Anatomy of an Arrest

Tom Dennehy-Caddick on being one of the thousands arrested in Palestine Action protests

Church Front, Sarah Fuller, 2019

In the latest “Lift the Ban” protest at Trafalgar Square, I was the first of the 523 people arrested under the Terrorism Act for holding a sign reading: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”. I was only first because I was short on time: my wife was ill and we were staying at her parents’, so, to participate, I came into London with my 17-month-old son, who I left nearby in the capable hands of his aunt. My plan was to approach the police with my sign at 1pm – Defend Our Juries’ official start time – hoping to be arrested quickly and released on street bail, so I could get back to my son. It was a compromise that ultimately left me feeling compromised.

In the lead-up, the police presence dwarfed the protesters: the square filled with officers, vans and barricades, with barely a hundred of us milling at the foot of the steps. One protester plaintively abandoned his hope that the police might not have the capacity to arrest everyone.

I slumped on a bench, exasperated and sleep-deprived, struggling to collect my thoughts and prayers. Shortly before 1pm I caught up briefly with Anne Jones [p. 7], a friend of the house passing through. After discussing the legal paradox of arresting people under a ban the High Court had itself ruled unlawful, I wrote the prescribed words on my sign and approached the police. There followed an endless cycle of bureaucracy: waiting for an arresting officer, waiting in a van, waiting for instructions from higher-ups, waiting for the new pop-up processing facilities to process the process of processing me. In the end, matching me to their records took so long that I reluctantly admitted to being the same guy they’d arrested for a DSEI lock-on years earlier, simply to get back to my son.

Upon release, I felt an alienation from the whole process unlike anything I had experienced in previous actions. At first I put it down to disappointment: early reports suggested only dozens had been arrested. Days later the true figure emerged: 523, the third largest single -day mass arrest in modern UK history, behind only the Battle of the Beanfield and the second “Lift the Ban ” protest. I was delighted, yet something still felt amiss.

A second reason was that my state of life has changed. I am now a husband and father,

with a second child due in September. The costs of protest are no longer mine alone. The threat of legal proceedings, conviction, travel restrictions and career consequences is now shared with my young family.

Mary and Jesus, Sarah Fuller, 2012

But the deepest cause was that this action belonged to something much bigger than me. With 3,500 arrests, “Lift the Ban ” is possibly the largest campaign of civil disobedience in UK history. Unlike my earlier actions, planned among friends as forms of public communication we each helped shape, this followed a tightly organised script.

Simone Weil warned that “collectivity is the object of all idolatry”: it suspends individual reflection and draws people into the mindless machinery of power they seek to resist. The danger is to “always say it, never think it”, as Theodor Adorno put it, letting slogans replace reflection. Alasdair MacIntyre presses the same concern differently. Protest, he argues, once meant bearing witness “to something ”, and only consequently “against something ”. Modern protest collapses into negation alone, speaking chiefly to those who already agree and becoming incapable of either losing or winning an argument.

In the face of this, I have always defended direct action on three conditions. First, I remain transparently accountable. Second, my actions embody the change I wish to see, including non - violence. Third, they expose the contradictions of authority in ways argument cannot. The “Lift the Ban ” campaign, at its best, fulfils these principles. Holding a sign and waiting to be arrested is inherently transparent. Proscription strips a movement of basic legal protections, including freedom of speech, so publicly opposing such sweeping state powers embodies a freedom denied to everyone. And by arresting largely elderly, law-abiding citizens for holding signs, the authorities undermine their own claim that such bans are principally about public safety.

This is where Christ ’s cleansing of the temple, the trigger for his arrest, remains the model of Christian direct action worth returning to. Not because it was collective, but because of its purity of intention and total personal exposure: it was transparent, it embodied the purification it called for, and it forced the powers of this world to reveal themselves as the authors of death. That is the discernment I want direct action to retain; not mindlessly dissolving into a crowd, but a conscious, accountable and non -violent unveiling.

While I recognise the sacrifices Palestine Action activists have made, and maintain that the conduct attributed to them amounts principally to serious criminal damage rather than terrorism, I must also recognise that at times in word and deed they have not met these threefold criteria. This forms part of wider disagreements within the peace movement.

Whatever one thinks of particular activist groups, though, those disagreements do not erase the legal objections to proscription. The High Court ’s “chilling effect ” proportionality case, the Home Secretary ’s reliance on “disruptive benefits ” of the ban, and the UN Special Rapporteur Ben Saul ’s conclusion that even serious property damage does not itself amount to terrorism under international law, all remain substantial grounds on which the ban could yet be overturned, despite the Court of Appeal ’s June verdict.

None of that fully resolves what I communicate through my own action. But perhaps it does not need to in the moment of arrest. Discernment of our actions does not end when the handcuffs come off. It continues afterwards, in precisely this kind of reckoning: sorting what I actually said from what I meant to say, what I affirm and what I withhold, what principles I stand beside and what methods I do not.

What is certain is that restrictions on public expression often obscure debate until the state’s own response brings it into view. Instead of answering uncomfortable questions, it can become easier to render them unsayable.

So when Palestine Action ’s actions and the controversy surrounding the ban bring the genocide still unfolding in Gaza into sharper focus, we see with new clarity the need to cry out. It is that collective horror which has transformed targeted, discerning direct action into a mass movement large enough to challenge the state’s boundaries on speech.

MacIntyre ’s warning nevertheless remains. Christ ’s cleansing of the temple was first a witness to the sanctity of his Father ’s house, and only consequently against what defiled it. That, I think, is the order protest must retain. Negation should never come before allegiance. What I meant to bear witness to on that day was not primarily the wrongness of a ban or the actions of a state, but the sanctity of the lives being erased in Gaza. Only because of that witness do I find myself standing against those who destroy life, and beside the Author of Life, who faced death not by disappearing into the crowd but by remaining, to the last, exposed, accountable and, ultimately, victorious.

Tom Dennehy-Caddick