‘I have never been an activist’: Meet the pensioners risking prison to support Palestine Action
In an interrogation room at just after 1am, 68-year-old grandmother-of-seven Marji Mansfield was sitting across from counterterrorism officers after being arrested at a pro-Palestine protest in central London.
She had suffered days of poor sleep in anticipation of this eventuality. Now, an “aggressive” man was asking her repeatedly if she sympathised with a terrorist organisation, leading her through an extensive list of questions about her politics and who she knew in Gaza.
A few hours earlier, on the afternoon of 5 July, half a dozen officers had handcuffed the pensioner and hauled her off the ground and into a police van alongside her 73-year-old husband.
The couple, who once described themselves as “small-c conservatives”, had travelled to the capital from near Chichester for the protest, declining to tell their children what they were about to do.
It was only a day later that their son realised what had happened after he saw his mother on the news, suspended and flanked by the large group of officers.
Mansfield had been following the conflict in the Middle East since the Israeli invasion of Gaza in 2014, but only became an active protester after former home secretary Suella Braverman described peaceful protests as “hate marches” in October 2023.
“I have never been political or an activist. I was just an ordinary, middle-England person,” she says. “But then I became outraged.”
Mansfield says she was “shocked” by the events of 7 October, when Hamas militants crossed the border into Israel and killed around 1,200 people, taking 251 more hostage. “But the actions that subsequently followed, where entire families are being wiped out, I had to join those urging for a ceasefire now,” she adds.
More than 60,000 Palestinians are believed to have been killed since Israel launched its retaliatory aerial and ground offensive in Gaza. Humanitarian organisations have warned that, with not nearly enough aid entering the territory, the 2.3 million residents of Gaza are now in effect being starved.
Keir Starmer warned this week that Britain would recognise the Palestinian state if Israel did not end its “appalling” war in Gaza. He urged Israel to work towards a ceasefire and a two-state solution.
Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Starmer of “rewarding Hamas’s monstrous terrorism”. Mansfield dismisses Starmer’s move as having been “performative rather than substantial”.
Fighting her own battle for Gaza, the pensioner was arrested under Sections 12 and 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000 for holding up a placard that said: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action”. Being charged under Section 12 carries a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison.
The protest group Palestine Action had just been proscribed as a terrorist organisation, after it claimed responsibility for activists spraying red paint on fighter jets at RAF Brize Norton. The proscription means it is illegal to support the group. It puts Palestine Action in the same legal ranks as Isis, al-Qaeda and Hamas, leading critics to accuse the government of heavy-handedness.
Mansfield knew it was possible she would be arrested, but had no idea how the police would actually react when she and dozens of others held up placards in support of Palestine Action outside the Houses of Parliament. It was the first of what would become weekly protests, all of which resulted in arrests.
As the police interview with an exhausted Mansfield drew to a close at around 2am, after more than 60 questions had been asked, the counterterrorism officer made one final remark.
“Look, even if you get hundreds of people, thousands of people, we’re 30,000 strong,” Mansfield recalls him saying. “We’ll put all our resources, and not just police forces, into arresting and interrogating you.”
Then he let the “traumatised” pensioner go free, hundreds of miles from home. She had not been charged with a crime.
A total of 385 MPs voted in favour of the unprecedented move to criminalise Palestine Action. Only 26 dissented.
Announcing the vote, home secretary Yvette Cooper said that while free speech and the right to protest form “the cornerstone of our democracy”, Palestine Action was guilty of “violence and serious criminal damage” that does not constitute “legitimate protest”.
As a result, Palestine Action was proscribed alongside a white supremacist, neo-Nazi organisation called Maniacs Murder Cult and a pro-Kremlin ethno-nationalist organisation that seeks to create a new Russian imperial state.
Critics and human rights activists quickly accused the government of infringing on people’s right to protest following the proscription of Palestine Action.
In a letter to Cooper, the Network for Police Monitoring said: “Misusing terrorism legislation in this way against a protest group sets a dangerous precedent, threatens our democratic freedoms, and would be a terrifying blow to our civil liberties.”
Several United Nations human rights experts, meanwhile, said that criminal damage that does not endanger life is not “sufficiently serious to qualify as terrorism”.
On Wednesday, a judge ruled that Palestine Action would be allowed to challenge the Home Office in court over its proscription, but it could be months until a result.
The outrage over the move has increased as more protesters are arrested.
Private Eye editor Ian Hislop branded the arrest in Leeds on 19 July of 67-year-old Jon Farley, for holding up a printout of the magazine’s front page that questioned the proscription, as “mind-boggling”. Farley has not been charged.
The case was cited by Mr Justice Chamberlain on Wednesday as a reason to allow Palestine Action to fight the proscription. He said it was evidence of the “chilling effect” the proscription was having “on those wishing to express legitimate political views”.
In total, more than 200 people have been detained since the ban. Not a single person in England or Wales has been charged.
The large majority are over 60, according to Tim Crosland, a former government lawyer who now campaigns for Defend Our Juries, an organisation that is supporting many of the detainees. He says some of the protesters are “well into their eighties”.
The police are aware of these optics. Mansfield claims that her male counterterrorism interrogator even asked her at one stage: “Was this a conspiracy to make the police look bad?”
The reality, she says, is simpler: the seriousness of terrorism charges is a significant disincentive to younger protesters at the start of their careers; for pensioners determined to take a stance, it is the perfect opportunity to step up.
Robert Lee, 61, another protester arrested on 5 July but not charged, who later went to support demonstrators in Bristol, says he remembers one 83-year-old woman gleefully telling him that police were afraid to arrest her “because they are terrified I might die in custody”.
But the crowds of pensioner protesters are nonetheless peppered with younger demonstrators, a reality they say nods to the broad spectrum of opposition to the proscription of Palestine Action.
For Zara Ali, 18, who is among the youngest to have been arrested, her involvement felt especially high-stakes. She was already on bail for conspiracy to cause public nuisance after blocking a road in March. She has not been charged.
“I was told to prepare myself for prison,” she says, admitting that she was very “anxious” when she arrived in Parliament Square for the protest on 19 July. “But at the end of the day, I had it in my mind that this is not about me but about Palestine, and about every single political prisoner who is being held.”
The Independent spoke to half a dozen protesters for this piece, all of whom said that their “disgust” at Israel’s war on Gaza was the primary motivation for their involvement. Claims that the proscription pointed to a “dystopian” future in Britain were also commonly cited as a key motivation.
The Home Office declined to comment.
