Thread by @rivkahbrown

Today @declassifiedUK revealed that govt advisors told Yvette Cooper that proscribing Palestine Action would be “unprecedented” bc unlike the 81 others on the list PA mainly damaged property.

It was unprecedented. It was also foreseeable. A thread on UK counter-terror history 🧵

The UK first began legislating against terrorism in the British Empire, in response to armed uprisings in India and Ireland in the 1910s & 20s. The proscribed organisations list came in with the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act, and for many years included just 1 entry: the IRA.

At the time, the IRA was bombing pubs, banks and barracks, killing civilians & military targets. The 1974 PTA defined terrorism as “the use of violence for political ends, & includes any use of violence for the purpose of putting the public or any section of the public in fear.”

The PTA didn't specify violence to people or property, though the IRA was consistently doing both, so perhaps the distinction felt moot to lawmakers and the public.

Only in the Terrorism Act 2000 – the law which forms the basis for most counter-terror policing today – did we get a fuller definition of terrorism. Too full, some argued.

The TA 2000 characterised terrorism as an act that involves serious violence against a person; serious damage to property; danger to a person’s life; a serious risk to the public; or serious disruption of an electronic system. Now we’ve swung the other way.

In its 1999 report on the TA, @libertyhq sounded the alarm about the addition of violence to property within the definition of terrorism, noting: “Usually damage to property is described in statutes as criminal damage and not as ‘violence’”. They were ignored, obviously.

But as noted in this thread, Labour home secretary Jack Straw reassured nervous MPs that the law wouldn’t be used against protestors, only those threatening “the most serious violence to individuals”.

https://x.com/MadocCairns/status/1940783620341555531

Giving the example of animal liberation activism, much of which involved damaging animal testing facilities, Straw said that “we are not talking about demonstrations that get out of hand”.

Straw told another concerned MP that those supporting international human rights campaigns such as those of the Kurds or indigenous Americans “will not even remotely come under the bill”.

https://x.com/MadocCairns/status/1940783641610932394

Similarly, at the bill’s second reading, Straw emphasised that the bill was about protecting human life, not property.

https://x.com/MadocCairns/status/1940783650062455059

Still, the warnings persisted. In a 2015 report, the government’s terrorism law reviewer Lord David Anderson QC called the UK’s definition of terrorism “over-broad”, particularly in its definition of violence, giving it the potential to ensnare non-violent actors.

“The UK legal definition of terrorism doesn’t have to include violence, which opens it to potential application against groups that most of us would instinctively think are not terrorists,” he wrote assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a751400…

Efforts have been made at an international level to exclude mere property damage from the definition of terrorism. In 2004, the UN passed a resolution expressly stating that terrorism should include harm to people. The UK voted for it, though in practice has ignored it.

In 2014, the government introduced the Prevent duty, a counter-extremism programme mostly designed to target Islamism (despite far-right extremism being the fastest-growing threat to the UK). A 4-year-old boy was referred to Prevent for drawing a cucumber.

Then there’s the fact that, from the 2000s onwards, UK counter-terror law moves from criminalising acts of terrorism or participating in/enabling terrorist groups, to *glorifying* acts of terrorism, and then merely *inviting support for* proscribed groups.

And that’s how terrorism goes from militiamen bombing cars to 83-year-old reverends holding placards.

Meanwhile, though Palestine Action may only just have been *proscribed* for damaging property, its activists have for years been treated as terrorists by the prison system.

As well as being denied lawyers and prevented from socialising with each other in prison, one Filton 18 member has reportedly been detained without trial for longer than any protester in UK history theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/j…

For years, people have been warning that the inclusion of property damage within the UK's definition of terrorism would ensnare activists. Ministers promised it wouldn't. They lied.

Read my report with @simonchilds13 about how we ended up here. novaramedia.com/2025/07/23/the…