Early in World War 2, a young Irish Republican, Brendan Behan, was arrested in a Liverpool guesthouse, with explosives, and plans to blow up Her Majesty’s Shipyards, something which still carried the death penalty. After being convicted, he was sentenced to 3 years in an open borstal, and deported to Ireland 18 months later.
The British certainly never pursued their war against Ireland with anything other than the utmost viciousness, but prior to the 1970s, it was normal for IRA prisoners to be released following the declaration of a ceasefire or cessation of hostilities, and even those serving life sentences were released after the IRA campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s came to an end. Prior to 1976, Republican prisoners were also effectively treated as Prisoners of War, with ‘Special Category’ status. Even in the 1990s, IRA prisoners were given short terms of parole, home leave for Christmas, and eventually they were all released under the Good Friday Agreement, even those serving multiple life sentences.
Throughout the height of the conflict, with thousands of bombs being detonated, mass-internment, and the shooting of unarmed civilians by British forces, while the Provisional IRA was listed as a ‘terrorist organisation’ in Britain, it maintained a political wing (Sinn Fein), as did all the armed groups in the conflict, and though intensely disliked by the British government, they remained entirely legal. They were free to publish and distribute newspapers, and hold public meetings and rallies, and the police cells weren’t full of people arrested for holding signs saying, “I oppose British occupation. I support the Provos.”
The late 1960s also saw the appearance of home-grown armed struggle in Britain, with both the 1st of May Group, and the better-known Angry Brigade, carrying out hundreds of actions, from the machine-gunning of the US Embassy and Wandsworth Prison, and the bombing of banks and army recruitment offices, to attempts to assassinate members of Edward Heath’s government. In 1970, Ian Purdie was sentenced to 9 months in prison for throwing a petrol bomb at the Ulster Office during an Irish Civil Rights march in London. Subsequently, several members of the group, one of whom conducted his own defence throughout, were sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, while others were acquitted.
Purdie’s 1970 arrest reflects the militancy of past street protests and demonstrations. Speaking at an event to commemorate the 1977 Battle of Lewisham, in which antifascists and local people eventually prevented the National Front marching, a member of the Socialist Workers Party told how, on the eve of the demonstration, his local organiser instructed him to start making petrol bombs. The antifascist battles of Lewisham and Cable Street, are still widely referenced today by Left-wing organisations, without appreciating the level of sheer violence stopping the fascists necessitated. Today, the SWP, under the banner ‘Stand Up To Racism’, would be collaborating with the police, telling demonstrators to ‘ignore’ the fascists, and grassing people up to the cops. In 2026, the Blackshirts and the National Front, protected by the police, as they were then, would be allowed to march, with a token SUTR protest, probably held elsewhere. The Poll Tax Riot would not have happened, nor would the militant anti-Vietnam war protests, epitomised by the pitched battle at Grosvenor Square in 1968.
It is not the police, or new laws, that have tamed protest over the past 2 or 3 decades, it is the role of the liberal Left, more Yellow than Red. The police may be better equipped today, but they have always been vicious, using their clubs far more frequently in the days before they were issued PAVA spray, splitting skulls on countless occasions, and even killing demonstrators, such as Kevin Gately and Blair Peach, (at antifascist demos in 1974 and 1979 respectively). The role of stewards in the past was to protect marchers, today it is to act on behalf of the police, protect any fascists or Zionists along the route, challenge any militant behaviour, and ultimately to grass people up to the cops. The first response of TUC stewards to attempts by a lone female, black member of the Revolutionary Communist Group to speak against the Labour Party, after the 2026 Leeds May Day march was to physically manhandle her, and then call for the police to intervene.
While opposition to the Vietnam War was extremely militant, both in Europe and the USA, resistance to the ongoing Genocide in Gaza, and Zionist expansionism has, for the most part, been restricted to marches. While they may be a show of solidarity, and a meeting point for kindred spirits, after 2 ½ years, they can now be seen to be entirely ineffectual in terms of government policy, and are increasingly coming under attack, due to Zionist influence.
Veterans of street battles, riots, and militant demos, such as 1983’s ‘Stop The City’ have long been aware that it is not those who fight back hardest who are targeted by the cops for arrest. They will go for the easiest targets, which is one of the reasons the policing of Far Right demonstrators is completely different to the policing of the liberal Left. The weakness of our demonstrations, the compromises made with the cops, their total lack of militancy, their self-policing nature, is part of the reason they will increasingly be targeted for repression. Unfortunately, the tame nature of protest over at least the past 2 decades has left many younger comrades lacking the skills which were once regarded as essential to those going on demonstrations, and psychologically unable to cope with even relatively mild forms of police violence.
If protest is not effective, it is nothing more than street theatre, it is not worthwhile. The liberal Left have sought to use every tactic possible, except the one which is proven to work – Direct Action.
In opposition to the Genocide, direct action groups such as Palestine Action and People Against Genocide have been the tip of the spear. They are being targeted not because of their weakness, but because of the effectiveness of their tactics in taking on the Israeli weapons companies in Britain, and the subsidiary companies that support them. These bold, direct action tactics had companies like Elbit Systems squealing for help from the British State, and since the Israeli lobby have bought so much influence in government, not least with cold hard cash, that help has not been slow in coming.
Palestine Action has been targeted with an unprecedented ruthlessness, with former Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, lying to Parliament, to push through proscription of a network which has never had any connection to terrorism. Not that there was a great deal of opposition from the cowardly and corrupt members parked on the green benches, nor those on the red ones either. Palestine Action have been attacked not only because they are effective, but also because they challenge the Israeli narrative. Never before, in British legal history, has a protest group been targeted and traduced in this way, not even those who opposed the British occupation of Ireland, or those who supported the Animal Liberation Front, for example, a group responsible for a huge amount of property destruction, some of it by the use of incendiary devices.
Since then, thousands of peaceful protestors have been arrested simply for carrying cardboard signs, while others have been targeted merely for having Palestine flags, or for any number of indications of opposition to Israeli Genocide. Activists linked to Palestine Action, or other anti-Genocide groups, have been arrested in the most Draconian manner, held and questioned using counter-terrorist powers, interned on remand in prison for long periods, and subject to a level of abuse that did not waver, even when some of the prisoners were months into a hunger-strike. The British State are absolutely intent on smashing pro-Palestine groups who employ direct action, and fitting-up those they arrest, with the aid of dishonest legal practice, corrupt judges, jury manipulation, and the intimidation of Defence council, being part and parcel of that.
In the 1970s, commenting on the British policy of internment in the north of Ireland, Brigadier Sir Frank Kitson, in his seminal anti-insurrection guide, Low Intensity Operations, said: “The law should be used as just another weapon in the government’s arsenal, and in this case it becomes little more than a propaganda cover for the disposal of unwanted members of the public.”
There is a reason we say, ‘All Coppers Are Bastards’ – they ARE! The arrest of thousands of pro-Palestine Action protestors has shown that the cops, just like the Nazis, and just like their police forbears in the German-occupied Channel Islands of World War 2, will do whatever they are told, irrespective of the law, and irrespective of morality. The police are not the sons of the workers, they are the attack-dogs of the Ruling Class (and in this case of the Israeli State).
After being fitted up by Injustice Johnson, brought in as a hit-man by the British State for that specific purpose, just as he was in relation to Hillsborough, Grenfell, and the use of torture by British forces in Iraq, the 4 convicted members of the first 6 of the Filton 24, who stormed an Elbit Systems facility in Bristol in 2024, are likely to be sentenced as ‘terrorists’. They were not tried under terrorism legislation, and were never accused of being terrorists, but unbeknown to the jury, who convicted them of criminal damage, their sentences could be extended, and their treatment, both in prison and post-release, dramatically worsened.
It is inevitable that the corrupt and cowardly politicians in Whitehall have underestimated the strength and courage of those whose very humanity prevents them from siding with monsters like Netanyahu, who cannot ignore the suffering of the innocent civilians of Gaza, let alone profit from it, and who are willing to sacrifice everything to oppose the Genocide of the Palestinian people. The repression against our movement, paid for with blood money from the Zionist state, is something which will be forcefully challenged and resisted. Just as other freedom fighters have resisted the British State in the past, so will our prisoners carry the intifada into jail with them, and fight back against the rotten system that holds them there. Direct Action is a tactic, not an organisation or network, it cannot be outlawed, it is available to every human-being with a beating heart and a burning sense of injustice. The stooges of the genocidal Israeli state, currently squatting in Parliament, and in the corridors of power, should continue to expect resistance, and one day it will be THEM being held to account.