have lodged a motion to “reclaim” or restart proceedings.

We have not yet reached the actual Scottish judicial review or had any chance to give the arguments we will use there. It is my intention that we will attack the proscription in the most fundamental way, making these points among others:

• There is an active obligation on states to do everything possible to stop a Genocide. By contrast, the UK has done everything in its power to facilitate Genocide, including protecting its supply chain.
• It is patently absurd to call a non violent direct action group a terrorist organisation
• The state should not be treated as neutral or infallible by the courts. The false narrative on Iraqi WMD, and the terrible deaths and destruction to which that narrative led, should be a warning the state can get it very wrong.
• As a former senior civil servant who was in the FCO during that period, I can testify to the pressures on civil servants and agencies to produce the evidence and policy recommendation that Ministers wish to hear
• The evidence base produced by JTAC to support the proscription recommendation was fundamentally untrue. The Filton jury proved that the Met Police and JTAC assertions of escalating violence, carrying weapons with intent to harm, did not happen as a matter of fact. The jury rejected the aggravated burglary and violent disorder.
• Only one Palestine Action activist has ever been convicted of an offence of violence, and there the jury specifically found no intent
• Lady Justice Carr in the Appeal Court judgement both relied on Sheriff McCormick’s sentencing remarks in the Thales case. But there were no convictions of violence in the Thales case. Sheriff McCormick misrepresented the evidence. Last week he the Sheriff Appeal Court in Scotland overturned his finding of anti-Israeli racism against Mick Napier of Scottish Palestine Solidarity Committee. The inaccurate and frothing remarks of one zionist Sheriff are not a basis for proscription.
• Lady Justice Carr ruled that the Home Secretary must be given “appropriate latitude” and a “wide margin of appreciation” in security cases. But the Home Secretary should not be idealised. They are a politician, and in this case a politician who is parti pris. Yvette Cooper is massively financed by the Zionist lobby. The courts should operate in the real world not in an idealised and unrealistic one.

Lady Carr’s judgement is entirely and directly predicated on the notion that in any conflict in law between the state and the citizen, special deference should always be given to the state as more noble and trustworthy. That reasoning is fundamentally flawed.

To get heard at all we have to roll back Lord Young’s extraordinary ruling that the English Court of Appeal judgement should be accepted as law in Scotland in the interests of “comity”. This overturns centuries of doctrine on the separate jurisdiction of Scotland going back to the Treaty of Union itself – though it does reflect what had in truth been the unchallenged though illegal practice of deference to England in such matters. … continue

July 1, 2026 - Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, UK, Zionism