On Monday 15th June this year, the Court of Appeal gave its judgement in a case concerning Palestine Action. Palestine Action, is a group designed to oppose the action taken by the state of Israel against Palestine. To say that the group is absolutist in its views is perhaps to understate them.

Its main targets are any companies which sell arms to Israel. It says that it engages in peaceful protest. It is though organised using a network of ‘cells’ each consisting of just a few people who are encouraged to take direct action. They choose the targets and the manner which they select to attack them without reference to the leaders of the association. Identifying yourself to the association is actively discouraged.

Guidance is however given by the founders of the group in the form of a manual describing how to destroy things (not people) in as quick and efficient manner as possible. This is both to maximise the impact of each strike and also to minimise the likelihood of being caught by the authorities. The longer you’re there, the more likely you are to be found in flagrante. The tool of choice is the sledgehammer – used for windows and doors and all manner of other things. The manual also gives guidance as to how to avoid being apprehended by the police.

They have in fact carried out millions of pounds worth of damage to machinery and latterly to two military jet aircraft. In one of the attacks at a private company’s factory, a police woman was attacked with one of those sledgehammers, causing damage to her spine. The major damage to the jet fighters seems to have been the last straw: in June of last year, the Home secretary decided that Palestine Action was a terrorist organisation and so she proscribed it under our anti-terror legislation.

Cue major protests on the streets of London against such a ban on free speech and the right to protest. The protestors were mostly respectable retirees, with white hair, dog collars, Zimmer frames and arthritis, in order, presumably, to persuade us that it therefore couldn’t be a terrorist movement.

And the first round in the ensuing legal battle went to Palestine Action. In a rambling High Court judgement, it was held that the Home Secretary had acted ‘irrationally’ (in the legal sense) in imposing the ban.

A five-strong Court of Appeal, including the Lady Chief Justice and the Master of the Rolls has now explained why the ban should be upheld. Essentially, it said that although rights to protest were very important and that peaceful protests should of course be allowed, a very high bar had to be surmounted in order to justify the use of violence.

And they found that the appellant, a co-founder of the organisation had tried to mislead the lower court as to the nature of its activities in order to try to paint a picture of itself as a peaceful organisation. There may well be an appeal to the Supreme Court, but I'd be surprised if they overturned the CA decision.

I was puzzled to hear that the appellant had suggested that Palestine Action were in line with the traditions of protest exemplified by the Suffragettes. Now as far as I know, the members of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage didn’t set up a clandestine underground network to try to obtain votes for women. And neither did they use sledgehammers.

But in 1903, an offshoot, the Women’s Social and Political Union was formed. Their members, led by the famous Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst sisters decided that they weren’t getting anywhere - and so instead of women’s suffrage being peaceably argued for by ‘Suffragists’, we had ‘Suffragettes’. And the Suffragettes were very different to the Suffragists.

They became known for protests, sashes proclaiming ‘votes for women’, women chaining themselves to railings, hunger strikes and resultant force feedings. As such, the myth has arisen that any violence relating to the suffragette campaign was directed against them, rather than carried out by them. But that is far from the truth.

Their ‘outrages’ escalated to bombings, arson, and chemical attacks, causing harm to individuals, as well as to public and private property. Many historians think that their use of violence in fact set back their cause. Just as I suspect Palestine Action's use of violence is off-putting to most people. The suffragettes ‘protests’, however, stopped at the outbreak of the first world war and, in 1918, in the social conditions changed by the war, women over 30 years of age were emancipated, the age being reduced to 21 in 1928.

Obviously, it must be frustrating to perceive something to be a problem and fail to get it resolved, particularly when it continues for a long period. But the question is always why it has failed. We live in a democracy and to insist that the opinions of a particular pressure group should prevail – especially when it entails violence – is obviously anti-democratic.

Nonetheless I have some sympathy with the despair of some groups resulting from the failure by others to see what is to them an ‘obvious’ wrong, one which needs action to correct. And it is true that democracy can often work at a snail’s pace. After all, we are trying to convince people who are inherently conservative, resistant to change, that the change really should occur.

Often, when it finally comes about, the new order seems completely natural and becomes an almost unremarked-on part of our lives. Recent examples are that of the abolition of capital punishment or the crime of homosexuality. Homosexuality as a crime was only abolished in 1967 – 23 years after the suicide of Alan Turing, our most talented mathematician.

He had been the person responsible for our code-breaking efforts at Bletchley Park during the second world war. He was undoubtedly responsible for saving hundreds of thousands of lives. But he was later convicted of homosexuality and put on hormonal treatment to ‘cure’ him - with such a disastrous result.

By contrast, at the age of 88, we’ve just lost our most famous artist – David Hockney – someone who manage to live an openly gay life and who, during his lifetime, was feted for his artistry. But then he was a famous artist who spent many years living in Los Angeles and not a war-time code-breaker living in England about whom, ironically, the public knew nothing - because his work was so important that it was classified as top secret.

And now we’re seeing another example of the need to keep pushing at the door. The Assisted Dying Bill itself died with the prorogation of parliament the other week. Although passed by the Commons, in the Lords it was subjected to a co-ordinated attack by relatively few (mainly religious) members who had put down thousands of amendments, so many that they could not be dealt with in the time available for debate.

The bill was a private member’s bill and so does not automatically revive with the new parliamentary session. At the beginning of each session, however, there is a lottery in which MPs can be granted the right to introduce a bill of their choosing – just as the first assisted dying bill was. The first few have a very good chance of being fully considered in Parliament.

And it seems that the MP who drew the second ticket for the introduction of a bill has decided to reintroduce the same assisted dying bill as before. By virtue of a strange set of rules, this may mean that the lords cannot even think about amending it. And so if it clears the Commons, then it would automatically pass in the Lords.

I have long been a supporter of such a change. Would I engage in violent protest in order to ‘encourage’ our legislators to do what I consider to be the right thing, so allowing many people to avoid unendurable suffering? How could I inflict suffering in the cause of preventing it? Would I do what I can to encourage our MPs to vote in favour of it? Yes. I have already written to our MP who, I’m pleased to say, is in any event a supporter of the bill.

15 June 2026

Paul Buckingham