KEIR STARMER has a problem. Actually, he faces a veritable tsunami of problems, but the most pressing one is the collapse of public confidence in his government.

It is not just the desultory opinion poll figures which suggest that — come a general election — that most of his new intake of MPs and a good many of those more established will be handed their virtual P45s by an unforgiving electorate.

It is not just the humiliating lack of respect accorded him and his fellow European leaders by the devious denizen of the Oval Office.

It is not just the complete irrelevance with which his views on the war on Russia’s borders are accorded.

It is not just the anger people feel at his government’s accommodation with racism.

It is not just the disdain with which most trade unionists regard his government’s backsliding on workers’ rights.

It is not just the complete contempt which people have for his sickening toleration for Israeli genocide or the anger they feel at both the open and covert military and intelligence aid which is deployed in support of the Israeli death machine.

It is the increasingly open defiance that is shown by growing numbers of people to his government’s failing attempt to deny free expression and his hopeless endeavour to shut down dissent.

When bemused coppers have to check with their superiors whether a T-shirt bearing the legend “Plasticine Action” in the colours of Palestine constitutes an offence against the Terrorism Act, we know that it is not the hundreds of thousands who repeatedly take to the streets who are out of step with majority opinion but these hopeless inadequates who thought that arresting elderly electors for carrying home-made cardboard declarations was likely to coerce our solidarity coalition of the wilful into surrender.

Extra piquancy is added to the runaway success of the Plasticine Action T-shirt, which, with two-fingers-to-Starmer and his Home Secretary, is being sold with the profits raised going to Medical Aid for Palestine.

In a world that is grappling with war, poverty, inequality, discrimination and climate change, protest is more essential than ever to challenge the way things are.

Our government deploys a whole range of repressive laws in addition to the latest Terrorism Act. This latest law gives discretion to the bourgeois state’s system of coercion to take the accused out of the jury system. In this alone, the government is conceding political ground by acknowledging that a jury of peers is manifestly less likely to convict under this obscenely unjust law than a judge.

A hope unfulfilled was that the new Labour government would repeal anti-protest laws pushed through by the Tories. Where this includes sections of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2021 relating to public order, the Public Order Act 2023 itself and the Serious Disruption Regulations 2023, the government has disappointed.

When confronted by people willing to disobey an unjust law, the government itself loses both confidence and credibility. There is no limit to the number of people so willing.

The demand for the government to take action on the Palestine question has become one which is already compelling some measures that register disapproval. But carpeting the Israeli ambassador means nothing while military supplies, intelligence and surveillance flights by the RAF give material support to the Israeli war machine, and the production of war materials by British and Israeli firms continues.

Where Palestine Action demonstrates its moral superiority over government ministers and their supporters is in asserting a measure of popular sovereignty in carrying out actions that accord with popular opinion and materially affect the Israeli war machine.