Labour doubles down on its hypocrisy and brutality.
The 2025 Labour Party conference, held in Liverpool from Sunday 28th to Tuesday 30th September, once again exposed both the hypocrisy and brutality of the party’s stance on the genocide in Gaza. It also underlined Labour’s repressive response to any populist opposition that dares to challenge its imperialist imperative: unconditional support for Zionism and its genocidal agents, the Israeli state and its instrument of slaughter, the Israeli Defence Force, all rendered the height of hypocrisy by the recent act of the Labour government in recognising a Palestinian state.
During protests held outside the Labour Party conference venue, the Arena and Convention Centre, peaceful demonstrators were arrested for waving placards displaying support for the proscribed organisation Palestine Action. 66 protesters were arrested on the 29th September following on from 15 that were arrested on the 28th September, bringing the total to 81, of which two were later released without charge. Those arrested on the 29th were aged from 21 to 83. No figures appear to have been released on the ages of those arrested on the 28th.
The sight of peaceful protesters being arrested for nothing more than holding up a placard expressing support for Palestine Action, which Labour proscribed on 5/7/25, has now become a common feature of Palestine protests across Britain, including the sickening brutality of elderly women having their hands bound behind their backs with plastic flexi-straps, then being physically manhandled into waiting police carrier vans.
The proscription of Palestine Action is a gross misuse of counter terrorism powers enshrined in the Terrorism Act 2000, stretching the definition of terrorism to cover disruptive protest and property damage already punishable under ordinary criminal law. This measure cannot be understood in isolation; it is part of the Labour government’s broader role as the left liberal mask of British imperialism. By branding a protest network as a terrorist organisation, Labour is not defending the public from violence, but defending the imperialist order itself. Israel, a settler colonial state and a key instrument of Anglo‑American domination in the Middle East, relies on Britain’s political, diplomatic, and military support. To criminalise those who disrupt Britain’s arms trade or expose its complicity is to move beyond passive support into active collaboration with genocide.
What Labour presents as counter terrorism is in reality counter insurgency: an attempt to delegitimise Palestine solidarity, intimidate protest movements, and set a precedent for wider repression. The timing of the ban, amid mass opposition to Israel’s levelling of Gaza and starvation of its population, underlines its political purpose to silence solidarity, suppress resistance, and protect Britain’s complicity in genocide. This repression is not a sign of authority but of insecurity, a reflection of the ruling class’s fear that their narrative, the defence of which they see as vital to the economic and military interests of western imperialism, could collapse completely.
This internal tyranny comes amid Britain’s recent recognition of a Palestinian state, an act of cynical hypocrisy. This recognition is not justice but performative virtue signalling: a staged display of compassion that conceals and preserves complicity. By affirming a ‘state’ that exists only in diplomatic rhetoric, Starmer’s government attempts to present itself as humane while evading responsibility for Britain’s historical and ongoing role in the dispossession and elimination of the Palestinian people. It is politics of gesture over substance, where recognition costs nothing and changes nothing. Meanwhile, Britain continues to facilitate and diplomatically support the perpetrators of genocide, rendering its recognition a sham. We have covered the British recognition of a Palestinian state in a recent article: Gaza, Genocide, and the Charade of Recognition.
The repression of Palestine protesters has been intensified over recent months using powers granted under the Terrorism Act 2000 combined with 2021 proscription of Hamas, which allows for a ‘three part test’ threat of prosecution that blurs lawful flags, chants, and symbols with criminalised extremism. First, an act of expression, such as carrying a Palestinian flag or chanting a slogan, is itself legal. Second, authorities construct a link by claiming the act implies support for a proscribed organisation like Hamas, invoking sections of the Terrorism Act, such as article 13 (display of articles) or article 12 (inviting support). Third, they frame the context as threatening public order or causing distress under the Public Order Act 1986.
Once expression, link, and context are combined, prosecutors can recast ordinary political protest as terrorism related, effectively enabling them to suppress legitimate protest. With those three elements in place, the protester can be arrested, even though neither the flag itself nor its display is illegal. The act becomes prosecutable because the state interprets it through the lens of proscription and public order, allowing police discretion to criminalise anti Zionist protest.
The events in Liverpool last week outside the Labour Party conference mark another round of state repression. This comes in the context of Britain’s act of fake virtue signalling, its recognition of a Palestinian state which aligns with the fraudulent two state solution. This so‑called solution offers nothing but sleight of hand, a mechanism to preserve Israeli, and by extension Western imperialist, control. What is indisputable is that British imperialism equates armed national liberation under genocidal occupation with terrorism, while maintaining its close ties to the Israeli state, a stance consistent with its broader imperial and geopolitical interests. A lasting and just peace requires a one state solution for all of historic Palestine, beginning with the revocation of all prior recognition of the state of Israel.
We must resist with every fibre of our being both the internal repression of dissent in Britain and the very existence of the Zionist entity on Palestinian land, as part of the wider struggle against imperialism.
Class Consciousness Project 
Leave a comment