A judge has imposed lengthy custodial sentences on four Palestine Action activists who smashed up drones and other equipment at an Israeli arms manufacturer’s UK factory after ruling that there was a “terrorist connection” to their offending.
Charlotte Head, 30, and Leona Kamio, 30, were each jailed for five years and Fatema Rajwani, 21, was sentenced to four years and 8 months for criminal damage in relation to a 2024 break-in at the Elbit Systems UK site in Gloucestershire. Samuel Corner, 23, who was additionally convicted of grievous bodily harm without intent [emphasis added] for striking Sgt Kate Evans with a sledgehammer, was sentenced to seven years and eight months. Each will also spend an additional year on licence and be subject to 15 years of terrorist notification requirements.
A report relied on by the prosecution at Friday’s sentencing hearing said the raid on the factory had caused £1.2m of damage, including to 41 military assets. The report referred to £395,056 of damage to six units in an unnamed drone system as well as damage to other unmanned aerial vehicles.
The Guardian yesterday
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In a post eight days ago I wrote:
If we do not understand Zionism as a colonial/imperial project – for reasons given here and here – our grasp of its inhumanities may be heartfelt and actionable, and on both counts invaluable, but will be limited and easily exploited by dark forces which thrive on confusion and are capable of appropriating our most decent and laudable instincts.
And if we do? Then we will also know that empire’s excesses in far off lands – which by a zillion objective measures erode rather than protect the interests of the vast majority of Westerners, whether we slice this economically or by the Orwellian degraded term, ‘security’ – have a way of blowing back on the imperial hub itself. Witness the erosion of hard won civil liberties across the West.
My cue for handing over to Jonathan Cook, writing yesterday. His focus is on Britain’s increasing de facto pro Zionist policing, echoed in Europe, North America and Antipodes …
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Since then, but before yesterday’s draconian sentencing – among many egregious injustices, the jury which convicted them had no idea they’d be jailed as terrorists – of four brave young Britons for breaking the law to disrupt crimes vastly greater and darker, crimes in which the British state is actively complicit, Jonathan Cook returned to the subject. A few words before I hand over to him on the sinister and multi pronged assault on the rule of law – to say nothing of decency, fair play and actual justice – posed by the treatment of the Filton Four. As its title suggests, his clear and characteristically unshowy piece takes as its start point thousands of lawyers voicing alarm at the subversion of due process, and of a much vaunted separation of the executive from judiciary arms of state for which we had a foretaste with the persecution of another brave young person of conscience …
… while calling in vain for Judge Johnson, hardly less compromised by conflicting interests and loyalties than Lady Arbuthnott, to recuse himself.
Over to Jonathan, writing June 10.
Legal profession revolt against the UK judge whose job is to protect Israel’s genocide
Judge Johnson so rigged the trial of anti-genocide activists that 1000s of legal professionals have urged him to step down from the sentencing hearing. But Johnson’s dirty work is not yet complete.
The trial of the Filton Four reaches its climax on Friday. Judge Jeremy Johnson will decide the sentences of four Palestine Action activists found guilty of criminal damage – after two juries refused to convict them of far more serious charges brought by the British government, via the Crown Prosecution Service.
Keir Starmer’s government failed to secure the convictions for aggravated burglary and violent disorder it so desperately needed. They would have helped retroactively justify its decision to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation – the first time in British history that a direct action group, which targets property, has been proscribed.
Starmer’s hostility towards Palestine Action is personal. It has been a massive thorn in his side during Israel’s near three-year genocide in Gaza.
From the outset, Starmer suggested that Israel had the “right” to withhold food, water and power from the 2 million Palestinian residents of Gaza – a crime against humanity for which the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is wanted by the International Criminal Court.
Starmer’s complicity in the genocide has only been underscored by Palestine Action, which has targeted Israeli factories operating in the UK run by Elbit Systems that supply Israel’s genocidal army with killer drones for use in Gaza.
The so-called Filton trial derives its name from an Elbit factory in the Filton neighbourhood of Bristol that Palestine Action targeted in August 2024. Efforts to destroy these Israeli drones came at a time when Starmer was under enormous popular – if little political – pressure to end British arms sales to Israel.
PR crisis
Proscription, however, has not worked out well for Starmer. It has entangled him in a self-inflicted public relations crisis of almighty proportions.
Palestine Action activists have been held in remand without trial for an unprecedented period of time, far in excess of the normal maximums, and in especially harsh conditions that have treated them as if they were terrorism suspects, even though their arrests long precede the group’s proscription last year.
These sustained abuses led to a prolonged hunger strike, and a desperate government and media campaign to justify their mistreatment.
Proscription has led to thousands of people, most of them elderly and including upstanding members of British society – from magistrates and doctors to army veterans – facing convictions for “supporting terrorism” for holding up placards stating: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”
This popular backlash cornered the High Court into declaring the proscription unlawful – a decision the government is appealing. That has led to another unprecedented situation: police are still arresting people for holding the placards, despite the courts ruling that the basis for such arrests is unlawful.
The law has never looked more of an ass.
Which is why the government is pinning its hopes on Judge Johnson riding to the rescue on Friday.
Judge Johnson has not been shy about showing where his loyalties lie. Not to the law, but to the British security state.
Which should hardly come as a surprise, given his background …
Read Jonathan’s piece in full on his substack …
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It’s all one can expect from our fascist ruling scum class, who have been doing very similar things for centuries. I hope it is possible to have an appeal, and that there is sufficient disturbance in the legal profession to help overturn this witch-trial.
I support the Filton Four.
There are precedents. We’re old enough to remember the Shrewsbury trade unionists – among them a Ricky Tomlinson yet to switch career from plasterer to actor – jailed under the arcane 1875 Conspiracy Act for trade union activity in the 1972 builders’ strike. The uproar was so great – even the painfully timid TUC was talking of a general strike – that under one of those even more arcane powers held in reserve by the British ruling class as a bail out card, up popped a “Crown Solicitor” last heard of in the 16th century and who, it turned out, had the hitherto unsuspected authority to overturn a judge’s ruling!
Them woz different times though. I’d love to be wrong but don’t see the TUC weighing in on this one, though a dismissal of Home Secretary Shabena Mahmood’s appeal against the High Court ruling, as yet scandalously unenforced, that her predecessor Yvette Cooper’s proscription of Palestine Action was unlawful won’t do the Filton 4 any harm.