Is there a chance, do you think, that the new Home Secretary, the rather impressive Shabana Mahmood, might use her first days in the job to reverse one of the most egregious errors of her predecessor? I refer to Yvette Cooper’s idiotic proscription of Palestine Action. That genius idea of treating an activist political organisation as a terrorist outfit has had the entirely predictable effect this weekend of causing the police to make nearly 900 arrests at a march organised by its supporters. That’s an awful lot of police time – paid overtime – and police cells and taxpayer money gone to give activists a useful opportunity for grandstanding. Don’t the police have better things to do? Actually let’s forget the rhetorical question; the police do have better things to do.
If the protesters had committed criminal damage or acts of intimidation or incitement to violence, I’d be all for arresting them in the hope that the courts would deal with actual troublemakers. But the stupid thing about putting them on the same basis as, say, Islamic State, is that they don’t need to do any of these things to get arrested; simply holding up a placard saying I Heart Palestinian Action should do it.
