Does Lord Walney Think All Palestinian Groups Are the Same?

Lord Walney AKA John Woodcock, the government’s anti-protest tsar, has donned his clown makeup and oversized shoes once again with an un-fact-checked attack on the Palestine movement.

Walney attacked Thursday’s “workplace day of action” for Palestine, organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and backed by trade unions. Retweeting a statement by the Zionist Board of Deputies of British Jews (BoD), Woodcock – an Israel supporter and paid lobbyist whose clients include weapons and fossil fuel companies – claimed that the PSC “has strong links to Palestine Action who terrorise workers in defence factories with intimidation, sabotage and violence,” he said. “How can unions justify supporting this?”

Woodcock described the BoD’s statement, which dismissed the PSC day of action as “gesture politics” representing a “continued failure of unions to support workers if they are Jewish”,  as a “strong message”.

The idea that the PSC has “strong links” to Palestine Action in the way Walney suggests is bullshit. It’s a bit like saying Friends of the Earth, Just Stop Oil and a local campaign to save the village duck pond have “strong links”.So, for the benefit of Lord Walney, here’s a quick 101.

The PSC holds mass marches and lobbies MPs. It does not organise direct action. The suggested activities for the workplace day of action include gathering outside work at lunch time and taking a picture, letter writing, signing petitions, film screenings and distributing leaflets – a far cry from spray-painting shop fronts and blockading arms factories.

In fact, Palestine Action was launched by activists who got frustrated with what they saw as a lack of progress made by the less disruptive forms of protest. Unlike the PSC targets Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer.

There’s nothing wrong with a diversity of tactics – each organisation opposes Israeli apartheid and now, the Gaza genocide in different and important ways. But for a supposed expert on political violence and disruption to tar one campaign with the supposedly “extreme” actions of another, without evidence, prompts the question of whether he’s right for the job.

Walney, an unelected lord, argues that the right to protest has gone too far. He says that because we live in a liberal democracy, there are more legitimate ways to engage with your elected representatives than taking to the streets or besieging arms factories, such as writing them polite letters and voting for them. He has also recommended that MPs and councillors not talk to the PSC at all. And now he’s inventing “strong links” between different campaigns which have broadly similar aims but completely different tactics. Desperate stuff.

There have long been questions over Woodcock’s suitability for his role, and these questions are picking up momentum. Green MP Carla Denya and Labour’s Steve Witherden have asked questions in parliament about him, and campaigners from Defend Our Juries to the Good Law Project have urged the government to remove him.

In October, the Home Office wrote to the Good Law Project confirming that it was deciding whether to keep Woodcock on, as part of a counter-extremism “sprint” (an internal review in the wake of the summer’s far-right riots).

The sprint seems to have turned into a marathon. Last week, the Sunday Times reported that the home secretary is planning to set out a new counter-extremism framework next year.

The paper also reported that among those involved in the review are Robin Simox, the hawkish, rightwing anti-extremism tsar who claimed pro-Palestine protests were pushing a “a shameful extremist agenda, the normalisation and promotion of antisemitism.” So I wouldn’t bank on any positive changes resulting from it.