Hundreds of protesters are expected to gather in Liverpool on Sunday in support of Palestine Action, as Andy Burnham presides over his first Labour Party conference as Prime Minister.
Defend Our Juries, the rights group organising the demonstration, said the “mass, silent sign-holding vigil” would take place close to the conference centre. The protest is against the group’s proscription as a “terrorist” organisation in July 2025.
More than 3,600 people have been arrested since the ban was introduced after taking part in civil disobedience actions supporting Palestine Action, often while holding signs reading: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”.
Organisers said several hundred people were likely to attend Sunday’s vigil and warned that further arrests were expected.
Defend Our Juries described the protest as an “integrity test of the new leadership’s commitment to ending Britain’s complicity in Israel’s ethnic cleansing and war crimes”.
Pressure on Labour over Palestine Action
Activists and rights groups have called on Labour to suspend all arms sales to Israel over the conflict in Gaza and the West Bank. They are also demanding that the Government reverse the ban on Palestine Action, whose main target is Israel’s largest weapons maker, Elbit Systems.
“If [prime minister] Burnham means what he says, that he plans to end Britain’s complicity in Israel’s horrific crimes, then he would stop the arrests of people peacefully demonstrating against the genocide and the authoritarian attempts to crush its opponents,” Defend Our Juries said.
“We urge PM Burnham to do the only sensible thing and lift the ban on Palestine Action, the very people in the UK actually trying to prevent British complicity in Israel’s war crimes.”
Mr Burnham has taken a stronger stance than his predecessors against Israeli settlements and settler violence in the occupied West Bank, announcing sanctions earlier this month.
But the question of whether his government will lift the Palestine Action ban remains unresolved. Joseph Willits, head of Parliamentary Affairs at the Council for Arab-British Understanding, said it was “too early to say” whether the issue would become a political dividing line.
“If this is also a battle line with Trump and the Trump administration, do they pick that battle line or the others?” he said. “Has he already picked other battle lines when it comes to Palestine and therefore does he just leave this one?”
Colm Murphy, a senior lecturer in British politics at Queen Mary University, said Labour might address the issue if Palestine Action became “salient in British politics again”.
“I’m not so sure it will, but we shall see. A protest might raise the profile a bit,” he said.
The demonstration comes as Labour’s conference runs from Sunday to Wednesday. On Friday, Declassified UK said it had been denied media passes to cover the event.
Palestine Action was proscribed while Keir Starmer was prime minister. Mr Starmer faced criticism after saying, days after Israel attacked Gaza following Hamas’s attacks in October 2023, that Israel had the “right” to cut off the territory’s water supply, adding that “Obviously, everything should be done within international law”. He later walked back the statement.
Mr Willits said the sanctions announced under Mr Burnham highlighted the “inadequacies and the lack of will from the previous government”.
