🟢 The Green Party Must Reject an Alliance with Labour Over Palestine Action
When a governing political party labels protesters as "terrorists" and defies the courts, a red line is crossed from upholding public order to a fascist repression of dissent.
What is most appalling about the Labour Party’s enactment of state violence against members of Palestine Action is not that they proscribed it as a “terrorist organisation”. Excessive power makes people stupid, and their decision was obviously, ridiculously stupid.
Nor was it the government’s refusal to back down when this stupidity was brilliantly exposed by the civil disobedience campaign of holding placards in support of the protesters. Power is also proud. It cannot lose face.
No, what is most appalling is that, once the court ruled the proscription was illegal, the Home Secretary immediately announced they would appeal the judgement.
In other words, they are not just stupid. They are evil.
The two things are quite different. We can all be stupid. We all make mistakes. But when a political organisation running a state is told by the courts that its actions are illegal, and then continues to insist that protesters are terrorists, it shows that this was not a mistake. These people actually believe that protesting is a terrorist act.
This is the essence of the fascist position: to label opponents as terrorists in order to justify violence against them — raids, arrests, imprisonment.
If any member of the Labour Party does not resign over this exposure of what their politicians have now shown themselves to be, then they themselves are complicit in this strategy.
Because this is massively serious.
You either protect a free society or you lose it.
You either believe in proportionality or you believe in the fascist playbook.
The difference here is the same as the difference between direct action and terrorism. There is a fundamental chasm between them.
No alliance with Labour
Which raises a serious question: is the Green Party going to go into alliance with this organisation?
Any alliance with Labour has to be ruled out absolutely. Labour is now functioning as a pathological criminal organisation. Keir Starmer lied to become leader. The party broke its own rules to expel tens of thousands of members on trumped-up charges. Its culture is rooted in a top-down, oligarchic and factional structure that suppresses dissent and consolidates control.
Organisational research consistently shows that century-old institutions do not fundamentally reform themselves. They protect their internal power arrangements. They double down. They expel critics. They bureaucratise dissent. They become more rigid over time, not less.
Labour is not drifting accidentally into authoritarianism. Its internal structure predisposes it towards it.
If the Green Party enters into alliance with Labour, it will be dragged into the cesspit of neo-liberal appeasement of the corporate class. That is how institutional gravity works. Smaller parties do not transform larger oligarchic machines. They get absorbed, neutralised, or compromised by them.
And history is instructive. In Germany, the long-term accommodation of social democracy and the Greens within a constrained neoliberal framework created the political vacuum in which the AfD surged to over 30 per cent in parts of the country. When progressive parties manage decline instead of confronting power, the far right feeds on the disillusionment.
If the Greens blur the moral line here, they will not weaken Reform. They will strengthen it.
This is the red line for any real progressive politics.
If you stand for proportionality, for civil liberties, for the right to dissent without being labelled a terrorist, then you do not ally with those who criminalise protest.
There is no grey zone here.
It is a red line.
Hobbes would be turning in his grave. Yes, the state may repress those who threaten public order — but there is one exception: when those who run the state themselves become an existential threat to public order through the destruction of the biosphere. Remember a certain trial after 1945. If you want to understand that argument in full, read my new book Suicide.
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