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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

But they're only a proscribed group because the cabinet decided it was politically convenient to proscribe them.

It's not like these guys are the Taliban or the IRA, though some of them did chuck some paint on some planes.

So a person who is worried about Starmer's authoritarian tendencies lay responsibility for the police action at the door of number 10.

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They destroyed "drone and aircraft machinery" [0] at APPH and at Teledyne "damage to the clean rooms could halt production for up to 12 months" [1].

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-57403049

[1]: https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/pro-palestine-activists-dama...

That's an argument for arresting and imprisoning a bunch of people for criminal damage, not an argument for proscribing an entire organisation and limiting their free speech.

The argument here is not the PA should be let off scot free. The argument is that proscribing them as an organisation is a massive and authoritarian overreaction to their actions.

I should have included the quote I was responding to: "some of them did chuck some paint on some planes."

Is that inaccurate? Unless the goal was to strike terror into the hearts of some insurance companies, in what way does the scale of the damages affect whether this organisation should be proscribed? Should we be proscribing Bernie Madoff next?

"chuck some paint" is a deliberate misrepresentation.

It misleadingly describes the scale, coordination, and intent. It uses a minor detail to trivialize an act explicitly intended to reduce military capacity.

Is there any scale of paint chucking that can realistically represent a terrorist threat? Is there any scale of paint chucking that should lead to proscription? Because that's the key point here. It's not "can they be prosecuted for paint chucking?" (yes, obviously), or "can their paint checking escapades have serious costs or ramifications?" (sure, lock them up!) it's a question of whether their actions constituted such a grave threat to the safety of the United Kingdom that the only way of dealing with that was to make it illegal to even support their group.

If we as a country are so at risk from paint chucking that we're resorting to proscription as our tool of defence, then we have some serious issues.

Although PA was bundled in with two other organisations in the vote, the vote did pass 385 votes to 26, so it seems there was broad support across MPs, not just the cabinet.

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