The New Dark Age

Earlier this year, Netpol and the Article 11 Trust published our State of Protest report, with a stark title: ‘This is Repression’. We are currently collaborating on a new report for 2025 and it is hard to know what to call it this time. Perhaps ‘An End to Our Illusions’?

On the second anniversary of Israel’s latest war in Gaza, we can surely have no more illusions that the “rules-based international order” is anything but over, or that the idea of universal human rights has died with the world’s governments complicity in the suffering of Palestinians. Nor can we have any illusions that the two main Westminster political parties, both deeply pro-Israel, were ever open to moral pressure from the public to avert a genocide.

Attacks on Protest Rights

To understand how we arrived at this point, we need to look back over the attacks on protest rights over the last two years. In the aftermath of the attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, there was a concerted effort not simply to condemn Hamas fighters, but to portray the day as ‘another 9/11’ – yet another day torn free from any history or context – in order to demand that everyone must choose between two sides, between “good” Israel and “evil” Hamas. This provided Israel with the justification to very quickly begin the war crimes inflicted on the population of Gaza, now recognised widely as genocidal. Closer to home, it also provided the narrative to relentlessly demonise anyone showing solidarity for besieged Palestinians as “pro-terrorist”.

This was documented comprehensively in Netpol’s report “In Our Millions” in 2024: how demonstrations were designated “hate marches” by then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman. Netpol documented how this message was picked up and amplified by the right-wing media, and how the police then went looking for ways to criminalise protesters. There were many arrests for hate crimes or terrorism offences; officers searching for ways to link individuals with banned organisations like Hamas because of clothing, flags or even just Arabic writing.

By the time of the general election in 2024, the groundwork had been laid for cross-party support for portraying Palestine solidarity campaigners as a ‘threat’ for challenging MPs on inaction over the horrific news from Gaza, and even one junior minister having a constituent arrested for challenging her position on the genocide.

This demonisation of protesters is critical to where we find ourselves now. It did not happen overnight. For two years, the police and the government have used Britain’s sweeping public order, hate crime and terrorism legislation to continually shift the boundary of Braverman’s “criminal threshold” against protest rights. This is how we went from demands for tougher action against alleged ‘hate crime’ to the effective banning of protests, on alleged ‘risk’ grounds near the BBC on Shabbat, or the arrest of protest march organisers in January 2025,. This is how we ended up with the Home Secretary, this time a Labour minister, stretching the definition of terrorism to breaking point to ban an avowedly non-violent protest group, Palestine Action, in July 2025.

Two years on

By October 2025, the Palestine Coalition that organises national demonstrations has held its thirty-first march, most recently at the Labour Party’s conference in Liverpool. These protests are now smaller than in 2024 and have largely dropped out of the news, although they serve as a means of keeping the wider Palestine solidarity movement together.

Meanwhile, the aftermath of the Palestine Action ban has, at least until a crucial legal challenge by the group’s co-founder Huda Ammori in early November, largely divided campaigners into three camps. There are those who are fearful about what they can or cannot say about Palestine and are desperate for clarity – something that our sweeping and vaguely written counter-terrorism legislation makes almost impossible. Netpol has spent much of the summer explaining the impact of the ban to this group. There are those who are continuing to take action against arms companies despite the Palestine Action ban, in cities like Newcastle, Southampton and Edinburgh. Finally, there are the campaigners who are reluctant to accept the reality of the state’s willingness to arrest or prosecute everyone who expresses support for a banned ‘terrorist’ group.

“The police can’t arrest us all”, they say, as though breaching the ban is much the same as committing a public order offence.

Since July, a tactic of deliberate mass arrests advocated by the group Defend Our Juries’ ‘Lift the Ban’ campaign, which has led to the detention of over 1600 individuals holding placards, has seemed like the only game in town. It has unquestionably kept the ban in the news, and it has also kept the Metropolitan Police busy: too busy, so far, to focus their energy on other alleged breaches of the ban online.

However, whilst Defend Our Juries has emphasised the importance of understanding the risks for anyone planning to breach the ban, it has also been dismissive of “lawyers looking only at past precedent, without reference to the political dynamics in play”, from the “media and political context through which the law is interpreted and applied”. The group does not want what it sees as an over-emphasis on the severity of counter-terrorism laws to discourage people participation.

The difficulty here is two-fold. Firstly, there is no reliable precedent for this ban, but there is every indication that the government and the police is eager to crack down in a way that many campaigners simply refuse to acknowledge. Police were prepared, for example, to raid the homes and arrest five of the organisers in advance of their protest in London on 6 September. Everything, therefore, hangs on November’s judicial review changing the legal context: yet until then, the unpredictability of the moment makes it hard to see how first-time or inexperienced protesters are genuinely making decisions based on ‘informed consent’.

Secondly, Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil are the blueprint for deliberately seeking arrest to ‘overwhelm the system’ but they had (at best) mixed results in exerting pressure on the government to change policy. Throwing oneself at the mercy of the state led to enormous publicity, but action to halt the climate crisis is still heading in the wrong direction. Instead, the personal cost for climate campaigners has been demonisation, repression and harsh punishment within the meat grinder of a criminal justice system that is debilitatingly chaotic.

Moreover, these kinds of mass arrest tactics undoubtedly involve extremely courageous people but tend to centre a certain kind of ‘respectable’ protester – overwhelming white middle class professionals or, particularly now, frail pensioners. It produces powerful images but it does not reflect what Palestine Action itself before it was forced to dissolve stood for. The group had been notably more working-class and more multi-racial, and less concerned with the media’s attention than with targeting arms sales to Israel at its source. What detainees from actions who have been held in prison for extended periods awaiting trial say they want now is renewed action to stop Britain shielding weapons companies from accountability.

Where next?

One danger, if more direct action happens, is that the “criminal threshold” might simply shift again: that another new Home Secretary will introduce more anti-protest legislation, or ban more groups as rebranded versions of Palestine Action. Legislation already makes this possible. Yet the government’s own intransigence in the face of public outrage over the daily massacres in Gaza is precisely what has made Britain’s weapons manufacturers the focus of many grassroots campaigners. The difficulty for the government, too, is how much it is able to influence outcomes in its favour if more campaigners taking direct action that does not involve willingly submitting to arrest. Prosecutors may also find themselves unable to push for more serious charges before juries refusing to convict because they watch the same images from Gaza as the rest of us.

As repression of protest has deepened, it is worth remembering that for all its power, the state is not infallible. Sometimes, protesters can catch the police completely unprepared, as they did on the first day of the DSEI arms fair in east London in September. A day that began with weapons company delegates forced for the first time to run a gauntlet of angry protesters and panicked senior officers overheard asking each other, “where all these people had come from?”, led to only three arrests and no criminal charges. It showed that organising protests against Britain’s complicity in genocide in a way that also resists another crackdown, while hard work, is possible.

Campaign groups need, however, to have no illusions this is dependent on how reasonably or benignly the government or police acts – our success depends entirely on the decisions they make themselves.