UK politics

21 photos from, and my report about the 42nd “First Wednesday” monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US and around the world on and around Wednesday July 1, 2026. In the text accompanying the article, I discuss the proximity of this month’s vigils to July 4, and, this year, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which was meant to bring to an end the 13 colonies’ subjection to the executive tyranny of the British government and King George III. As I explain, however, 250 years later, the continuing existence of Guantánamo makes a mockery of those claims, as it is, fundamentally, a place where the law has rarely applied, and where the 15 men still held — and all those held previously — owe their detention to the same exercise of executive tyranny that the Founding Fathers sought to overthrow in 1776, but this time around implemented by the US government under four successive presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

In the last of three articles (two here, and one on Substack), about the recent concerted assault on the direct action group Palestine Action in the UK courts, I follow up on my first article, about the sentencing of the Filton 4 last Friday, with a detailed analysis of how the judge, Mr. Justice Johnson, was able to sentence the four activists for terrorism, when they weren’t convicted of terrorism by the jury in their retrial. As with the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization, which was upheld by the Court of Appeal on Monday, and which drew extensively on the shameful redefining of terrorism to include “serious damage to property” in the Terrorism Act 2000, Mr. Justice Johnson’s legal subterfuge also involved focusing on deeply contentious legislation; in this case, Priti Patel’s Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Act 2021. Prior to the passage of the 2021 Act, judges were empowered, after a conviction by a jury, to deliver an aggravated sentence if the crimes for which defendants were convicted were determined to have a terrorist connection. That specifically meant crimes that included murder, a number of explosives offences, hijacking, hostage-taking and serious aviation offences, but in the 2021 Act Priti Patel arranged for it to be expanded to include any offence that carries a maximum penalty of more than two years’ imprisonment, and this was what was used by Mr. Justice Johnson, the biased judge in the case of the Filton 4, to augment their sentences after they were only convicted of criminal damage. The big question now, for anyone concerned with justice in the UK, is how we get Priti Patel’s absurd expansion of judicial powers involving augmented sentencing removed before another group of people who are not terrorists, and haven’t been convicted of terrorism, meet the same twisted judicial fate.

My analysis of yesterday’s dispiriting but ultimately predictable ruling by the Court of Appeal in London, reinstating the government’s proscription, as a terrorist organization, of the stunningly successful direct action group Palestine Action, which has been extraordinarily tenacious in its efforts to destroy or disable genocidal weapons produced in the UK by Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest arms company. The proscription was ruled unlawful by the High Court, in February, in a judicial review, initiated by Huda Ammori, one of Palestine Action’s two co-founders, on two counts — one involving legally technical issues relating to home secretary Yvette Cooper’s powers to proscribe, and the other relating to issues of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly under the European Convention on Human Rights. The Court stuck down both, in what was a very “pro-establishment” ruling, full of deference for the home secretary, and for the “expertise” of the intelligence services and the police, and insistent in its portrayal of Palestine Action as a shadowy, covert terrorist organization, operating via secretive “cells.” The biggest problem with the proscription, however, lies not with the courts, but with the Labour government of Tony Blair, which, in the Terrorism Act 2000, defined one aspect of terrorism as involving “serious damage to property.” As a group of UN Special Rapporteurs explained last July, when Palestine Action was proscribed, “While there is no binding definition of terrorism in international law, best practice international standards limit terrorism to criminal acts intended to cause death, serious personal injury or hostage taking”, not mere “damage to property.” As lawyers start working on an appeal, I hope that there will be increased scrutiny of the overreach of the Terrorism Act 2000, to redress a situation whereby those who, like the Palestine Action activists, are inspired by their consciences to cause damage to weapons for use in a genocide, are regarded as terrorists. If these activists are to be tried, they should be tried solely for criminal damage, and they should also be allowed to be acquitted by jurors on the basis of their own consciences, a long tradition that, in these fevered authoritarian times, when the establishment is doing all it can to protect Israel and to continue enabling its genocide, the judicial system has also sought to suppress.

Photos from, and my report about the 41st monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US and around the world on and around June 3, 2026. In the text accompanying the article, I discuss the importance of remembering Guantánamo (which is so largely forgotten) via my interpretation of a well-known quote — “In a time of universal deceit, even the act of remembering is a revolutionary act.” I also discuss how the original quote — “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act” — is more significant than at any other time in most of our lifetimes, with a US president who dismisses the truth as “fake news”, and with western governments and mainstream media outlets insisting that a genocide is “self-defense” and that those undertaking it are the “children of light” fighting the “children of darkness.”

Marking the 41st anniversary, today, of the Battle of the Beanfield, when the British state undertook the most savage assault on unarmed civilians in modern British history. On June 1, 1985, riot police from six counties cornered a vastly-outnumbered convoy of vehicles seeking to make their way to establish what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival, in fields around the ancient sun temple on Salisbury Plain, and “decommissioned” them with extreme violence, brutally assaulting the men and women of the convoy, terrorizing their children, destroying their live-in vehicles, and making 537 arrests in total. As part of the necessary act of remembering acts of state violence that those responsible would prefer to keep hidden, I wrote a book about the Beanfield, published in 2005, which is still in print, and which followed on from an earlier book, ’Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion’, a social history of Stonehenge, in which the Beanfield featured prominently, and which is also still in print. Marking today’s anniversary, I revisit the history of the free festival and traveller movements that led up to the Beanfield, trace its impact on the communities involved, and also draw an important line from the draconian legislation that followed the Beanfield, undermining travellers’ rights, and our right to gather freely, through further legislation in the ‘90s, after the British counter-culture refused to accept Thatcher’s edict that all dissent was forbidden, through to the huge increase in even more draconian legislation in recent years, aimed primarily at climate activists, and, most recently, those taking direct action against Israel’s biggest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems, who, alarmingly, have, as a result, been designated as a terrorist organization by the Labour government.

My update on shocking news in the case of the Filton 6, Palestine Action activists who undertook direct action in August 2024 against a factory in Bristol owned by Elbit Systems, the Israeli arms company that manufactures drones and other weapons used in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. They were then imprisoned on remand (without charge or trial) in punitive conditions that encouraged many of them to undertake hunger strikes, until their trial, which began last November and ended in February, with the jury dismissing some charges and unable to reach a verdict on others. Instead of backing down, the government immediately launched a retrial, in which the jury eventually found four of the six guilty of criminal damage. In a shocking twist, however, after reporting restrictions were lifted on May 12, it was revealed that the judge, Mr. Justice Johnson, had secretly arranged for their sentencing to include terrorism charges that were not disclosed to the jury, which could double their sentences (to be delivered on June 12) and tar them for life as terrorists. The judge, who had already perverted the course of justice by refusing to allow the defendants to tell the jury why they took the action that they did, is basing his unacceptable post-trial intervention on two particular passages in the Terrorism Act 2000 — an ill-defined claim that “serious damage to property” may constitute terrorism, as well as a claim that terrorism may involve “the use or threat of action” that “is designed to influence the government, or an international governmental organisation”; in this case, as he explicitly stated in a hearing last year, the Israeli government. If Mr. Justice Johnson gets his way, adding terrorist convictions to post-trial sentencing, while keeping juries in the dark throughout the whole process, will be shockingly and unacceptably normalized, injecting a poison into the entire legal system that is profoundly unjust and dangerous, as well as creating a template for criticism of Israel’s actions to be viewed as terrorism, and it must be resisted as robustly as possible.

Photos from, and my report about the 40th monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US and around the world on and around May 6. In the article, I also provide a rationale for the vigils’ continued presence, despite the indifference of the Trump administration, and provide a summary of the current circumstances of the 15 men still held in varying states of fundamental lawlessness.

26 photos from, and my report about the 39th monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US and around the world on and around April 1. In the article, I also provide a detailed analysis of how and why the great crimes of Guantánamo and the “war on terror” — imprisonment without charge or trial, including torture and other forms of abuse, and illegal wars in pursuit of regime change — have, through not being adequately challenged and repudiated, fed directly into the horrific atrocities of the last 30 months. The first of these is Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, and the torture, rape and murder in Israel’s prisons for Palestinians, while, over the last six weeks, the US, the staunchest supporter of Israel’s genocide, has become directly involved in the Israeli model of devastating, lawless warfare, focused on as much arbitrary civilian death and destruction as possible, via its joint war with Israel on Iran, while Israel also repeats its Gaza playbook in Lebanon.

25 photos from, and my report about the 38th monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, in which I also explain why the vigils remain important: firstly, because Guantánamo enshrined indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial, the hallmark of dictatorships, as US policy, echoing and drawing inspiration from Israel’s brutal, lawless prisons for Palestinians, and inspiring Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s ever-expanding ICE detention facilities for US immigrants; and secondly, because, as the last bastion of the “war on terror”, it is also a powerful reminder of how that “war” led not only to the establishment of horrific, lawless prisons, but also, via the invasion of Iraq in particular, to the notion that the US could invade a sovereign nation based on lies, and, via Obama’s drone assassination program, to the notion that the US could extrajudicially murder anyone alleged to be a “combatant” without any form of due process, both of which helped Israel to seek to justify its genocide in Gaza, and are now being used by Trump to seek to justify his joint “war” with Israel on Iran.

Although the US and Israel’s illegal and unprovoked “war” on Iran has, understandably, been dominating everyone’s consciousness for the last week, I wanted to find the time to celebrate an extraordinary indicator of hope that I wrote about a week ago, but then delayed publishing because the attacks on Iran had begun. That extraordinary indicator of hope is the victory, in a by-election in Gorton and Denton, in Greater Manchester, of Hannah Spencer, a local plumber standing for the Green Party, who comfortably defeated both the discredited Labour Party, which had previously held the seat, and the far-right Reform Party, dashing their hopes of capitalizing on their disturbing rise in popularity over the last year. Spencer led a refreshingly honest campaign in which she attacked the culture of the super-rich immiserating the lives of ordinary hard-working people, and emphasized the shared humanity of the area’s mixed white and Muslim populations, building on the successful message of “eco-populism” by the Green’s inspiring new leader, Zack Polanski, whose revival of left-wing idealism is so successful that the Greens are now the most popular party amongst all voters under the age of 50. In my analysis, I not only praise the Greens for single-handedly reviving hope; I also condemn the Labour government for their thorough betrayal of their roots, their support for war and genocide, their authoritarianism, their slavish dedication to big business, and their sweeping contempt for the people they are supposed to represent. I also celebrate the downturn in the fortunes of Reform, under the leadership of the racist opportunist Nigel Farage, whose giddy rise to become, over the last year, the UK’s most popular party now seems to be in reverse. Polling after the by-elections shows them now on 23% (down from a high of 35%), with the Greens up to 21% and Labour and the Tories both languishing on 16%, and we must all hope that their decline continues, as they are a genuine menace, increasingly aping the vilest policies of Donald Trump, and especially his enthusiasm for the mass deportation of immigrants. Just this week, other polling revealed, shockingly, that a majority of Reform’s members support not just the deportation of recent immigrants, but also the notion that all “non-white British citizens born abroad should be deported or encouraged to leave.”