Four jailed as terrorists; Starmer’s law enables more

TITLE: Four jailed as terrorists, Starmer’s last bill targets journalists # TYPE: analysis # DESK: uk # REGISTER: engaged # EXCERPT: Four activists were jailed as terrorists for damaging an arms factory. Days before Starmer leaves office, his last bill puts journalists in the same dock. # TAGS: national-security-bill, palestine-action, press-freedom, civil-liberties, protest-rights, terrorism-act, shabana-mahmood, the-canary # ORIGINAL_DATE: 2026-06-30 # BODY:

Samuel Corner is 23. He was sentenced on 12 June to seven years and eight months. Leona Kamio, 30, got six years. Fatema Zainab Rajwani, 21, got five years and eight months. Charlotte Head, 29, was sentenced alongside them. Their crime was criminal damage at an arms factory in Filton that supplies components to the Israeli military. Woolwich Crown Court ruled it had a “terrorist connection” under section 69 of the Sentencing Act, the first time that label has been attached to a damage conviction with no terrorism charge in sight. All four now carry terrorist notification requirements for fifteen years: reporting their finances, their travel, their addresses to police, for a decade and a half, for throwing paint.

Eighteen days after that sentencing, on 30 June, the National Security (State Threats) Bill completed every stage in both Houses of Parliament and now awaits only royal assent. It is Keir Starmer’s last major piece of legislation before he leaves office. It hands the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, the power to designate any body she “reasonably believes” is engaged in “foreign power threat activity”, and to criminalise anyone who supports it, materially assists it, or accepts a benefit from it. The maximum sentence is 14 years. The same week the bill cleared its final stage, Lloyds Bank froze the account of the Canary, Britain’s most-read left-wing news outlet, without explanation, leaving it unable to pay staff.

A designation power built like a proscription

The bill borrows its architecture directly from the Terrorism Act 2000. Just as the home secretary can proscribe an organisation as a terrorist group, the new law lets her designate a body as a threat to UK safety or interests. Once designated, three new offences apply: expressing supportive opinions of the body, materially assisting it, or accepting a benefit from it. The government has said openly that one purpose is to make it easier to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Nobody at People’s Britain disputes that the IRGC has run hostile operations on British soil, including the 2024 stabbing of the journalist Pouria Zeraati. The dispute is with a law drawn so wide that a group’s designation as a foreign threat becomes the trigger for prosecuting anyone in Britain who has contact with it, reports on it, or is paid by an organisation linked to it, regardless of what that contact actually involved.

The test for guilt is not knowledge. It is that the accused “ought reasonably to have known” their conduct would assist a designated body. Ignorance is not a defence. Lord Anderson KC, a former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, told Parliament that journalists “would be at risk of prosecution if they were to have contact of any kind with sources within designated bodies or their agents,” and that safeguards were “largely absent from its text.” Jonathan Hall KC, the current reviewer, recommended extending the bill’s reasonable-excuse defence to cover information obtained lawfully. The government rejected it.

The carve-out that was not written down

The Home Office says journalism is protected by “relevant defences.” Jemimah Steinfeld of Index on Censorship has pointed out the obvious problem: that protection sits in a policy paper, not in the bill itself, “where it would hold more weight.” The distinction is not academic. A policy paper can be reissued, reinterpreted or quietly dropped by a future home secretary; a statutory defence cannot. Steinfeld put the practical choice a reporter now faces in two lines: “A journalist gets imprisoned for interaction with a designated group or a journalist steers clear of them altogether. Both are bad for media freedom.”

The Lords did move on one front. On 30 June, a humanitarian defence covering the material-assistance and benefit offences was added on the strength of an amendment from Baroness Northover and Lord Anderson, accepted without a division. Aid workers who might otherwise be prosecuted for delivering water, medicine or shelter through a designated body now have a statutory shield. Journalists were offered nothing equivalent. Parliament wrote a defence for people distributing bandages and declined to write one for people asking questions.

The debanking that arrived on cue

No prosecution under this bill has yet happened; it is not yet law. What has already happened is Lloyds Bank blocking the Canary’s account over the same weekend the bill finished its passage, cutting the outlet off from its own funds and its ability to pay its staff. Lloyds gave no reason, and there is no evidence tying the two events directly. But Hall himself had already warned, in the context of this bill, that designation “may unnerve trustees and banks,” producing exactly this kind of frozen account for humanitarian organisations. The Canary case does not prove the bill caused it. It proves the mechanism Hall warned about, a bank deciding a political publisher is safer left unbanked than defended, is not hypothetical. It is already operating on outlets the state has not even designated yet. Jeremy Corbyn, responding to the Canary’s debanking, called it “a very dangerous road.”

The precedent already in the dock

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation on 5 July 2025, the first non-violent direct-action group ever branded that way, after activists spray-painted military aircraft at RAF Brize Norton. The High Court found that proscription unlawful in February 2026. The Court of Appeal reversed that finding on 15 June and upheld the ban. In the months between proscription and the end of April, at least 3,070 people were arrested for showing support for the group, 523 of them in a single demonstration in April. Huda Ammori, the group’s co-founder, called the Filton sentencing “the first case, and therefore the test case, for trying to convict activists as terrorists, using a manipulated court process.” Kerry Moscogiuri, chief executive of Amnesty International UK, put it plainly: “Criminal damage has never been treated as terrorism within the UK justice system before, and it is completely disproportionate to do so because the offence occurred at a protest.”

This is the pattern the new bill formalises and extends. A protest movement gets proscribed. Its supporters get prosecuted as terrorists for acts that were, until recently, tried as criminal damage. A bank starts treating association with the wrong cause as a reason to withhold money. And now a statute arrives that lets a single minister decide which bodies are dangerous to know, with a 14-year sentence for anyone who gets the answer wrong after the fact.

What the government is not saying

Corbyn called the bill, while it was still moving through the Commons, “an alarming expansion of state power, and an escalation of the government’s chilling assault on the right to protest,” adding that it was “deliberately vague and open-ended.” The government’s own answer is that this bill targets hostile states, not dissent, and that existing protections cover journalists and campaigners in practice. That answer collapses on its own reviewers’ testimony: the man Parliament itself appointed to scrutinise this legislation asked for the journalist defence to be written into the statute, and the government said no. A protection that exists only in a policy paper is a protection a minister can retract without a vote.

Starmer will not be in office to answer for how this law is used. Mahmood will be. Four people are already in prison for less.