'Greenpeace Could be Next' Warns RAF Veteran Arrested for Palestine Action Demonstration
Steve Masters, who served in the Royal Air Force for two decades, says the ban on the pro-Palestinian campaign group should alarm all those who still believe in the right to protest
“I believe in the right to protest”, declares RAF veteran Steve Masters, who was arrested earlier this month at a demonstration in support of Palestine Action, recently proscribed as a terrorist organisation.
Matthews, sporting five campaign medals across his chest after two decades in the forces, was filmed being hauled out of a mobility seat by police officers along with hundreds of other protestors, who held up placards bearing the name of the now-banned activist group (as well as saying they opposed genocide in Gaza). By doing so, they risked 14 years in jail under the Terrorism Act.
As a veteran environmental campaigner, Matthews has witnessed the steady accumulation of laws designed to curb protest, but he told the Byline Podcast, “this one's an absolute game changer. I think this could lead to people like Greenpeace and Just Stop Oil being proscribed. And they're clearly not terrorists.”
Palestine Action, which was founded in 2020, has previously targeted UK factories owned by the Israeli defence firm Elbit and claimed responsibility for a break-in at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire in June, when two RAF planes were sprayed with paint.
The then Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said in August, “There may be people who are objecting to proscription who don't know the full nature of this organisation, because of court restrictions on reporting while serious prosecutions are under way.
"But it's really important that no-one is in any doubt that this is not a non-violent organisation."
An unrepentant Matthews has seen no evidence of this, and said: “They're hitting people economically and when you start hitting people economically, the pressure on politicians, who maybe listen to those voices more than they listen to the people, that's when things start to get a little bit heavy.
“Let's not forget the genocide. You know, what's going on in Gaza is absolutely abhorrent, and I see the proscription as an attempt to silence voices around that.”
Until recently, Palestine Action appeared to be following a long British tradition of non violent direct action. Forerunners include working class ramblers who launched a mass trespass of Kinder scout in Derbyshire in 1932 in defiance of wealthy landowners, eventually securing the Right To Roam. The Suffragettes, who used a range of illegal tactics including arson and breaking windows to win votes for women, are lauded by parliamentarians. A statue of their leader Emmeline Pankhurst stands in Victoria Tower Gardens, part of the Palace of Westminster.
Palestine Action, however, has now been placed on a par with the likes of Al Qa’ida, who inspired the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks and National Action, a neo Nazi group whose members plotted to kill Rosie Cooper MP.
Matthews believes the UK Government should itself be accountable for its support of Israel, whose response to the atrocity of October 7, 2023 he describes as “utterly disproportionate”
“I’ve got three grandchildren under 11, and I can't reconcile what's going on with being a grandfather, knowing that there are young people [and] people my age, just surviving day to day, under the conditions that they are and not speak out.”
His old employer, the RAF is understood to be providing surveillance cover over Gaza for the Israeli Defence Force and, in that context, he believes that being detained whilst wearing his medals sends out an important message.
“When you see veterans with medals and mobility walkers, or people with T shirts saying, ‘I'm a grandmother’ getting arrested and turning up in their hundreds and risking arrest, that's what marks a step change in this level of protest and I think that's what cuts through to the general public.
“If it was a bunch of teenagers and twenty-somethings running amok around London, the narrative would be completely different. But the fact that it's your church leader or it's your Imam from the mosque, or your GP that's getting arrested - that’s quite a different picture from a student riot or something like that. I think that's significant.”
Listen to the full interview on the Byline Podcast