“The use of anti-terrorism legislation to criminalise peaceful protestors and non-violent direct action against genocide is taking Britain further down a dangerous rabbit-hole”, Robert Griffiths told the Communist Party’s Political Committee on Tuesday evening (15 July 2025).
“Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and Prime Minister Keir Starmer are like a pair of Humpty Dumpties declaring that the word ‘terrorism’ means just whatever they choose it to mean”, he said in a reference to Lewis Carroll’s nonsense tale ‘Through the Looking Glass’.
The Communist Party General secretary was responding to the arrest and detention of 72 people in London, Cardiff, Manchester and Leeds last weekend for opposing the banning of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.
“Spraying paint on a fighter aircraft used to assist Israeli mass murder in Gaza is not an act of terrorism by any reasonable definition of the word”. Mr Griffiths insisted, “nor does peacefully sitting or marching in solidarity with Palestine Action and the Palestinian people turn someone into a supporter of terrorism”.
He declared it an “outrageous breach of our hard-won democratic freedoms” that protestors, some in their 80s, had then been held in the cells for up to 36 hours after being arrested by large numbers of police officers.
“Over recent decades, the British state has been making deep inroads into the rights of citizens to protest peacefully, march, go on strike and speak out against injustice and oppression at home and abroad – but never with such enthusiasm as we see from the Starmerites in charge of the Labour Party and its supine MPs”, the Party leader charged.
Mr Griffiths also accused government ministers of being more concerned about the BBC livestreaming chants from the Festival than about the ongoing atrocities in Occupied Palestine.
The Political Committee expressed its solidarity with Ben Jamal of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Stop the War’s Chris Nineham, who go on trial in February 2026 for alleged public order offences relating to the mass demonstration in London for Palestine on 19 January 2025.
Britain’s Communists also joined 22 trade union leaders in condemning new charges against trade union activist Alex Kenny and CND general secretary Sophie Bolt for their participation in that day’s protest.
“British government ministers should be in the dock instead, accused of collaborating in genocide and authorising police attempts to sabotage peaceful marches in solidarity with its victims”, Robert Griffiths proposed.
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