🚨 Explaining to the BBC what an alien culture is🚨

Some tricky conversations this evening about the impending social media ban. ‘I don’t even know who this government guy is’ ‘Keir Starmer’ ‘Keir Starmer, what does that mean’

Mike returns from holiday and gets treated to a sneak peek of our new studio that Puch has been working hard on 👀 @Iromg

The Court Of Appeal Got This One Right. Palestine Action Is A Proscribed Terrorist Organisation. The Ban Stands. Five senior judges have ruled what should never have been in doubt. The Government's decision to proscribe Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act was lawful. The High Court's February ruling that it was disproportionate has been overturned. The ban stands. It is worth recalling what got Palestine Action proscribed in the first place. In June 2025 activists broke into RAF Brize Norton and damaged military aircraft with spray paint, an act the Government assessed as causing serious harm to national security. That followed a sustained campaign of break-ins, criminal damage and disruption at defence and industrial sites going back to 2020. Even the High Court judges who ruled the ban disproportionate conceded, in their own words, that a very small number of the group's actions had amounted to terrorist action under the legal definition. Shabana Mahmood put it more plainly. The court acknowledged that Palestine Action has carried out acts of terrorism, celebrated those who carried them out, and promoted the use of violence. That was the High Court's own finding, in the same ruling that called the ban disproportionate. The proscription was endorsed by Parliament. It followed what the Home Secretary described as a rigorous and evidence-based process. The High Court's objection was not that the underlying conduct was acceptable. It was that the Home Secretary, in the judges' view, had not properly followed her own departmental policy in reaching the decision. A procedural finding was used to try to unwind a substantive judgement that the conduct itself met the threshold for terrorism. In the months between proscription and this ruling, over 1,600 arrests were made linked to support for the group. Four activists, convicted by a jury of criminal damage, were sentenced as terrorists, a sentencing decision that drew an open letter from more than fifty lawyers and academics objecting to the label. Throughout that period the ban remained legally contested, with protesters outside the Royal Courts of Justice holding placards reading "I'm not a terrorist" while the organisation they supported had already been found, even by the judges who ruled against the Government, to have engaged in terrorist action. This matters beyond Palestine Action itself. The same week this ruling landed, a Shia cleric with an open paper trail of mourning Hezbollah fighters and glorifying the IRGC walked back into Britain unchallenged, his case sitting in a queue marked "under review." Meanwhile a group that broke into an RAF base and damaged military aircraft came within one judgment of having its terrorist designation quashed entirely, on the basis that the Home Secretary's paperwork had not been completed to the court's satisfaction. The Court of Appeal has now corrected that. Breaking into a military airbase and disabling aircraft with the explicit aim of disrupting Britain's defence capability is not protest. It is not civil disobedience in the tradition of the causes its supporters like to invoke. It is, in the law's own words, terrorist action. Five judges have now said so unambiguously, and said that the Home Secretary was entitled to act on it. The law has occasionally been used as a shield for things that plainly should not be shielded. Today it was used correctly. The distinction between a protest movement and a proscribed terrorist organisation is not a technicality, it is the line the Court of Appeal has just redrawn where it always should have been. "In the months between proscription and this ruling, over 1,600 arrests were made linked to support for the group."