Whom do we really need protecting from?

You can tell a lot about a society’s priorities by what it tries to protect itself from.

I say ‘a society’s priorities’; really I should say ‘a government’s priorities’. They are not the same thing, and on occasion the differences between them yawn very wide indeed.

Since the direct action group Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in July of this year, hundreds of people have taken part in actions where they expected that, as a result of demonstrating support for the group (usually by holding up signs), they would be arrested under the Terrorism Act. And indeed, many hundreds of them have been.

The demonstrations have not been uniformly peaceful, and yet the general commitment of the organisers and participants to non-violent action is notable. Photos and videos of softly-spoken professionals and retirees, as well as younger people, being hauled away by small gaggles of police officers, their bodies hanging limp and unresisting between their uniformed captors, do offer striking dramatisations of what, the protestors would say, is a topsy-turvy approach to public safety and the humane course of law. 

Defend Our Juries and other organisations committed to such action are, in part, being tactically savvy by refraining from violence. Your cause is much more likely to attract support from a broad public base if it is seen to be generally peaceful, however risky an endeavour it still is to take part - potentially, a sentence of up to fourteen years in prison awaits those who are convicted under the Terrorism Act.

Moreover, it draws explicit attention to the fact that both opponents of the organisation’s proscription and those who discuss its merits in public, are taking part in an action that, on its face, harms nobody. No violence is done; no life is endangered; no risk to health and safety is created (as acknowledged in the High Court decision not to grant an interim injunction blocking the proscription). One does not have to express support for Palestine Action to feel the force of their argument. 

There are legal proceedings ongoing at time of writing, concerning both the decision to proscribe Palestine Action in the first place and also what the previous Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, described as “serious prosecutions” involving the organisation and its members, all of which would apparently make its “full nature” apparent to those now defending it.

If it could be shown that Palestine Action was, in fact, a dangerous hate-group, it would certainly change the tenor of the public discussion: that, one might well feel, was an organisation which we should feel uncomfortable supporting; which far fewer people would be willing to face arrest by defending; and from which we might even, conceivably, need protecting.

On the subject of protection: on 13 September 2025, it is estimated that up to 150,000 people gathered in central London to express their support for the English Defence League founder and far right political agitator Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson.

The people attending to rally behind Yaxley-Lennon and his purported cause of ‘freedom of speech’ and the ‘safety of women and girls’ might not all have planned to get involved in violent clashes with the police – but a significant number of them did. Which was not a surprise, in context. 

As at plenty of previous gathering whose explicit pitch is to the intersecting communities of football hooligans, anti-migrant crusaders and would-be revolutionaries against what Yaxley-Lennon called “this rape jihad against our daughters”, all generously lathered up with alcohol, the potential for violence is very much baked in.

The ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, in which marchers with tiki torches chanted Nazi-inflected slogans like “Blood and Soil” and “Jews will not replace us”, and an antifascist counter-protestor named Heather Heyer was murdered by a white-supremacist who drove a car into her at high speed, might not be a readily available memory for English police officers. But when you call your event ‘Unite the Kingdom’, and the rhetoric surrounding and permeating it is soaked in the same images of invasion, ‘replacement’ and retribution, you are certainly speaking a language that those with violence in mind will hear.

When Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and owner of X, took to screens to tell the crowd in Trafalgar Square that violence was coming and their options were “you either fight back or you die”, it demonstrated the same point. Violence is a feature, not a bug, at such events. 

Violence saturates the words and statements of figures like Musk, Yaxley-Lennon and many others, including parliamentarians. All traffic in the same vision of a coming apocalypse in which there will be, in Reform UK MP Nigel Farage’s words, “civil disobedience on a vast scale” in response to the perceived ‘invasion’ of asylum seekers, Muslims and other undesirables.

He says ‘civil disobedience’; really he should say ‘racist violence’. The kind of thing from which we all, unquestionably, need protecting.