YVETTE COOPER’S determination to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation for an entirely peaceful protest is a grotesque assault on civil liberties.

If it is not defeated it will have a chilling effect on free expression in Britain, and not just on direct actions of the kind Palestine Action specialise in.

Witness the absurd prosecution of Kneecap band member Liam Og O hAnnaidh for allegedly displaying the flag of proscribed Lebanese group Hezbollah: public expressions of support for Palestine Action would become illegal. As Metropolitan Police chief Sir Mark Rowley makes clear, that would include the kind of solidarity demonstration that took place in Trafalgar Square today.

Some say the government’s hysterical overreaction is due to deep embarrassment that two individuals could break into Britain’s biggest RAF base, ride up to military jets on scooters and pour paint into their engines in protest at the RAF’s role in providing intelligence to Israel’s armed forces committing war crimes in Gaza, before leaving undetected.

But the reality is that Cooper’s draconian extremism is entirely aligned with the government’s record — and that of its predecessor.

The cross-party consensus in favour of an ever more authoritarian state is as firm as their joint support for militarism, war and an Israeli state facing genocide charges in international courts.

Labour in opposition declined to overturn the successive restrictions on our freedoms by the last Conservative government — from the policing, public order and national security Acts gifting police sweeping powers to shut down protest and providing for 10-year prison sentences for being a “serious nuisance,” to new ministerial authority to declare organisations “extremist” with no court process or right of appeal, banning public authorities from then talking to them.

In power, Cooper’s Crime and Policing Bill continues the repressive drive, with government amendments giving police greater powers to imprison protest organisers and impose huge fines on participants if they breach increasingly arbitrary police restrictions.

This legislation is aimed squarely at suppressing the mass movement for Palestine. So is the ban on Palestine Action. Both are attempts by an unpopular government to mask just how unpopular its active complicity in Israel’s war crimes are.

It is that which should inform mass resistance to the ban on Palestine Action. Met chief Sir Mark tries to claim that “actions in support of such a group go beyond what most would see as legitimate protest,” but he is wrong.

Whether or not most people support particular forms of direct action it has taken, most definitely see the hypocrisy of dubbing a paint-based protest “terrorism” while continuing the crime it was designed to highlight, RAF support for the terror inflicted on the Palestinian people by Israel. Most do not want their right to express an opinion on such actions curtailed by law.

And, as polling has repeatedly shown, most are dead against this government’s support for Israel. An Opinium poll early this month found 57 per cent would back a full arms embargo on Israel, which just 13 per cent opposed, while 53 per cent want Israel expelled from the UN and 50 per cent thought supermarkets should boycott all Israeli products.

A Westminster consensus behind repression and war must be met by a growing public consensus against both. Building that is the task of mass movements like the coalition behind the huge Palestine demonstrations, but must involve solidarity with groups like Palestine Action too.

For the anti-war left, wider understanding that the wars our government supports are criminal should be a basis for organising against militarism and Britain’s place in the US-dominated Nato alliance, whose summit starting on Tuesday will confirm our subservience to the US’s globally aggressive agenda by committing member states to spend billions more on their militaries in obedience to Donald Trump’s demands, even as the US lurches into unprovoked war against Iran.