3,300 Palestine arrests foreshadow Home Secretary’s new 14-year power
The National Security Bill clears Parliament naming Iran as its target, but the arrest data shows who these powers actually reach.
More than 3,300 people have been arrested, and upwards of 1,200 charged with terrorism offences, since the government proscribed Palestine Action a year ago for spraying paint and blocking roads. On 8 July the National Security (State Threats) Bill finished its passage through Parliament and now needs only the King’s signature to become law. It creates three new offences, punishable by up to 14 years in prison, for anyone who supports, assists, or receives so much as information from an organisation the Home Secretary decides to designate.
No judge signs off on that designation. Shabana Mahmood does.
How the National Security Bill passed through Parliament
The Bill was introduced on 9 June, cleared all its Commons stages in a single sitting on 17 June, and completed its passage through both Houses on 8 July when the Lords accepted the government’s final amendments. It is aimed, ministers have said, primarily at designating Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. Britain has already sanctioned more than 550 Iranian individuals and organisations, Home Office minister David Hanson told MPs, and the Bill gives the government “a framework… where we can act on any potential state threat.”
Lord Cryer, defending the Bill in the Lords, pointed to the stabbing of Iran International journalist Pouria Zeraati and to reported Revolutionary Guard targeting of British Jews as the justification. Those are the government’s stated reasons for the Bill, not a test of what the Bill actually does once it is law. The offences it creates are not written to name Iran. They are written to cover any organisation the Home Secretary chooses to designate, for as long as she chooses to keep it designated.
A power that has already been used
Parliament does not need to guess how a designation power like this gets used. Palestine Action was proscribed under the Terrorism Act on 5 July 2025. In the year since, more than 3,300 people have been arrested and over 1,200 charged for showing support for a banned organisation, most of them for holding signs or sitting in the road. The Court of Appeal upheld the ban as lawful on 15 June this year.
That is the precedent this Bill extends. It builds a second designation power, sitting outside the Terrorism Act, with the same feature that made Palestine Action’s proscription so easy to enforce at scale: one minister decides who counts as a threat, and everyone who so much as receives information from that organisation becomes a suspect.
Jeremy Corbyn, now sitting as a Your Party MP, called the Bill “an alarming expansion of state power, and an escalation of the government’s chilling assault on the right to protest,” warning it was “deliberately vague and open-ended” and would let the Home Secretary “criminalise political campaigns of their choosing.” CAGE International went further, describing a designation power with no judicial oversight as a mechanism to use a 14-year sentence “to shape what people are permitted to read, share, and think about.”
Who reporting Gaza, Iran and Lebanon puts at risk
The offence that has alarmed press-freedom lawyers is the one covering “material benefit,” defined broadly enough to include information. David Anderson, the peer who tabled the eventual Lords amendment, warned that “foreign correspondents could also be affected… at risk of prosecution if they were to have contact of any kind with sources within designated bodies.” Former diplomat Craig Murray put it more starkly: a journalist could face 14 years for publishing “TRUE casualty information from Iran, from Hamas run hospitals in Gaza, or IDF assault details from the resistance in Lebanon.”
The Lords did respond. On advice from independent reviewer Jonathan Hall KC, and backed by Lord Carlile, Lord Anderson’s amendment added a “reasonable excuse” defence, now section 17C, for anyone accepting information from a designated body. Ministers say that is enough. Dame Angela Eagle told the Commons the Bill “does not… criminalise legitimate humanitarian aid work or the important work of journalists.”
That claim does not survive contact with the text. The words “journalist,” “journalism” and “journalistic activity” appear nowhere in the amendments Parliament accepted. A reasonable-excuse defence is one you raise at trial, after arrest, after a lawyer has already weighed 14 years against a byline. Kim Johnson, one of the Labour MPs who voted against the Bill, told the Commons that “journalists could still face a prison sentence of 10 to 14 years for working with or even approaching sources in hostile Governments,” and asked the government to “consider pausing the legislation so that we can go back to the drawing board.” It didn’t. Ministers also rejected a full exemption for humanitarian NGOs sought by Labour’s Sarah Champion, arguing it would be a “loophole that hostile actors would seek to exploit.”
Who asked for this
The Bill did not appear from nowhere. In April, the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council held an in-person meeting with Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper to press for urgent designation of the Revolutionary Guard, a delegation led by Board of Deputies president Phil Rosenberg and Jewish Leadership Council chair Keith Black. Labour MP Luke Akehurst, a former director of the pro-Israel lobby group We Believe in Israel and an arms-industry lobbyist, spoke in the Commons in support of the Bill.
None of that makes the Iranian state threat imaginary. Zeraati was stabbed on a London street. British Jews have been named as Revolutionary Guard targets in documented cases. The case for the Bill’s Iran-facing purpose is real. What it does not explain is why a power built to designate one state’s paramilitary force was drafted with no limit on which organisation the Home Secretary reaches for next, and why the lobbying that pushed hardest for it came from groups whose interest is not press freedom.
The law with no line for journalists
Parliament wrote 14 years into this Bill for supporting, assisting, or receiving information from a designated organisation. It did not write a line protecting the reporter who quotes a hospital’s death toll, or the aid worker who takes a call from Tehran, or the freelancer who receives footage from Beirut. It did not need to. Everyone who took the Bill through committee already had the closest thing on the statute book to a dry run: 3,300 arrests, most of them for a banner and a road block, since the last time a minister was handed a list and a signature.
