On a power held in reserve
On a power held in reserve
On a power held in reserve
On 4 July 2026, the one-year anniversary of the ban, an 84-year-old retired priest named Sue Parfitt stood on a cardboard box outside New Scotland Yard and asked the police officers in front of her to join Palestine Action, and they arrested her.
Palestine Action is a direct-action group that spent five years damaging the British factories of arms firms tied to Israel, and in July 2025 the government proscribed it under the Terrorism Act, which made membership a crime and made expressing support for it an offence carrying up to fourteen years in prison.
So a spoken invitation, made in full view of cameras, became an act of terrorism. The officers led her away without handcuffs, as a courtesy to her age.
The scene is easy to read as a mistake, as the state losing its sense of proportion. I think that reading is wrong, and the truth is harder.
The law did not change to reach her. The clause that makes her a terrorist was written in 2000, and it has sat in the statute book ever since. Section 1 of the Terrorism Act defines terrorism to include serious damage to property, done to influence a government, for a political cause, and it does not require that any person be harmed. That definition was drawn from an American model, and it was shaped in part by the sabotage of animal-rights activists in the 1990s, and it was written for a country still leaving the Northern Ireland conflict behind. The reach was there from the first day.
What grew after was the punishment. In 2006 the government added offences for glorifying terrorism, after the London bombings. In 2019 it made it a crime to express support for a banned group while being reckless about who might be encouraged, a lower bar than before, and it wrote this with returning foreign fighters in mind. In 2021 it raised the maximum sentence for that offence to fourteen years.
None of these were built for a woman on a box, and all of them now apply to her.
The state's own reviewer saw it coming. Jonathan Hall, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, wrote before the ban that no court had ever settled what serious damage to property means, and that the clause could pull ordinary protest into terrorism policing where no harm to people was intended, and he suggested the test be narrowed. The government read the warning and proscribed the group anyway.
So the priest sits at the meeting point of two things. One is a definition wide enough to hold her, present and unused against protest for twenty-five years. The other is a set of penalties assembled for other threats and now applied to her. Neither was made for her, and both reach her.
For twenty-five years the state held this power and chose not to use it against protest, and the choice was political, not legal. When it was withdrawn, it was withdrawn by decision, in a particular week, over a particular cause.
The law worked as written. What changed is that someone decided to use it.