Most people have never liked war much and the vast majority of us have never liked war crimes at all. Some people — quite a lot of people, actually — will go to quite a lot of work to prevent war crimes, if they can see a way.

A few years ago, I wrote about an event in Hastings where we had a screening of Nae Pasaran. We in Hastings felt a strong connection to the story because we had some activists in town who had had an idea very much like the one those Rolls Royce workers had.

Our activists disabled a fighter jet, too, and they were arrested for it, too. You can read both stories here….

And it would seem that something very similar happened at Brize Norton last week.

But there’s a big difference between what happened to those Rolls Royce workers and to our local women, and what’s likely to happen to the Palestine Action activists now. You see, there was — and still is — a law in this country that if someone commits a crime in an honest attempt to prevent a larger crime — like perhaps breaking into a house to put a fire out — then their crime should be discounted. The hammer-blow women explained to the court that the jet they damaged had been ear-marked to be used in committing war crimes. The court accepted their justification.

It’s simple logic really, isn’t it. But what’s changed is that in the years in between, unpopular, authoritarian governments have tagged on a lot more laws, in an on-going attempt to quell political opposition. There are two very relevant changes in the case of disabling jets to prevent war-crimes.

One is that it’s no longer permitted to explain political motivation as a defense in court, so activists can never tell a court why they did something. The other is that the law against ‘supporting terrorism’ used to mean, eg, buying guns for terrorists — now, it means saying anything positive about anyone the government has decided is a terrorist.

And next week Yvette Cooper, who used to be a relatively normal UK Labour politician before the world went mad, is planning to pronounce Palestine Action a proscribed (ie, ‘terrorist’) group, so no-one be able to talk about them at all, let alone point out that they were just trying to prevent a war-crime. This Monday, some people are going to London to take what’s possibly their last chance at freedom of speech on this particular issue.

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