After a preliminary hearing in the Scottish judicial review of the terrorist proscription of Palestine Action, the judge, Lord Young, reversed his earlier decision and has stopped the review, as fast as he possibly could. London had sent a regime minister to overawe the Edinburgh court.
Yvette Cooper, former home secretary who proscribed Palestine Action, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer meeting during the Interpol General Assembly in Glasgow in November 2024. (Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street/Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
After direct action activists of the organization Palestine Action (PA) entered the Royal Air Force base at Brise Norton, Oxfordshire on June 20, 2025 to spray red paint on military aircraft in protest at British complicity with Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the then Home Secretary Yvette Cooper controversially designated Palestine Action as a terrorist organization under the 2000 Terrorism Act. Under that Act, anyone in Britain publicly supporting PA was subject to arrest. More than 3,000 persons have been arrested. After the terrorism designation was challenged, the High Court of England and Wales ruled on Feb. 13 that it illegally violated freedom of speech laws.
The court, however, left the terrorism ban in place while the government appeals. In Scotland a separate case to suspend the designation, pending a Scottish judicial review, was brought by Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, two-time candidate for the British parliament, author, columnist and member of Consortium News‘s board. A Scottish court allow the review to proceed. The U.K. government then filed a motion in the court of Session in Edinburgh seeking to postpone the Scottish review until its appeal at the High Court in London is resolved. After a hearing on the government’s motion Wednesday, a Scottish judge granted the central government’s motion the next day, a setback for Murray. This is Murray’s account of Wednesday’s hearing in his own case from his point of view.
By Craig Murray
CraigMurray.org.uk
I went through last Wednesday’s preliminary hearing in the Scottish judicial review of the proscription of Palestine Action with a sense of mounting horror. We had the same judge as at the permission hearing, Lord Young. We had exactly the same arguments and the same case law being deployed again by the U.K. government as at the permission hearing. But there the sense of déjà vu ended.
[Lord Young ruled Thursday in favour of a central government motion to pause the Scottish review of Palestine Action’s proscription until the appeals process in England had run its course. The National, a pro-independence Glasgow daily, reported:
“A JUDGE has agreed to put a Scottish legal challenge to the UK Government’s ban on Palestine Action on hold. … At the Court of Session in Edinburgh, Lord Young granted a motion from the UK Government to “sist” (pause) the Scottish judicial review of the proscription, meaning the case will not proceed until proceedings in England, potentially up to the Supreme Court, have run their course. The ruling is a blow to former diplomat Craig Murray and his supporters, who had asked the court to suspend the ban in Scotland in the interim on the basis that it was unlawfully crushing free speech and protest rights.”]
English proceedings at an advanced stage seemed in Lord Young’s mind to have shifted, from an irrelevance in a different jurisdiction, to a fundamental reason not to proceed. The costs of holding a physical review, in terms of the actual pounds and pennies of having courts, had been previously dismissed contemptuously by Lord Young when advanced by the government as a reason not to hold a judicial review at the permission hearing.
Lord Young then himself raised the cost of a Scottish judicial review as a potential reason for not having one. Three times.
He also made plain from the outset that he was considering the Starmer regime motion for sisting (postponing in effect forever) the Scottish judicial review as a matter of case management, not as a matter of principle of whether the court had jurisdiction. For that reason, if he decided to sist — which he eventually did — he would not be contradicting his previous decision that the Scottish review could go ahead.
The solution was not openly to deny Scotland’s rights, but administrative delay. Forever.
The main obvious thing that had changed was not the government arguments, but the person making them. This hearing last Wednesday had itself been postponed almost three weeks to fit the diary of the Advocate General, Catherine Smith KC, who was representing the Starmer regime in person because – as the Government submission directly stated – of the great constitutional importance of the case.
Catherine Smith KC, advocate general, Baroness Smith of Cluny, 2024. (House of Lords / Roger Harris/ Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 3.0)
Catherine Smith KC is political royalty. Daughter of former Labour leader the late John Smith and of Baroness Smith, sister of the BBC’s Washington correspondent Sarah Smith, and sister-in-law of the son of former NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson. I could go on.
She is also rubbish in court. She presented the government’s arguments much worse that they had originally been presented, with a really revolting mix of personal arrogance and profound lack of articulacy. She sometimes appeared unable to put a coherent sentence together, and on the rare occasions when she did so, we were generally left wondering in what way it linked to the last one. Lord Young frequently rescued her by expressing the idea she had been groping her way towards with all the alacrity of a blindfolded person in handcuffs.
At one point Lord Young actually said to the Advocate General: “You haven’t explained that very well.”
Nevertheless, he took it that there was great force behind her arguments, now that it had been made very plain by the despatch of this august personage that London took this very seriously indeed. He gave every indication of a willingness to be herded. It merely made his life so difficult that they had despatched such an incompetent shepherd.
Very early in proceedings Lord Young had been at great pains to point out that his agreement that we had the right to a Scottish judicial review had always been subject to possible cancellation for reasons of “case management.” In principle there was a right to a Scottish judicial review. But there were practicalities of case management to consider, and one of those practicalities was the existence in England of the Ammori case which was now at a much more advanced stage, with the English Court of Appeal going to announce its decision on June 15. It may then proceed to the U.K. Supreme Court which covers Scotland anyway.
London: ‘Undesirable for Palestine Action to be Legal in Scotland & Illegal in England’
In the course of the day, Joanna Cherry [a Scottish lawyer an former MP in the British parliament] pointed out that our Scottish judicial review had been due to happen back in March – and the reason it had been delayed was the U.K. government introducing “secret intelligence” evidence which had been heard in closed sessions. To “sist” or postpone the case until the end of U.K. proceedings meant to drop it forever. To do this on procedural grounds because of delays introduced by the government being reviewed would be unfair on the petitioner.
[See: Craig Murray: Palestine Action Terror Ban Was Fabricated]
In the Cherry and Miller cases the U.K. Supreme Court had been faced with different decisions of the English and Scottish courts on the same issue. The English court could be wrong. Mr Murray as a resident of Scotland was entitled to the protection of the courts of his place of domicile. Scotland and England were separate jurisdictions with separate legal systems and separate legal traditions.
Catherine Smith for the Starmer regime took a hardline unionist position. It was undesirable for Palestine Action to be legal in Scotland and not in England, and she did not believe that such a position could be “competent” as terrorism was a reserved matter under the Scotland Act.
Edinburgh University Old College Quad. during the protest in support of Palestine, May 11, 2024. (Derek Williams, Wikimedia, CC-ASA-4.0)
She was very scathing about the evidence that, two months before the proscription, the Scottish CONTEST board (the official counter-terrorism strategy board of the Scottish government, which includes Police Scotland and the security services) had minuted that Palestine Action in Scotland “did not come close” to meeting the definition of a terrorist organisation. The Scottish board is a “local board,” she said, which did not have access to all the intelligence available to the main counter terrorism bodies in London.
London sent a regime minister to overawe the court in Edinburgh and remind us of our position in the world. We have been telt.
The Starmer regime’s arguments were founded on “judicial comity,” which amounted to simply an argument that the judiciaries of the different jurisdictions of the United Kingdom should not disagree with each other, as expressed by the High Court of England in the “liberty case.” [The National Council for Civil Liberties vs. the Prime Minister (2019).] This was almost word for word the argument they had made, and was the case they had advanced, at the permission hearing. Even Lord Young rather bridled at this.
“Are you saying I got this wrong?” he asked.
“Yes,” Smith replied.
There was so much more to report, but my current state of health doesn’t allow me to spend long days in court followed by long evenings writing up. I paste below the original decision by Lord Young to grant the appeal – you will notice that is quite a ringing declaration that citizens in Scotland are entitled to the protection of the Scottish courts – is indeed then undercut by an escape route that issues of “case management” may make proceeding with the review undesirable and are a different question.
The one time I was actually furious during the proceedings last Wednesday was when Catherine Smith said that the Scottish judicial review should be closed down for reasons of cost, and specifically stated that the closed evidence sessions – on which I am given no information and do not even know when they happen – are costing the court system £10,000 a day.
The U.K. government is introducing spurious and fake intelligence material – making who-knows-what allegations about Palestine Action – and using the cost of fake intelligence hearings to close down scrutiny. It stinks.
Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. His coverage is entirely dependent on reader support. Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.
Subscriptions to keep Craig Murray’s blog going are gratefully received. Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, Murray has set up new methods of payment including a GoFundMe appeal and a Patreon account.
This article is from CraigMurray.org.uk.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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