The above clip shows the speech by Paul Laverty on his release from custody, having been arrested for wearing what he incredulously points out is a ‘proscribed T-shirt’.
For that, he was arrested and charged under terrorism legislation. Let that sink in: in Britain, in 2025, the word “terrorist” is no longer reserved for those who plant bombs or plan mass killings, but for those who simply name genocide for what it is.
This is not just an attack on one man, or on Palestine Action, the group that the state now seeks to proscribe. It is an attempt to criminalise solidarity itself. To stretch the definition of terrorism until it covers even the most minimal act of conscience: wearing a slogan that opposes the starvation of children, the bombing of hospitals, the obliteration of an entire people.
Laverty, himself a former international human rights lawyer, talks about how he bored the police officer by going through the many reports declaring Israel’s actions to be genocidal – from the three reports by the UN, the report by Amnesty International and the report by Médecins Sans Frontières.
Paul Laverty goes on to say how the police officer was particularly bored when he bored him with the terms of the Genocide Convention, Article 1 of which obliges states not just to punish genocide but to prevent it. He bored the police officer further by talking about Article 3 makes collusion with genocide itself a crime. If Britain wasn’t utterly selective about which laws it adhered to, then members of the UK government would be in the dock for providing weapons, diplomatic cover, and political legitimacy to Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza. Instead, the inversion is complete: the people who oppose genocide are branded criminals by the British legislature, while those who facilitate it are lauded as statesmen.
This is the logic of symbolic violence. The state manipulates categories, “terrorist,” “extremist,” “legitimate protester”, to delegitimise opposition and maintain its complicity. What we are seeing is not the protection of democracy but the criminalisation of dissent, the disciplining of conscience. Some laws are legitimised, others are ignored, some courts such as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) have been completely undermined, while the UK courts are used by those in power to construct a narrative in which T-shirts and protests detract from the actual acts of genocide themselves.
But Laverty is right about one thing: the court that matters is not the court of law, but the court of public opinion. Governments across Europe may close ranks with Israel, repeating tired mantras of “self-defence” and “defeating Hamas,” but public opinion is elsewhere. Across the continent, polls show overwhelming majorities condemning the bombing of civilians, calling for ceasefires, demanding accountability. The state can try to criminalise speech, but it cannot erase this dissonance between rulers and ruled.
This gap between what people see with their own eyes and what governments insist they must believe is dangerous for those in power. And that is why repression is intensifying. Because once the narrative shifts from “terrorism” to “genocide,” once the question is not about how to police Palestine solidarity but how to hold our own governments accountable for its complicity in genocide, then the legitimacy of the state itself is at stake.
So let’s be clear: the arrest of Paul Laverty is not an isolated event. It is part of a wider strategy to silence, stigmatise, and criminalise opposition to the mass killing of a besieged population. But it also reveals the fragility of that strategy. For the more they stretch the word “terrorism” to cover dissent, the more obvious it becomes that the true extremism lies not with those who resist, but with those who collude in genocide.
The British law courts may brand us criminals. But the court of public opinion already knows the truth. And in the long arc of history it is that verdict which tends to endure.
