The history of protest: Yvette Cooper would have labelled the Suffragettes terrorists
Yvette Cooper rightly venerates the Suffragettes who won the vote for women but as former Green MP Caroline Lucas pointed out a few weeks ago, if she applied the same criteria she does to Palestine Action, then the Suffragettes would be labelled as terrorists too.
While the Suffragettes organised mass demonstrations for the vote in the years before World War One, a more militant section went beyond breaking windows to attacks on property and arson. Some of these, deliberately or not, involved significant injuries to individuals.
According to Yvette Cooper writing in the Observer on 17th August 2025
Palestine Action has claimed responsibility for – and promoted on its website – attacks that have seen those allegedly involved subsequently charged with violent disorder, grievous bodily harm with intent, actual bodily harm, criminal damage and aggravated burglary.
The problem with this perspective is that all of the things Cooper mentioned are existing offences that can be prosecuted as such. When people are arrested for ‘aggravated burglary’ for example they are not usually called terrorists.
As Amnesty International have underlined again the Terrorism Act 2000 gives an absurdly wide catch all definition of terrorism. Peter Hain pointed out in the Guardian that if Palestine Action are terrorists what term might be used to cover ISIS and Al Qaeda?
Beyond all that trying to prosecute people who disagree with Cooper’s ban as ‘terrorists’ for holding up placards, as the current DPP is trying to do, represents a significant slide towards authoritarianism.
One might conclude that when at school and University Yvette Cooper clearly was not paying attention to two important matters:
1 The First Law of Holes
2 The actual history of protest, starting with the Chartist slogan ‘peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must’
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