Got arrested for terrorism in 2025
Jan. 1st, 2026 04:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lokifanHappy new year!
I’ve been trying to post about this for ages and having an ADHD procrastination about it. But it’s one of the big things of my 2025, so now seems like a good time.
I’ve been charged under the Terrorism Act for sitting in Parliament Square holding a sign. I’m currently waiting for a court date.
My sign said ‘I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.’ Palestine Action is a non-violent direct action group here in the UK. Among other things, they’ve targeted a UK facility belonging to Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms manufacturer, with various actions: lock-ons, spray-paint, building takeovers. The day of our action, in fact, Elbit announced they’re leaving the UK :D A win for direct action!
Well, Yvette Cooper, our Labour Home Secretary, has repeatedly said that Palestine Action isn’t non-violent, actually. But everything she’s cited specifically - burglary, vandalism, breaking and entering - is a property crime! She says she can’t tell us the details but she promises, they’re definitely violent and dangerous. I’ll believe it when I see it.
She had Palestine Action proscribed as a terrorist group -- officially banned -- by Parliament earlier this year. Worth noting, btw, that it was done an incredibly dodgy way. MPs were given three groups to vote on, and they had to do one vote for all three, and there’s no mechanism to change their minds. One was Palestine Action, who do things like spray-paint fighter jets and disrupt companies that supply weaponry to Israel. The others were Russian Imperial Movement and Maniacs Murder Cult, both violent neo-Nazi outfits. So you had to ban all three or none.
Banning them makes expressing support for these groups a crime.
There was an outcry, from some MPs (big up Clive Lewis!), from UN officials, and from a lot of human rights organisations - Liberty, Amnesty International, etc. Palestine Action’s founder is taking legal action against the proscription. But for now it stands.
So at that point Defend Our Juries got involved. They’re a group that started in response to, among other things, a retired social worker named Trudi Warner being arrested for her silent, peaceful demonstration. A group of climate activists had been arrested for their action blocking the M25 (a big motorway), and the judge forbade them from mentioning the climate crisis as part of their defence (!!!). She went to the court and stood outside for 30 minutes holding a sign that said ‘Jurors, you have an absolute right to acquit according to your conscience.’
This, btw, is arguably true. And she still got arrested for CONTEMPT OF COURT. It took 18 months for the case to end. About a year after her arrest the case reached the court, and the judge threw it out - said there was no basis for prosecuting her and accused government lawyers of “mischaracterising” the evidence. AND THEN THEY TRIED TO GO TO APPEAL. Only dropped it 5 months later.
So yeah, Defend Our Juries is basically a group that tries to defend free expression, the rule of law, etc, in the increasingly authoritarian UK. And their reaction to Palestine Action’s proscription was to try to make it unenforceable via mass civil disobedience. And I joined in.
Now, the ban is being challenged in court - right now, as it happens, but we don’t know what’s going on with that. The founder of Palestine Action wants the ban struck down, and if that happens, the thousands of people arrested over this will almost certainly go free. But we don’t know yet.
In August, over 500 people showed up to Parliament Square, and at 1pm they all sat down, wrote the words, ‘I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action’ on a sign, and waited to be arrested. Then they were. 50% of them were 60 or older.
I couldn’t make it to that one, but I was there in September. That time almost 900 of us were arrested.
The idea is to make the law unenforceable in practice. In August, people had been arrested and given ‘street bail’; it had helped the police process them. So for September we were asked to refuse street bail. The London Met only has around 500 holding cells, so the system would strain to manage us. And that very clearly worked, at least from my POV.
I arrived a bit before 1pm, chatted to a few people, then sat down with my sign. I was there for a solid 8 hours before I got arrested! Clearly, an urgent terrorist threat. The police were busy, but there was also, imo, a pretty obvious effort to slow-roll everything. They’d come in every 30 minutes or so and arrest one person, so they could say they were enforcing the law. Our sense was that they were hoping people would leave, so that they could say they’d only arrested x number of people, apparently the protest wasn’t that big, no struggle to contain us. In the week beforehand the Met kept issuing warnings about how they could do the mass arrests no problem, they weren’t scared, so we shouldn’t show up, we should be scared.
Around maybe 6pm the arrests speeded up, presumably as coppers got off normal work and came to join in. Almost all of us went floppy and forced them to carry us, slowing everything down even more. By the time I got arrested I was frankly desperate to be. 8 hours, mostly silent, is ROUGH. I mean, I have ADHD, inflicting that level of faintly anxious boredom on me should be against the Geneva Convention.
That said, Defend Our Juries did amazingly. There were watchers around all the time, offering us snacks or water, checking we were okay. Various other protestors who weren’t taking part in the action itself - mostly pro-Palestine but there was an anti-abortion thing happening at one point, off to the side. At one point two coppers bulled their way into the middle of a cluster of sitting people to arrest someone, and dragged him off, his legs dragging on the ground. A watcher was immediately telling them to stop, you’re supposed to take people from the edges, don’t drag him, it’s dangerous policing. Other protestors and a lot of us participants were shouting as well, and they did actually stop. Another 4 coppers came over and lifted the guy off.
I did chat to other participants; we were supposed to stay silent but after a couple of hours, with almost everyone else talking, I gave up on that. I talked to a very nice Anglican priest from Devon who’d come with K, a woman from his church, both in their 50s or 60s; then a couple of nice guys my age or younger. One had needed a government security clearance for his job, so he was expecting to lose it; he thought he might even end up homeless. A very brave guy.
My job prospects will be curtailed but not wrecked if I get convicted, I think.
By this time it had got dark, and other protestors had lit candles. A choir was singing protest songs acapella and the protestors who weren’t participating were coming in closer and closer, standing around us; it actually felt kind of claustrophobic. The police were getting closer, people around us being arrested. Each time, there’d be a little explosion of people going “shame! Shame!” at the coppers, and cheering for the person who’d been arrested. (K had said earlier that she didn’t think it was nice, and I was like “I think if you’re arresting people for peacefully protesting, shame is the appropriate response, actually”. She ended up saying “I don’t know why I’m defending them.” Radicalisation for K!)
The participants seemed mostly very white, middle-class, and often older. (I saw a couple of John Lewis tote bags on the grass as I arrived and grinned.) I was dressed for harmless vibes myself: a lilac jumper with a pastel rainbow stripe, and my hair in two plaits. The protestors who were standing - aka there to support us and protest for Palestine, but not sitting with signs as part of the action - were much more often black or brown which imo really speaks to the justified lack of trust in the Met. The weighting of the risks was very different. They were younger, too, and actually one woman said to me that she admired us younger people turning out because she thought we had more to lose.
I was impatient to be arrested, but it was intimidating too. Not as much as I’d have thought; my focus was mostly making sure the guys I’d been chatting to, and I, didn’t lose our bags when we got arrested. I actually lay back with my head on my little backpack to help that not happen, lying on the patchy grass and dry soil of Parliament Square and listening to the singing: We Shall Overcome. Staring up at the dark blue sky. The choir crowding in closer, all holding little electric tea lights.
Then an officer came and crouched by me, and said I was being arrested, and took my sign off me. Asked if I’d come with them and obviously I wouldn’t so five officers picked me up. There were cheers, and “shame!” at the officers. A guy was shouting to me: “you’re on the right side of history, this’ll be something to tell your grandchildren about!” Someone came alongside filming it as it happened, following as they carried me across the street - it was truly the safest possible way to be arrested, as I thought many times that day, with witnesses and advocates all around. I was still watching the sky.
At some point the angle shifted or something, and my right knee and leg started to hurt. I tried to be stoic but they put me down near the police van and I ended up climbing in. They drove us off to a street nearby, around Whitehall.
That was kinda wild, actually. They’d set up a whole… thing for us. Every protestor had a copper and we all queued up, lol, very English. There were portaloos and, for some reason, MASSIVE lights that drowned out the streetlights. It felt very metaphorically resonant, actually, because these bright white electric lights turned everything literally black and white; you couldn’t see the shadows at all. Way off beyond where you could see properly were white tents where people were being processed.
So I’d had around 4 hours’ sleep the night before - not anxiety, sleep is just an issue for me. And by this point it was after 9pm, I was really tired, and we queued on our feet until roughly 4am.
Well, most of us. A few people lay down and refused to move, and would get carried a few feet every so often by coppers as the queue shifted.
I was mostly silent. My officer tried to be chatty and I answered one or two questions (bad me! Don’t talk to police!) but mostly stayed quiet. I could tell he was getting increasingly grumpy but he stayed professional - he’d been at work for 20 hours by the time the queue ended. He asked me more than once if I wanted to give my details, so I could get street bail and go home, but NOPE. The queue had slowed down a LOT after a couple of hours, which seemed good, like it was working - maybe they’d put 500 people in holding cells and were out of room.
The guy behind me was talking to his officer loads, and ended up debating with like four of them, including one who seemed higher-up, about the proscription on Palestine Action and the enforcement of it. The higher-up seemed to sincerely think all proscriptions should be enforced, even if they aren’t always - the protestor gave the example of IRA flags in Northern Ireland being left alone. I left it alone for a bit then reminded the guy not to talk to police, to be careful. Advocating for a proscribed organisation is a different offence from what we were being charged with and it’s a LOT more serious - could be 14 years in prison. So the debate was risky.
I did wonder a few times towards the end if I’d make it or end up going home, I was so tired. I wasn’t even really talking to the protestor in front of me - don’t talk in front of police - and that made it harder. I got my book out of my bag at one point and read it for a bit but then I needed the loo so it went back in the bag, and I didn’t wanna ask for it again.
Around 4am we finally reached the tent. I sat down with a couple of women, my officer still there. They asked if I’d give my details and I said no again. They did manage to find my name off my Oyster card but I guess my name’s too common, they couldn’t track down who I am for sure.
A guy came over and was all friendly and was like are you sure, because we’re having to send people out of the Met’s area, you could be sent as far away as Southampton. Pretty sure that was straightforwardly a lie, lol, and obviously by then I wasn’t gonna give in. Especially since Defend Our Juries had given us phone numbers for them and the law firm they’re working with, to call so they’d be waiting for us when we got out. I live in London but I’d have help getting home if I needed it.
They took me and two other prisoners and our respective officers off to a van, and then sat there for an HOUR. I was so tired and couldn’t get comfortable at all (the other two seemed to be dozing successfully) so it sucked. But eventually they were given a station to go to: Old Kent Road! Middle of London! Southampton nothing.
There was a moment outside the station where I talked to one of the other prisoners and we agreed it had been tough, we’d had a wobble in the late hours of the queue but we were doing it. We thought we’d give our details now; we could’ve withheld them but the action plan didn’t ask us to do that.
When we got in, the guy at the desk took down the details including the time of the arrest - roughly 7 hours earlier - and looked v surprised by the gap between arrest and booking. “I’ve never heard of something like that!” I was prisoner 790 or so, so we definitely made it a LOT of work to enforce the ban :D Over 900 of us arrested total.
Being in police custody super sucks, I don’t know if anyone’s surprised. The cell had a bench with a small blue mattress, the plastic kind you can fold up. The camera stares at you, the light’s really strong with no way to turn it off, the loo’s behind a weird little wall but doesn’t have loo roll, just hand sanitiser, I seem to remember. I had a little cry cos it’s honestly just horrible.
Lucky for me it’d been such a long day that I fell asleep hard until around 7 am, when someone opened the slot in the door to ask about breakfas. I got the vegan one. Now I was admittedly absolutely starving but it was surprisingly good as microwaved-in-a-bag food goes, baked beans and veggie sausages with some smokiness.
I went back to sleep but the processing came soon afterwards: photos, DNA swab from my cheek which I find extremely bothersome. I was a zombie.
I never even got my phone calls because I was released around 11am. But even so, they managed to have four Defend Our Juries people waiting for me! They were smiley and kind, and complimented me on my bravery, and took down my details, and offered some dark chocolate. SO GOOD. I really can’t compliment their organisation and handling of things enough.
I got the bus and train home, reading some more of Miciaih Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds. An excellent book, by the way, and not just because it held my attention under Dire Circumstances. Honestly so important to have a book with you at all times, especially if you can’t bring your phone in case the surveillance state uses it against you.
Got back and told my housematesodsta all about it. He’d been angry with me for taking these risks, but only because he worried about the police hurting me etc. I was really glad I’d warned him that I might be gone overnight!
Family is proud of me; I hadn’t told them beforehand in case they worried, too. Mum’s actually said she and Dad will help me with it if I get fined.
Which brings me to possible consequences, if you’re curious!
- Up to six months in prison. In practice not gonna happen, if only due to a different horrifying problem with the UK justice system; prison overcrowding is so severe that Labour doesn’t want anyone being sent to prison for less than a year.
- An unlimited fine; the level of it used to be £5k. I think this might happen. But my parents will help, and I think Defend Our Juries will be able to fundraise, though I won’t take money from them unless I have to.
- Permanent travel restrictions. Having a terrorism conviction does limit your ability to get a visa, which sucks; I may never be able to visit Japan, f’rinstance, and if I wanted to work abroad again it’d be harder.
- Potentially could affect jobs, because it’d likely come up on the criminal records check they do for teachers. Only potentially, though; teaching English as a foreign language is definitely a field that selects for pro-Palestine types, and I’d be able to explain the context of a case that’s been in the news. The only criminal offences that legally stop you from being hired as a teacher of kids or vulnerable adults are offences against kids or vulnerable adults, which this obviously isn’t.
Like I said, the ban might be struck down anyway. That said, I’ve lost confidence in that because the judge who was going to oversee the case, who’d refused government appeals to not have the judicial review of the ban at all, as replaced at the absolute last minute by three magistrates. Seems like a stitch-up.
Direct action is very satisfying, and this combines some of the causes I care about most: free speech, the rule of law, and a free Palestine. No regrets.
I’ll keep you posted.
I’ve been trying to post about this for ages and having an ADHD procrastination about it. But it’s one of the big things of my 2025, so now seems like a good time.
I’ve been charged under the Terrorism Act for sitting in Parliament Square holding a sign. I’m currently waiting for a court date.
My sign said ‘I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.’ Palestine Action is a non-violent direct action group here in the UK. Among other things, they’ve targeted a UK facility belonging to Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms manufacturer, with various actions: lock-ons, spray-paint, building takeovers. The day of our action, in fact, Elbit announced they’re leaving the UK :D A win for direct action!
Well, Yvette Cooper, our Labour Home Secretary, has repeatedly said that Palestine Action isn’t non-violent, actually. But everything she’s cited specifically - burglary, vandalism, breaking and entering - is a property crime! She says she can’t tell us the details but she promises, they’re definitely violent and dangerous. I’ll believe it when I see it.
She had Palestine Action proscribed as a terrorist group -- officially banned -- by Parliament earlier this year. Worth noting, btw, that it was done an incredibly dodgy way. MPs were given three groups to vote on, and they had to do one vote for all three, and there’s no mechanism to change their minds. One was Palestine Action, who do things like spray-paint fighter jets and disrupt companies that supply weaponry to Israel. The others were Russian Imperial Movement and Maniacs Murder Cult, both violent neo-Nazi outfits. So you had to ban all three or none.
Banning them makes expressing support for these groups a crime.
There was an outcry, from some MPs (big up Clive Lewis!), from UN officials, and from a lot of human rights organisations - Liberty, Amnesty International, etc. Palestine Action’s founder is taking legal action against the proscription. But for now it stands.
So at that point Defend Our Juries got involved. They’re a group that started in response to, among other things, a retired social worker named Trudi Warner being arrested for her silent, peaceful demonstration. A group of climate activists had been arrested for their action blocking the M25 (a big motorway), and the judge forbade them from mentioning the climate crisis as part of their defence (!!!). She went to the court and stood outside for 30 minutes holding a sign that said ‘Jurors, you have an absolute right to acquit according to your conscience.’
This, btw, is arguably true. And she still got arrested for CONTEMPT OF COURT. It took 18 months for the case to end. About a year after her arrest the case reached the court, and the judge threw it out - said there was no basis for prosecuting her and accused government lawyers of “mischaracterising” the evidence. AND THEN THEY TRIED TO GO TO APPEAL. Only dropped it 5 months later.
So yeah, Defend Our Juries is basically a group that tries to defend free expression, the rule of law, etc, in the increasingly authoritarian UK. And their reaction to Palestine Action’s proscription was to try to make it unenforceable via mass civil disobedience. And I joined in.
Now, the ban is being challenged in court - right now, as it happens, but we don’t know what’s going on with that. The founder of Palestine Action wants the ban struck down, and if that happens, the thousands of people arrested over this will almost certainly go free. But we don’t know yet.
In August, over 500 people showed up to Parliament Square, and at 1pm they all sat down, wrote the words, ‘I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action’ on a sign, and waited to be arrested. Then they were. 50% of them were 60 or older.
I couldn’t make it to that one, but I was there in September. That time almost 900 of us were arrested.
The idea is to make the law unenforceable in practice. In August, people had been arrested and given ‘street bail’; it had helped the police process them. So for September we were asked to refuse street bail. The London Met only has around 500 holding cells, so the system would strain to manage us. And that very clearly worked, at least from my POV.
I arrived a bit before 1pm, chatted to a few people, then sat down with my sign. I was there for a solid 8 hours before I got arrested! Clearly, an urgent terrorist threat. The police were busy, but there was also, imo, a pretty obvious effort to slow-roll everything. They’d come in every 30 minutes or so and arrest one person, so they could say they were enforcing the law. Our sense was that they were hoping people would leave, so that they could say they’d only arrested x number of people, apparently the protest wasn’t that big, no struggle to contain us. In the week beforehand the Met kept issuing warnings about how they could do the mass arrests no problem, they weren’t scared, so we shouldn’t show up, we should be scared.
Around maybe 6pm the arrests speeded up, presumably as coppers got off normal work and came to join in. Almost all of us went floppy and forced them to carry us, slowing everything down even more. By the time I got arrested I was frankly desperate to be. 8 hours, mostly silent, is ROUGH. I mean, I have ADHD, inflicting that level of faintly anxious boredom on me should be against the Geneva Convention.
That said, Defend Our Juries did amazingly. There were watchers around all the time, offering us snacks or water, checking we were okay. Various other protestors who weren’t taking part in the action itself - mostly pro-Palestine but there was an anti-abortion thing happening at one point, off to the side. At one point two coppers bulled their way into the middle of a cluster of sitting people to arrest someone, and dragged him off, his legs dragging on the ground. A watcher was immediately telling them to stop, you’re supposed to take people from the edges, don’t drag him, it’s dangerous policing. Other protestors and a lot of us participants were shouting as well, and they did actually stop. Another 4 coppers came over and lifted the guy off.
I did chat to other participants; we were supposed to stay silent but after a couple of hours, with almost everyone else talking, I gave up on that. I talked to a very nice Anglican priest from Devon who’d come with K, a woman from his church, both in their 50s or 60s; then a couple of nice guys my age or younger. One had needed a government security clearance for his job, so he was expecting to lose it; he thought he might even end up homeless. A very brave guy.
My job prospects will be curtailed but not wrecked if I get convicted, I think.
By this time it had got dark, and other protestors had lit candles. A choir was singing protest songs acapella and the protestors who weren’t participating were coming in closer and closer, standing around us; it actually felt kind of claustrophobic. The police were getting closer, people around us being arrested. Each time, there’d be a little explosion of people going “shame! Shame!” at the coppers, and cheering for the person who’d been arrested. (K had said earlier that she didn’t think it was nice, and I was like “I think if you’re arresting people for peacefully protesting, shame is the appropriate response, actually”. She ended up saying “I don’t know why I’m defending them.” Radicalisation for K!)
The participants seemed mostly very white, middle-class, and often older. (I saw a couple of John Lewis tote bags on the grass as I arrived and grinned.) I was dressed for harmless vibes myself: a lilac jumper with a pastel rainbow stripe, and my hair in two plaits. The protestors who were standing - aka there to support us and protest for Palestine, but not sitting with signs as part of the action - were much more often black or brown which imo really speaks to the justified lack of trust in the Met. The weighting of the risks was very different. They were younger, too, and actually one woman said to me that she admired us younger people turning out because she thought we had more to lose.
I was impatient to be arrested, but it was intimidating too. Not as much as I’d have thought; my focus was mostly making sure the guys I’d been chatting to, and I, didn’t lose our bags when we got arrested. I actually lay back with my head on my little backpack to help that not happen, lying on the patchy grass and dry soil of Parliament Square and listening to the singing: We Shall Overcome. Staring up at the dark blue sky. The choir crowding in closer, all holding little electric tea lights.
Then an officer came and crouched by me, and said I was being arrested, and took my sign off me. Asked if I’d come with them and obviously I wouldn’t so five officers picked me up. There were cheers, and “shame!” at the officers. A guy was shouting to me: “you’re on the right side of history, this’ll be something to tell your grandchildren about!” Someone came alongside filming it as it happened, following as they carried me across the street - it was truly the safest possible way to be arrested, as I thought many times that day, with witnesses and advocates all around. I was still watching the sky.
At some point the angle shifted or something, and my right knee and leg started to hurt. I tried to be stoic but they put me down near the police van and I ended up climbing in. They drove us off to a street nearby, around Whitehall.
That was kinda wild, actually. They’d set up a whole… thing for us. Every protestor had a copper and we all queued up, lol, very English. There were portaloos and, for some reason, MASSIVE lights that drowned out the streetlights. It felt very metaphorically resonant, actually, because these bright white electric lights turned everything literally black and white; you couldn’t see the shadows at all. Way off beyond where you could see properly were white tents where people were being processed.
So I’d had around 4 hours’ sleep the night before - not anxiety, sleep is just an issue for me. And by this point it was after 9pm, I was really tired, and we queued on our feet until roughly 4am.
Well, most of us. A few people lay down and refused to move, and would get carried a few feet every so often by coppers as the queue shifted.
I was mostly silent. My officer tried to be chatty and I answered one or two questions (bad me! Don’t talk to police!) but mostly stayed quiet. I could tell he was getting increasingly grumpy but he stayed professional - he’d been at work for 20 hours by the time the queue ended. He asked me more than once if I wanted to give my details, so I could get street bail and go home, but NOPE. The queue had slowed down a LOT after a couple of hours, which seemed good, like it was working - maybe they’d put 500 people in holding cells and were out of room.
The guy behind me was talking to his officer loads, and ended up debating with like four of them, including one who seemed higher-up, about the proscription on Palestine Action and the enforcement of it. The higher-up seemed to sincerely think all proscriptions should be enforced, even if they aren’t always - the protestor gave the example of IRA flags in Northern Ireland being left alone. I left it alone for a bit then reminded the guy not to talk to police, to be careful. Advocating for a proscribed organisation is a different offence from what we were being charged with and it’s a LOT more serious - could be 14 years in prison. So the debate was risky.
I did wonder a few times towards the end if I’d make it or end up going home, I was so tired. I wasn’t even really talking to the protestor in front of me - don’t talk in front of police - and that made it harder. I got my book out of my bag at one point and read it for a bit but then I needed the loo so it went back in the bag, and I didn’t wanna ask for it again.
Around 4am we finally reached the tent. I sat down with a couple of women, my officer still there. They asked if I’d give my details and I said no again. They did manage to find my name off my Oyster card but I guess my name’s too common, they couldn’t track down who I am for sure.
A guy came over and was all friendly and was like are you sure, because we’re having to send people out of the Met’s area, you could be sent as far away as Southampton. Pretty sure that was straightforwardly a lie, lol, and obviously by then I wasn’t gonna give in. Especially since Defend Our Juries had given us phone numbers for them and the law firm they’re working with, to call so they’d be waiting for us when we got out. I live in London but I’d have help getting home if I needed it.
They took me and two other prisoners and our respective officers off to a van, and then sat there for an HOUR. I was so tired and couldn’t get comfortable at all (the other two seemed to be dozing successfully) so it sucked. But eventually they were given a station to go to: Old Kent Road! Middle of London! Southampton nothing.
There was a moment outside the station where I talked to one of the other prisoners and we agreed it had been tough, we’d had a wobble in the late hours of the queue but we were doing it. We thought we’d give our details now; we could’ve withheld them but the action plan didn’t ask us to do that.
When we got in, the guy at the desk took down the details including the time of the arrest - roughly 7 hours earlier - and looked v surprised by the gap between arrest and booking. “I’ve never heard of something like that!” I was prisoner 790 or so, so we definitely made it a LOT of work to enforce the ban :D Over 900 of us arrested total.
Being in police custody super sucks, I don’t know if anyone’s surprised. The cell had a bench with a small blue mattress, the plastic kind you can fold up. The camera stares at you, the light’s really strong with no way to turn it off, the loo’s behind a weird little wall but doesn’t have loo roll, just hand sanitiser, I seem to remember. I had a little cry cos it’s honestly just horrible.
Lucky for me it’d been such a long day that I fell asleep hard until around 7 am, when someone opened the slot in the door to ask about breakfas. I got the vegan one. Now I was admittedly absolutely starving but it was surprisingly good as microwaved-in-a-bag food goes, baked beans and veggie sausages with some smokiness.
I went back to sleep but the processing came soon afterwards: photos, DNA swab from my cheek which I find extremely bothersome. I was a zombie.
I never even got my phone calls because I was released around 11am. But even so, they managed to have four Defend Our Juries people waiting for me! They were smiley and kind, and complimented me on my bravery, and took down my details, and offered some dark chocolate. SO GOOD. I really can’t compliment their organisation and handling of things enough.
I got the bus and train home, reading some more of Miciaih Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds. An excellent book, by the way, and not just because it held my attention under Dire Circumstances. Honestly so important to have a book with you at all times, especially if you can’t bring your phone in case the surveillance state uses it against you.
Got back and told my housemate
sodsta all about it. He’d been angry with me for taking these risks, but only because he worried about the police hurting me etc. I was really glad I’d warned him that I might be gone overnight!Family is proud of me; I hadn’t told them beforehand in case they worried, too. Mum’s actually said she and Dad will help me with it if I get fined.
Which brings me to possible consequences, if you’re curious!
- Up to six months in prison. In practice not gonna happen, if only due to a different horrifying problem with the UK justice system; prison overcrowding is so severe that Labour doesn’t want anyone being sent to prison for less than a year.
- An unlimited fine; the level of it used to be £5k. I think this might happen. But my parents will help, and I think Defend Our Juries will be able to fundraise, though I won’t take money from them unless I have to.
- Permanent travel restrictions. Having a terrorism conviction does limit your ability to get a visa, which sucks; I may never be able to visit Japan, f’rinstance, and if I wanted to work abroad again it’d be harder.
- Potentially could affect jobs, because it’d likely come up on the criminal records check they do for teachers. Only potentially, though; teaching English as a foreign language is definitely a field that selects for pro-Palestine types, and I’d be able to explain the context of a case that’s been in the news. The only criminal offences that legally stop you from being hired as a teacher of kids or vulnerable adults are offences against kids or vulnerable adults, which this obviously isn’t.
Like I said, the ban might be struck down anyway. That said, I’ve lost confidence in that because the judge who was going to oversee the case, who’d refused government appeals to not have the judicial review of the ban at all, as replaced at the absolute last minute by three magistrates. Seems like a stitch-up.
Direct action is very satisfying, and this combines some of the causes I care about most: free speech, the rule of law, and a free Palestine. No regrets.
I’ll keep you posted.
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Date: 2026-01-01 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-01 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-01 06:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-01 07:48 pm (UTC)And this is in accordance with our proud national traditions if anything is!
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Date: 2026-01-01 07:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-01 08:42 pm (UTC)If you need direct support, e.g. ££££, then please post a link (and if I don't respond because I haven't seen it then please message me directly or whatever).
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Date: 2026-01-01 09:47 pm (UTC)(And obviously it's a very minor thing that pales in comparison to everything else you say here, but isn't The Space Between Worlds amazing?)
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Date: 2026-01-01 10:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-01 10:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-01 11:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-01 11:51 pm (UTC)That is a pretty big thing. I am glad you are safe and I am glad you were there.
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Date: 2026-01-01 11:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-02 12:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-02 02:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-02 03:44 am (UTC)Advocating for a proscribed organisation is a different offence from what we were being charged with and it’s a LOT more serious - could be 14 years in prison.
What the fuck. That is absolutely outrageous.
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Date: 2026-01-02 06:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-02 01:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-02 03:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-03 01:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-03 05:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-03 05:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-03 09:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-03 01:30 pm (UTC)It definitely is a badge of pride arrest. And no one is going to think that you and the legions of elderly clerics etc were terrorists, let’s be real. But I agree with you about the stitch up with the magistrate thing, it’s like Starmer is determined to turn us into little America. Ugh.
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Date: 2026-01-03 04:39 pm (UTC)Thank you very much for doing this, and gosh, well done you <3
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Date: 2026-01-04 08:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-05 06:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-05 06:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-06 06:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-06 07:54 pm (UTC)