Hundreds of elderly people have been arrested on terrorism charges. The government have proscribed Palestine Action as a terror organisation. Security services regard them as a violent threat to the country. They did forcibly break in to a defence facility and throw red paint on expensive military aircraft causing millions of pounds of criminal damage. If they have done anything else, the public are not being told about it. The purpose was to draw attention to the damage being inflicted on Gaza and the terror imposed on its population, including mass starvation and indiscriminate shootings at feeding sites. All supported by UK intelligence from surveillance flights, plus the supply of weapons and machinery.
The silent protests and simple placards are an objection to the suppression of free speech. These pensioners are not trying to terrorise anyone but are deeply disturbed by the contrast in they way Palestine Action have been treated compared to the Israeli regime.
Some say it was a deliberate ploy to waste police time and fill up previous prison space that would otherwise be used for nasty criminals but the police were not obliged to turn up in huge numbers and make so many arrests.
We will see how many of the charges result in a trial. It will be very interesting to find out what jurors make of it. I don’t imagine many grannies will be sent to jail.
Every day, we hear of new atrocities carried out in Gaza. The Israeli regime’s rationale for their continued actions seem increasingly irrational, as does the government’s position of hapless critical friend. Israel will only listen to America and there is no “off ramp” in sight.
I guess many of us remember Greenham Common where there was regular criminal damage on a ‘nuclear’ site, without it being classified as terror. My memory is that the participants included people who were, or became, prominent in the Labour Party.
I always liked Yvette Cooper but it is difficult to agree with her on this, unless she puts forward a more convincing case that Palestine Action are a violent terrorist organisation than has been offered so far.
YC keeps saying “Ongoing investigations and upcoming court cases reveal deep-rooted terrorist activity which cannot yet be made public and all these well-meaning Nans are being duped”. Guess only time will tell. All I know is I feel deeply uneasy seeing my aged Auntie Jenny on TV being carted off by the boys in yellow (true dis)…..
If what she says is true, I’m afraid it merely demonstrates that the government have no real clue about how best to handle whatever it is they believe to be going on. They should have proceeded by first getting to the bottom of the alleged ‘deep rooted terrorist activity’ and only then decided if they should proclaim the group to be very naughty people we can lock up. In the meantime all of those folk prepared to object as they did, at great personal risk of severe inconvenience, would probably have done nothing worse than block a few roads and hold up some traffic.
Meantime, of course, the arms sales trickle on…
This is what it’s actually about for Starmer, Reeves etc.
This current UK government are deeply committed to the arms trade. In particular to European missile maker MBDA which sells a key component of the GBU-39 bomb, made by Boeing, supplied to the IDF in quantity and used by them in Gaza.
MBDA is jointly owned by BAE Systems (UK), Airbus (France) and Leonardo (Italy) and the wings for the GBU-39 guided bomb are made in an MBDA factory in Alabama.
Income from sales is sent via MBDA’s Stevenage facility to it’s French headquarters for distribution to it’s three shareholder companies.
Starmer is very keen on Anglo-French defence cooperation, emphasizing in a press release last month that the UK would be “working closely with MBDA to identify the opportunities from our investments”.
Business secretary Jonathan Reynolds, in May, made a joint announcement with British MBDA board member Chris Allam celebrating the firm’s latest investment in it’s Bolton factory.
In March chancellor Rachel Reeves, defence secretary John Healey, Scottish secretary Ian Murray and Reynolds issued a joint statement on increased defence industry support, again endorsed by MBDA’s Allam, describing MBDA as the UK’s sovereign complex weapons provider.
I take it you’ve seen this too.
I do wonder if they’d held up placards saying Action for Palestine what would have happened, arrested then having to unarrest them, after all it just draws attention to the stupidity of the government’s action.
Apparently Peter Perrett of the Only Ones was among those arrested. Good for him.
He obviously felt the long arm of the whole of the law
It strikes me that when people protest on matters the establishment / government don’t wish to engage honestly about whether it’s over the appalling cruelty currently ongoing in Gaza or folk protesting over climate change the public is encouraged to focus upon the protesters rather than what they are protesting about. Funny that.
Well here in Germany, you can get beaten around the head and dragged away by police for even daring to attend a protest against the slaughter taking place in Gaza by our friends, the Israelis.
Yay, go Labour.
Is anyone really surprised? Maybe I’m having a bad day, but seems to me there’s the idealism of what we support, and the Machiavellianism and pragmaticism shown by those clutching onto power, these being the kinds of sharp-elbowed people you would not wish to associate with at school or university, but learned you had to endure as you rose up the career path.
Maybe I need to up my fluoxetine.
I’m wondering how being authoritarian on protesting pensioners wins votes.
It’s the triple lock-up!
They’re not thinking about the votes at the moment. They’re thinking about the arms trade and US tariffs.
They probably think that by the time of the next general election, this will all have blown over. I think that it’s not going to.
It’s the Sarah Everard protests all over again, isn’t it?
The deaf ear of power.
This is such an emotive topic, but when I stand back from it I think there are really two issues here.
The first is whether people should be free to protest in support of proscribed terror groups. Taking this on principle, I’m inclined to say that they should not be. If a far right group tries to burn down a migrant hotel and declares its goal to do more of the same I wouldn’t want to see public support for them (and that’s unfortunately an issue that we’re likely to see more of going forward), because it’s public support for criminal action.
Obviously, marching in support of the group doesn’t make you a de facto terrorist, but equally I don’t think people should get a pass on the law because they’re 60+ and cuddly looking. It’s just not how it works.
The second issue, which I think is the nub here, is whether Palestine Action should be a proscribed terror group, and on that question I have to say I really don’t know. The criminal damage already reported makes a partial argument for it, but it sounds like there’s more that we’re not allowed to know about. So ultimately it’s a question of whether you trust the government on that extra element, and obviously trust in our institutions is not exactly at record highs right now.
I guess there’s also a third element, which is whether the ban on Palestine Action has ultimately been a PR win for the group. On that front, it’s difficult to say: it will certainly have won them many new fans/supporters, but on the other hand – as with all such protest efforts – you never see quite how many have been silently repulsed.
I think ultimately it’s a time will tell scenario. We’ll find out in due course whether this group were as awful as alleged (I’m guessing they won’t be), and equally whether the people arguing for free speech and the right to assemble are equally willing to do so for the terrorist groups they don’t agree with (and again, I’m guessing they won’t be).
The above is the legal angle. The other question is whether this is bad politics. That’s one’s easy: yes, it’s bad politics.
Well, yes. When we find out in due course whether this group were as awful as alleged, if the answer is that they are not as bad as all that, then HMGov will look like thuggish plonkers, and if they are shown to be as bad as all that, the Yaxley-Lennon fraternity will gleefully crow and up their game. Either way, respect for our authorities and their ability to decree and uphold consensual law and order, will tank even further.
This is just a counsel of despair.
You have to put your faith in something and, on the whole, I’d trust the government unless and until there’s a reason to do otherwise.
You surely have to believe that there are enough sensible people in “the system” to not make irrational decisions.
The issue about these arrests has nothing to do with the appalling things that are happening in Gaza.
It is perfectly reasonable to believe that Israel is, in fact, committing genocide in Gaza and to object to the UK assisting in that mission in any way. Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, an Israeli American scholar who’s been described by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum as one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide, has said, “My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.” Why should the UK government be so alarmed that they subject Palestine Action to draconian laws that have predictably led to grannies being labelled as terrorists? If peaceful, otherwise law abiding, grannies are now termed terrorists, surely the definition of terrorist has gone too far.
Clearly, there is a lot we, the UK citizens, are not being told, including the extent to which our government is involved in assisting the horror that is taking place.
If they turn out to be as bad as they say then the government will have got this one right and we should all be willing to admit as much.
The alternative is the “politics as team sports” tendency that has got the Americans in the god awful state they’re in.
In light of how sure our government were that Saddam Hussein had WMD, if Palestine Action really are as bad as the govt. say, they will need to prove it and only then will I support them in proscribing PA.
A judicial review on the proscription has been granted and evidence will have to be presented to it. I wonder if any evidence would come to light if there wasn’t a review in the pipeline.
There seems no limit to this government’s milky simpering to Israel’s deranged leadership and its interests. Classifying PA alongside Hamas, Hezbollah, the Provisional IRA, any number of Jihadist mentalists and so on is utterly ludicrous and catastrophically poor optics for anyone who wants to believe our Government actually will, one day, do its bit and exert the full extent of its capabilities to end the genocide. Instead we’re left with mealy-mouthed weak statements of condemnation, and the banning of PA.
It also made me wonder why such disruptive groups such as XR, JSO etc at the height of their malarkey didn’t attract such opprobrium.
“If they turn out to be as bad as they say then the government will have got this one right and we should all be willing to admit as much.”
Will it still then have been bad politics?
Dunno. Depends on the detail, how and when the information emerges and how it’s received.
Yes, Foxy.
Bad politics because of the ham-fisted and autocratic way that it’s been done.
Very good analysis.
It’s precisely because the law is bad, stupid and ignores the main issue than nans (and others) are hitting the streets in such numbers. By all means throw the book at the plane-splatterers – there are plenty of existing laws for that – but the rest is a stupid waste of time and makes the government, not for the first time, look like it hasn’t got a clue. Meanwhile in Sydney…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clydnvw1dg5o
It’s baffling. Time was when Starmer would have defended these miscreant nans.
I’m not sure there was ever a time when Starmer would have defended someone being critical of Israel.
It is very baffling.
I have a lot of faith in Starmer but this time he has got it wrong.
@mikethep really hit the nail on the head.
By all means throw the book at the plane-splatterers – there are plenty of existing laws for that – but the rest is a stupid waste of time and makes the government, not for the first time, look like it hasn’t got a clue.
All over Europe, we are expressing sympathy for the Terror Nans, and losing respect for Keir and Co. Talk about a home goal,
What also worries me is the way the banning of Palestine Action was done. It was packaged in with two far-right groups and parliament then had no choice but to vote on the package as a whole. Why?
Here is part of a news report released on https://www.gov.uk/government/news/three-groups-to-be-proscribed
“Three dangerous, terrorist groups will be banned under plans announced by the Home Secretary today.
“A draft proscription order has been laid in Parliament which will proscribe Palestine Action (PA), as well as two further groups: the Maniacs Murder Cult (MMC) and the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM).
“This will make it a criminal offence to be a member of one of these groups or to invite or recklessly express support for them.
“Parliament will now consider and debate the draft Order and if passed, the Order will make it an offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison to belong to or support the groups.
“Proscription is ideologically neutral. By deciding to proscribe these three organisations, the government is demonstrating its zero tolerance approach to terrorism, regardless of its form or underlying ideology. National security is the government’s first priority and it will not shy away from this responsibility.”
Ideologically neutral? Mmmmm.
The Maniacs Murder Cult do sound a tad unpleasant.
Not as bad as the Russian Imperial Movement. 😉
I knew them when they were the Imperial Movement of Russia.
Splitters.
If they drink Imperial Russian Stout then at least they have good taste in ales.
Exactly. Any right-minded politician would vote to proscribe both the Maniacs Murder Cult and the Russian Imperial Movement. But by grouping PA with these two organisations in the vote, MPs had their hands tied. The three organisation are not alike. But the government manoeuvred it so that it was all or nothing. Duplicitous is the word, I think.
If I had a terrorist organisation I think I’d call it something like The Kittens and Orphans Christmas Association in order to avoid suspicion. Maniacs Murder Cult is a bit of a giveaway.
This should have been all the evidence we needed to realise the banning of PA was dodgy from the outset. Had it been a vote simply on PA instead of this wrapping in with monster munch and the crazy reds or whoever, the outcome would have been substantially different.
Peter Hain speaks a lot of sense on the issues of protest.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/aug/13/peter-hain-says-uk-government-digging-itself-into-hole-over-palestine-action
Thanks for the article. It says: ‘Yvette Cooper told the BBC that Palestine Action “is not a non-violent organisation” and claimed that court restrictions meant people “don’t know the full nature of this organisation”.’
Three things spring to mind.
Even if Ms Cooper cannot go into details of various cases, she could at least tell us what charges have been laid against PA members. Has anyone been charged?
If anyone has been charged, this would suggest existing laws are enough to deal with whatever crime is alleged to have been committed.
And if charges have been laid, is Ms Cooper not assuming guilt before a fair trial?
You may take all this with a pinch of salt – but it might be that the Govt’s longstanding links with Elbit Systems – which were targeted by PA in their attack – and the subsequent proscribing of PA might not be entirely unrelated.
https://www.declassifieduk.org/labour-held-secret-meeting-with-top-israeli-arms-firm/
There is a conveyancing solicitors in Leamington called Wright Hassall.
I can tell you that dealing with them was exactly that.
Palestine Action are an obnoxious shower, not because they object to Israel’s actions in Gaza but because they have inflicted violent and destructive actions on several businesses in the UK including, allegedly, a number of Jewish led businesses who are not arms suppliers to Israel. Whatever the rights and wrongs of that, however, I don’t understand why it can’t be dealt with as criminal activity, and why it is necessary to proscribe them as a terrorist organisation. That proscription seems to me to set too low a bar in defining ‘terrorism’. If they have undertaken or activity planned actions which would meet most people’s definition of terrorism then the government need to find a way to explain that to us.
But I think some of the conspiracy theories around this are wide of the mark. I don’t see any evidence that Cooper, Starmer et al are in hock to the arms trade or to Israel and have taken this action for that reason. But I do think that in wanting to look tough against violent activists they have made a significant misjudgement and got themselves in a tight political hole, unless, as Bingo suggests in his excellent posts, there is hard evidence we don’t know about.
Good points. I too think this is (another) political misjudgement and that if there is hard evidence then we should be told about it sooner rather than later. It looks, though, that there may not be such evidence. According to The Guardian: “References to violence by Downing Street and Cooper are understood to refer to an allegation of assault against a single person associated with Palestine Action, which they deny and which relates to live proceedings so cannot be discussed fully because of the risk of contempt of court.”
It is a complex issue, because both sides of this conflict are utterly revolting and have performed atrocities beyond comprehension. The withholding of aid and subsequent starvation of a population is an act of genocide. The murder of hundreds of civilians, including woman (often sexually mutilated) and children was orchestrated mass murder, condoned and supported by the population of Palestine.
Here in Australia, pro-Palestine groups were rallying in the streets in anti-semitic joy as the latter event unfolded. I’m sure it was the same in the UK, and I’m sure they are basically the same groups protesting now.
Sometimes there are no goodies.
Two thoughts:
Are you sure that the majority of Palestinian citizens condoned and supported Oct 7th?
Whilst there were marches and rallies in the UK, they were calling for a ceasefire and nationhood for Palestine rather than clelebrating the attacks. That is the case today too.
There were a lot of people in Gaza out on the streets overcome with joyous celebration, trying to hit with planks of wood and spit on that poor dead girls naked and contorted torso as it was being driven through the streets, so I would say yes. Although obviously not all.
Yes, the majority of the population? I’d say it is hard to judge what proportion of the population was doing that, without physically being there.
Fair point
At the time I was appalled by the Palestinians gleeful celebration of the October 7th attacks. On reflection, I think it was a mistake to consider those barbaric thugs (100 of them? 200?) as representative of the Palestinian populace. I can’t say with any certainty, but that’s not the impression I get from having read and watched a lot more about the Palestinians since then.
That was absolutely not the case in Australia and I suspect it was also not the case in the UK. It was unbridled and gleeful antisemitic hatred.
And I call bullshit on Hamas not representing the wishes of Palestinians. There has been a lot of back-pedalling and distancing since. Check out media reports from the time such as this: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/poll-shows-palestinians-back-oct-7-attack-israel-support-hamas-rises-2023-12-14/
Edited to add that I actually support Palestinian statehood.
While you are not wrong that Hamas are an unpleasant bunch, I do think it is more than a little specious to list their crimes as “the murder of hundreds of civilians” and then Israel’s as “withholding of aid”, rather than, say, “the deliberate murder of many tens of thousands of civilians”.
I am by no means taking Israel’s side in this. As I said, both sides are revolting.
Netanyahu and Hamas are phychos without any conscience. Otherwise how could they sleep?
I’ve been watching a guy on YouTube (who is apparently famous on TikTok, where he has a billion followers), called Hamzah Saadah. He’s a young guy who calls himself a Palestinian though he lives and I think was born in America. But he claims Palestinian heritage and that the only reason he doesn’t live in the land of his forefathers is because of Israel’s occupation. I don’t know why he’s so famous – I find him very irritatingly infantile. (I think he’s not interested in discussion, only in a debate where he can score points against his “opponents” by belittling them on a personal level.) I watch his videos in order to get an idea of the average Israeli’s perspective. He mostly talks to Israeli schoolchildren, sometimes adults, sometimes IDF soldiers. They all see the existence of Palestine as a threat to their way of life (and claim ownership of the land due to some religious nonsense) and understandably so, given that Hamas were voted to government with a charter proclaiming the death of all Jews. But Israel is so steeped in blood and destruction now that very few outside of Israel still see it as the good guy.
You watch this guy to understand an Israeli perspective? An American on TikTok who claims to be Palestinian?
Yes. He uses a site I’d never heard of, called OmeTV, to chat to random people. The format seems to be that he can choose to interact with a specific nationality (he obvs chose Israeli) and he can chat to a succession of people or skip past them. This format gives him a much wider range of interviewees (age and background) than a simple interview video does.
To give you a random example:
I’m not sure I see the current increase in what is already widespread antisemitism of middle eastern arab and arab-descended people as completely irrrelevant to the events that have unfolded in Gaza and the occupied palestinian territories. The October 7th event was preceded by what can only be described as a 70-odd year unwanted occupation and forced removal of thousand upon thousand people, from a place they considered as their home. They have unsurprisingly resented it bitterly ever since.
It’s worth considering that when the Balfour Declaration was signed by the UK government in 1917, the percentage of Jewish people living in what was then the Palestine Protectorate was roughly 7%. By the late 1920s this figure had increased to over 25% and tension between the arab and jewish settler populations was getting unpleasant. By the time WWII ended the jewish population was just short of 50% and there was outright hostility between the incoming settlers and the people they were displacing. The myth propagated by Israel is that the land was barren and hardly populated or unpopulated. This is very much untrue.
Zionism as an ideology has always regarded jews as the rightful inhabitants of the area and that anyone else’s claim to being there as being irrelevant, based solely on the zionist belief that as their religion and the core of it’s practices originated from that area, it belongs to them and to nobody else. “From the river to the sea”. Not all jews are Zionists by any means and many are completely opposed to zionism. But the opposition of anti-zionist jews has not usually been very active and certainly not at all effective. Meanwhile the actions of the zionist state of Israel tend to exacerbate antisemitist sentiment in the area, as antisemitist sentiment grows, because people there tend not to see any difference between zionist jews and anti-zionist jews that affects them and their experience.
The utterly bogus, in some important respects, official definition of what constitutes antisemitism is very unhelpful, as it provides zionist extremists with a shield from genuine criticism of their actions.
Anti-semitism is a hatred of, and in many cases a desire to completely exterminate, the Jewish people.
It isn’t explained by, excused by or made more understandable as a result of the actions of the Israeli government. In much the same way that Islamic terrorism doesn’t excuse a hatred of Muslims.
It is absolutely wild that this continues to need to be pointed out, over and over again. We wouldn’t tolerate this line of argument for any other ethnic minority.
I’m curious about the phrase ‘the Jewish people’.
I can’t recall seeing anywhere an equivalent phrase like ‘the Christian people’, ‘the Hindu people’, ‘the Jain people’ or ‘the Muslim people’ being used. I’m not sure in what sense any of these phrases can be said to represent ‘an ethnic minority’ either.
Feel free to use whatever alternative term you like, I’m not fussed.
Quite right. Anti semitism is an entirely different thing to criticism of the Israeli state. Unfortunately there are many Israeli politicians from top down claiming that any criticism of their actions in Gaza or West Bank, is anti-semitic
Sure, and those politicians are both incorrect and morally bankrupt.
But that’s not what’s happening in the post above. What’s happening in the above post is the complete opposite (using antisemitism to excuse Israel vs using Israel to excuse antisemitism), and there is more and more of this stuff going around.
My suggestion is that we call out both errors as and when they occur, each without recourse to the other. Otherwise we risk getting stuck on the roundabout.
This is from the current edition of The New Yorker and addresses this very issue, the distortion of AS’s definition to serve political ends, though the prism of repression at Columbia University
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-troubling-lines-that-columbia-is-drawing?mbid=social_bluesky
*tap tap*
Is this thing on?
Agreed, Bingo.
❤️❤️❤️
Yvette Cooper offers more detail in The Observer.
https://observer.co.uk/news/opinion-and-ideas/article/palestine-actions-violent-criminality-is-not-lawful-protest
I don’t think anyone disputes that Palestine Action has broken the law. Cooper is going to have to reveal yet more, I suspect.
One of the crimes PA committed was graffiti on Donald Trump’s golf course in Scotland. He expected them to be treated harshly and, of course, the UK government has to keep him sweet. His thoughts on terror nans isn’t known.
Too old for him, most likely.
Their granddaughters, OTOH ..
Criminal damage as direct action protest is of course unlawful. I’m sure that those involved in it know that. By all means prosecute them under the law of criminal damage. Most of the perpetrators will have been expecting that and even looking forward to their day in court.
The interesting word Yvette Cooper and the government in general continues to use in the context of proscription is “violent”. This is what she needs to provide some evidence for.
And even then, are they saying that all violence during a protest is now to be regarded as terrorism? Is there a threshold between getting into a bit of a scuffle and attacking someone with intent to cause injury?
There are differences in law already between common assault, GBH with intent and assault with weapons.
I discussed this with a couple of friends who love a good protest. They’re the kind of middle class, middle aged activists who wore masks on their peaceful Kill The Bill protests because the Police will use your image to convict you of rioting, apparently.
Anyway. We agreed that we’re all horrified about what’s happening in Gaza and the inability of the world’s Governments to stop it. We agreed that breaking into military establishments is generally a bad thing, and there really should be laws about that, but disagreed on whether the law should apply only to groups we don’t like. This is where things started to get complicated.
I was told that it was never £7m of damage – the Government invented that, and if it turns out there’s evidence that PA do have plans for what could be classed terrorist activity, that evidence will have been invented too. I found this argument hard to refute, not because it is irrefutable – just because there are no facts to prove this either way.
So then we got onto whether protesting about the two things at once was a distraction from the more obviously righteous cause. I wondered if they could separate the two, maybe protest each on alternate days. They kind of said it saved time to do both the really obvious need for an end to the slaughter, and the legally-fuzzy issue of terrorist activity carried out for good rather than evil. At which point Nelson Mandela got mentioned, then Gerry Adams, then Hamas, and then it was implied that being prepared to wait and follow legal process on PA, rather than getting yourself arrest supporting it, meant you were tolerant of Israel’s action in Gaza.
That was too daft to debate, so I got up to get everyone another drink, and when I got back we talked about something else.
The £7m evaluation sounds to me well within the bounds of believability.
It wouldn’t necessarily represent the cost of stuff that was broken and had to be binned, but the cost of dismantling and checking things that might have been rendered unserviceable. Taking a jet turbine to bits to get at the innards and then putting it back together again is a very long, complex and expensive process.
Made even more expensive by the fact that the aircraft in question is probably leased rather than owned by the RAF.
Paul Weller is suing his accountants after they dropped him saying
“It’s well known what your political views are in relation to Israel, the Palestinians and Gaza, but we as a firm are offended at the assertions that Israel is committing any type of genocide. Everyone is entitled to their own views, but you are alleging such anti-Israel views that we as a firm with Jewish roots and many Jewish partners are not prepared to work with someone who holds these views.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/paul-weller-israel-gaza-accountants-b2810846.html
Not sure he’ll get anywhere suing them, unless they’ve misappropriated or wasted his money. Or possibly outright called him an antisemite.
Just naming and shaming them would do. Though maybe then they’d sue him. Depending on the language he used.
If I were him I’d just send them a copy of the New Yorker article linked above and tell them good-riddance.
One has to wonder how the many Jews outside Israel (and some inside) who strongly oppose Netanyahu’s actions feel reading statements like the accountants’.
They rather do demonstrate some of the points raised in that article
This just in.
https://londonist.com/london/art-and-photography/new-banksy-artwork-appears-at-royal-courts-of-justice?fbclid=IwY2xjawMryc1leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHpHMrmVQ93P_sGhJMwyzKubf8ujc_dQNZT4VnozJKTTodkURIAPtZuX2k7cu_aem_omVo0ewISfAxGIPROa_AZw
and its already been covered up, to protect our sensibilities
This time, he has defaced a public building. He could be prosecuted for vandalism.
The photo is interesting. The lawyer walking past seems to be wearing a judge’s wig and the wigs are not worn outdoors.
Also the wig in the stencil is ceremonial and gavels are no longer used in courts.
Those details, however, do not detract from the message that the law is being used to batter protestors.
I think he’s clearly used artistic license in his depiction of the lawyer, given its an artwork intended to be seen and consumed and understood within seconds – the fundamental nature of street art. Accuracy sacrificed for immediacy!
And to your first point, this is something I was wondering too. I am working on a book at the moment, a chapter of which concerns Banksy and some time ago I informally mentioned the question to a lawyer, to understand the ramifications of Banksy defacing private property.
If I understood correctly, up to now, most people, upon finding a Banksy on their house or property, would be rather happy about it and indeed, attempt to exploit it, rather than see it as damage (A chap who owned a car park in central London once contacted Sotheby’s to ask if they could help him lift a new Banksy off a portion of his car park’s’ concrete wall and sell it. They said no). Further, the question also involves whether Banksy has impaired a building’s function by painting on it and whether his work degrades the value of the building (in most cases obviously not, if anything quite the opposite)
But yes, a public building is a different matter. While Banksy’s operation is incredibly well organised and protective of the mystery dauber, it would be how such a prosecution could be executed.
But yes, at the heart of it, is the core message – the snivelling, pathetic quasi authoritarianism of a government flailing to defend Israel at all costs.
I’m looking forward to reading the book already!
😀
thanks! me too, I have to finish writing it 🙂
Lots of other people have been painting on public and (other people’s) private property recently, mainly in red and white. We are told that these people are just being patriotic, so that’s all right then.