Jailed, banned, silenced: Starmer’s final power grab

Fatema Rajwani is 21. She is serving five years and eight months in prison as a convicted terrorist, for taking part in a raid on a weapons factory. As she began her sentence, a caretaker government with weeks left in office pushed through Parliament a law that expands the same power over journalists, aid workers and campaigners.

Four people, sentenced as terrorists, for a factory raid

Rajwani, Charlotte Head, Leona Kamio and Samuel Corner were convicted of criminal damage at Woolwich Crown Court on 5 May 2026, for a raid on the Elbit Systems factory in Filton, Bristol, in August 2024. Elbit is Israel’s largest arms manufacturer and supplies parts for the weapons used in Gaza.

On 12 June, Mr Justice Jeremy Johnson went further than the jury’s verdict. He ruled the offences carried a “terrorism connection”, a sentencing enhancement the jury had no knowledge would be applied when they convicted. Head and Kamio received around six years each. Corner, convicted of criminal damage and grievous bodily harm without intent, received eight years and eight months. All four must serve two-thirds of their term in custody and face fifteen years of police reporting conditions after release.

Kamio’s statement in court read: “In order to hear the birds, the drones must be silent.” Defence barrister Rajiv Menon KC called the ruling “crossing a Rubicon”, warning it could in principle make “the suffragettes… terrorists”. Dr Tim Smith, who supported the group, told the Bristol Cable the four “have done more to prevent the commission of genocide than almost all of us combined.” That is his claim, not a finding of any court. What the court did find is that disabling weapons bound for a war zone now attracts a terrorist’s sentence in Britain.

The debanked and the arrested

The same week the Filton sentences were handed down, the pattern widened. Since Yvette Cooper proscribed Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act on 5 July 2025, the first time a direct-action protest group has been banned this way, police have arrested at least 3,070 people for showing support, many at silent sit-ins in Parliament Square. On 15 June 2026 the Court of Appeal ruled the proscription lawful, overturning a High Court finding four months earlier that it was not.

Then, on 30 June, the same day the House of Lords passed a new bill widening this kind of power still further, Lloyds Bank froze the account of The Canary, an independent left-wing news outlet, without explanation. Staff went unpaid. The outlet says it does not know why. Founder Kerry-Anne Mendoza’s team was left “in limbo”. Jeremy Corbyn called it “a very dangerous road.” Lloyds has offered no reason and no timeline, and there is no proof the bank’s decision was connected to the Bill. But the Bill’s own independent reviewer had already warned this was exactly the kind of collateral damage to expect.

What the new law actually does

The National Security (State Threats) Bill, introduced by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood on 9 June, gives the Home Secretary power to “designate” any body they reasonably believe is involved in “foreign power threat activity”, where designation is judged “necessary to protect the safety or interests of the UK”. Once designated, three new offences apply: supporting a designated body, assisting one, or obtaining a material benefit from one, each carrying up to fourteen years in prison. The model is deliberately built on the Terrorism Act’s proscription regime, extended from armed groups to bodies linked to foreign states.

David Anderson KC, a former Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, has warned that journalists could be “at risk of prosecution if they were to have contact of any kind with sources within designated bodies.” The offence can be met on an “ought reasonably to have known” standard, a lower bar than intent. Jonathan Hall KC, the current Independent Reviewer of State Threats Legislation, whose 2025 review recommended this power in the first place, has separately warned that a named designation “may unnerve trustees and banks” even where a charity’s presence in an area is purely humanitarian. Bond, the network of over 350 UK development NGOs, and Amnesty International both say the Bill risks criminalising routine aid work and triggering exactly the kind of debanking The Canary has just experienced. The Lords added a humanitarian defence to the assisting and information offences on 30 June, after NGO pressure. Bond says it still falls short of an express exemption.

The Bill does not name Palestine Action or Elbit Systems. Its stated target is state-backed sabotage and espionage, from Russia, Iran and China. That is a real distinction, and the Bill should be judged on what it says, not only on what it might become. But it hands a British Home Secretary the same designation power already used to turn a factory raid into a terrorism conviction and a protest movement into a proscribed organisation, at a moment when a caretaker government has every incentive to leave power broader, not narrower, on its way out.

Passed in a caretaker’s final weeks

Keir Starmer announced his resignation on 22 June, after Labour’s local election collapse and a wave of defence-spending resignations. Nominations to replace him open on 9 July; Andy Burnham is expected to take office around 18 or 19 July. In the middle of that transition, the Commons pushed all stages of this Bill through in a single day, 17 June, before the Lords cleared it on 30 June. Karen Bradley, the Conservative chair of the Home Affairs Committee, told the Commons “there is no need to pass the Bill in one day.” Not every critic in that debate was arguing for less power. Alicia Kearns, speaking from the Conservative front bench, attacked the Bill for being gentler on hostile states than existing terrorism law, a reminder that the loudest establishment complaint about this legislation is that it does not go far enough.

The through-line

One arms factory in Bristol put four young people in prison as terrorists. One protest ban has produced over three thousand arrests. One bank has silenced one newsroom without a word of explanation. And a prime minister with no mandate left to govern is using his last fortnight in office to make the power behind all three easier to use, against whoever the next Home Secretary decides to point it at.