The protest on the steps of the Met’s headquarters turned a narrow legal dispute into another public test of how Britain is policing speech around the group. The force says it is enforcing the law as it currently stands; critics say the shift revives the same free-expression concerns that helped persuade judges to strike down the ban.
Palestine Action supporters arrested again as Met hardens its stance
After the High Court ruling on Feb. 13, Counter Terrorism Policing said enforcement would be handled “pragmatically and proportionately” while the legal picture settled. That changed with the Met’s revised enforcement notice issued March 25, which said “anyone showing support for the group is likely to be arrested.”
The legal hinge is technical but crucial. The High Court ordered the 2025 proscription quashed, but the quashing order was stayed pending the government’s appeal. In practice, that means Palestine Action remains proscribed for now, even after judges said the decision to ban it was unlawful.
That left Saturday’s protesters confronting a policing approach that had shifted twice in six weeks: first toward restraint after the February judgment, then back toward arrest after the Met said it had finished reviewing the court’s order. Reporting from outside New Scotland Yard showed the 18-person sit-in becoming the clearest test yet of that new stance.
Why the reversal is facing criticism
For critics, the argument is not only about Saturday’s arrests but about what kind of conduct counterterror powers should reach at all. In its response to the February ruling, Amnesty International UK said the court had drawn a “line in the sand” against using proscription to suppress political activism, warning that thousands of peaceful protesters had already been swept up under terrorism laws.
The Met rejects that reading and says the issue is simpler: until the appeal is decided, support for a proscribed organization remains unlawful, and officers have to police the law in force rather than the law campaigners hope will follow. That position may be legally consistent with the stay, but it also ensures that each new arrest sharpens the political dispute over whether the government and police are treating direct action and public support as matters of national security rather than protest.
How the current clash fits a longer timeline
The latest arrests sit inside a much longer confrontation. In June 2025, Britain said it would ban Palestine Action under anti-terrorism laws after activists damaged two RAF planes at Brize Norton. By early September, police had arrested almost 900 people at a London protest supporting the group. Then, in February, the High Court ruled the ban unlawful, finding it disproportionately interfered with free expression even while leaving the proscription temporarily in place.
That sequence helps explain why Saturday’s 18 arrests mattered beyond the steps of New Scotland Yard. They were not just another protest-policing incident. They marked the return of a harder enforcement line in one of Britain’s most contentious civil-liberties battles, with the appeal still to come and both the government and campaigners treating the next ruling as a defining test of how far the state can go in turning protest into terrorism law.
