The High Court has delivered a terminal blow to the British state’s attempt to criminalise the moral conscience of a generation. Today’s Court ruling, declaring the proscription of Palestine Action illegal, is a vindication of the movement for a Free Palestine and a humiliating defeat for successive UK governments that prioritised arms industry profits and an alliance with the apartheid state of Israel over the lives of Palestinian people. The attempt to use terror legislation to shield British, US, and Israeli corporations complicit in genocide has been exposed as a desperate and illegal overreach. Keir Starmer’s government has proven itself to be the heir to Tory authoritarianism.
Yvette Cooper and her successor as Labour Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, followed in the reactionary footsteps of their Tory predecessors, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, who introduced the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and Public Order Act 2023 and sought to demonise pro-Palestinian protestors. Starmer’s deeply authoritarian project stands exposed as a continuation of the Tory policy to stifle protest and dissent. From draconian bans on marches to the chilling proposal to abolish trial by jury, Starmer’s administration is systematically dismantling legal protections won by generations of class struggle.
By removing jury trials, the state seeks to insulate itself from the judgment of the people and create a legal vacuum where only the government’s version of truth is permitted. The brutality of Starmer’s regime is written in the arrests of the elderly and the disabled. We have seen the state’s “justice” in the seizing of those who hold signs stating: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”.
This is the policing of the frail to protect the powerful. The Communist Party demands that all charges against these individuals be dropped immediately. Their offence was a refusal to be silent in the face of slaughter. Yvette Cooper, now Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, has proven herself entirely unfit for office. A politician who has championed the suppression of domestic dissent cannot be trusted to influence foreign affairs while the world watches a genocide. Her position is untenable. Yvette Cooper must resign. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who expressed her “disappointment” at the Court’s ruling that the Palestine Action proscription is illegal, has announced the government will appeal the decision. She should reflect and accept the Court ruling with immediate effect, and confirm the total repeal of the illegal proscription order now. The government cannot be permitted to operate outside the law while claiming to uphold it.
The recent acquittal of six of the ‘Filton 24’ defendants and the continuing legal harassment of Irish band Kneecap, along with today’s High Court ruling, prove that organised working-class resistance is the only true check on unaccountable state power.
The Communist Party stands with all those who put their bodies in the way of the war machine.
For Peace and Socialism. Free Palestine!
Executive Committee
Communist Party of Britain
Friday 13th February 2026
London
END.