THE High Court’s confirmation that banning Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation was unlawful is another hammer blow to Keir Starmer’s vicious and authoritarian government.

Its authority is already in tatters, the Mandelson scandal cementing the Prime Minister’s reputation for dishonesty; the resignation of Morgan McSweeney, the driver of its nasty factionalism and anti-democratic intolerance, leaving Downing Street rudderless and adrift.

Now the single greatest attack by Starmer’s government on our civil liberties — the proscription of a direct action group as terrorist, leading to thousands of arrests of entirely peaceful demonstrators since — has been exposed as draconian overreach, unjustified in law.

The ban remains while the government can appeal, something Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood says it will do. In that the rotten Westminster consensus is with her — the Tories have already welcomed an appeal and suggested amending the law to give governments greater unchecked power to proscribe organisations of their choice.

Last summer, when the ban came into force, just 22 MPs voted against it. Following a much larger rebellion against social security cuts, it showed a disappointing lack of concern over the assault on democratic rights that Labour inherited from the Conservatives and has intensified since coming to power.

Can we prompt a bigger rebellion today, and deter the government from trying to maintain its repressive ban?

The circumstances of the ban show similarities to aspects of the Mandelson scandal that still dogs the government. MPs hoping Labour can move on need to recognise this.

If public contracts with Palantir now reek of corruption given its relationship with Mandelson’s lobbying firm Global Counsel and the number of Ministry of Defence officials who went into jobs at the CIA-linked surveillance tech company before it won them, then the role of corporate lobbying in the persecution of Palestine Action needs addressing too.

We know that former British Army chief Lord Richard Dannatt wrote to Home Office ministers in 2022 demanding they address the “threat” posed by Palestine Action after they caused damage at a factory belonging to US company Teledyne, to which he was a paid adviser. Dannatt was later suspended from the Lords for breaching lobbying rules, though not over that incident.

We also know that US President Donald Trump said after speaking to Starmer in March last year that he had been assured Britain had “caught the terrorists” (Palestine Action activists, though it had not then been declared terrorist) who had vandalised his Turnberry golf course in Scotland. Trump’s shadow looms over the Mandelson scandal, and any suggestion the ban was influenced by the US president should worry MPs.

Besides the run-up, what about the consequences?

Images of British police rounding up hundreds of often elderly protesters for sitting in public places holding placards have beamed around the world, revealing a repressive reality at odds with the state’s self-projection as a defender of democracy and free speech.

The absurd claim that a direct action group engaged in targeted acts disrupting parts of the Israeli war machine’s supply chain was “terrorist,” and therefore a threat to civilians, was used to justify the inhuman treatment of activists awaiting trial for months and even years — denial of bail, of rights to associate with other prisoners, to books, libraries and the gym — provoking the agonising hunger strikes of the winter.

The people do not swallow the Westminster lies. Juries are refusing to convict Palestine Action activists — one reason the government wants to take an axe to jury rights.

That government is way out of step with the British people.

MPs should find the courage, now Labour’s need for a fresh start is so blindingly obvious, to tell it to lift the ban, accept the court ruling and drop its attempts to criminalise solidarity with Palestine. Those who won’t should be confronted on it publicly — and no candidate to succeed Starmer should be allowed to duck the question.