Direct Action: Two Case Studies

Just Stop Oil's campaign, running since April 2022, has consistently chosen targets tied to its cause rather than random disruption: petrol stations (43 arrests in a single coordinated action against seven London stations alone), luxury car dealerships including Ferrari, Bugatti and Bentley showrooms in Mayfair, the Bank of England, MI5, the Home Office and News Corp's headquarters, and M25 service stations where fuel pumps were damaged. The group says the National Gallery's Rokeby Venus, its glass smashed with safety hammers in 2023, was chosen deliberately as an echo of suffragette Mary Richardson's 1914 attack on the same painting.

By the group's own count, its supporters have been arrested more than 1,900 times since the campaign began, with several members having served prison time for offences including occupying trees slated for clearance and criminal damage to protected artwork.

Palestine Action's status is genuinely different in kind from any other group on this page: since 5 July 2025, it has been formally proscribed as a terrorist organisation under the Terrorism Act 2000 \u2014 the same legal category as al-Qaeda and ISIL. It is now a criminal offence in the UK to be a member of the group or to express support for it. The immediate trigger was an incident at RAF Brize Norton on 20 June 2025, in which activists broke into the base and sprayed red paint on two military aircraft. The government's stated justification, given in Parliament, described a "nationwide campaign of direct criminal action against businesses and institutions" with a presence in all 45 UK policing regions, and targets that had broadened from defence firms to financial firms, charities, universities and government buildings.

This is genuinely contested, not settled law. The High Court ruled in February 2026 that the ban was unlawful and disproportionate; the Court of Appeal then overturned that ruling in June 2026, finding the proscription lawful after all. The United Nations' Human Rights Chief, Volker Türk, has separately and publicly called the ban a "disturbing misuse" of counter-terrorism legislation, arguing that international standards confine terrorism to acts intended to cause death, serious injury or hostage-taking \u2014 not property damage. More than 130 public figures have spoken out against the proscription.

The scale of public pushback has been extraordinary by UK standards: over 425 people were arrested at a single September 2025 rally in Parliament Square specifically in support of the now-banned group, a genuinely unusual number for one day of protest.

One claim worth including, with a clear caveat attached: data attributed to Global Witness and cited by at least one campaigning outlet suggests UK climate protests have, in aggregate, been policed more heavily than far-right protests \u2014 with a specific example of Northumbria Police spending \u00a3488,530 policing pro-Palestine demonstrations around a single arms factory in Newcastle between December 2023 and April 2025.

That figure comes to us second-hand, from a source that describes its own outlook as progressive, rather than directly from Global Witness's own published data. It's a real, checkable claim worth taking seriously \u2014 but worth verifying against the primary source before treating it as a settled comparison, rather than accepting it because it fits a preferred conclusion either way.

A claim has circulated online linking Home Secretary Yvette Cooper's donor connections to the decision to proscribe Palestine Action. The underlying financial facts here are genuinely well documented, independently of that specific claim: Trevor Chinn, a long-time Labour donor, gave \u00a350,000 to Keir Starmer's 2020 leadership campaign and is a major funder of both Labour Together and Labour Friends of Israel. Investigative reporting has separately found Cooper among the ministers who have received funding traceable to Chinn and other pro-Israel-linked donors, alongside most of the rest of the current Cabinet.

What isn't established is the causal leap some commentators draw from those facts \u2014 that this funding explains or caused the specific decision to proscribe Palestine Action. The donation records demonstrate a real financial relationship; they don't, by themselves, demonstrate that the relationship drove that particular policy outcome. That distinction matters, and an honest account keeps the two separate rather than treating a real funding link as proof of a specific motive.