Right, so Palestine Action, having undertaken their brisk tour of the airbase at Brize Norton last year, did of course give two RAF Voyager aircraft a makeover in that well-known colour, “international incident red.”
Keir Starmer, as he never misses an opportunity to overreact, responded by hurriedly slapping a terrorism ban on the movement. All of that we already know of course.
Now, you can think breaking into an RAF base and spraying military planes is irresponsible, reckless, criminal, all of the above. Fine. It was always going to attract attention, that was the point. This was not somebody glueing themselves to a council chamber door here.
But there is quite a leap, isn’t there, between prosecuting the people who got into the base and declaring the entire movement a terrorist organisation?
That was Starmer’s leap.
The man looked at a very obvious security failure by the RAF, saw two aircraft covered in red paint, and decided the problem was not the security at the base. It was the existence of people prepared to protest British military involvement in Gaza.
So he reached for terrorism law.
And when a government starts treating political protest as a national-security problem, it rarely stops at the first overreach. It gets ideas. It starts asking what else could be done. What new powers might help. What new systems could be built. How much further the definition of “security” can be stretched before it finally snaps.
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