Long read. Not sure I buy that it's an active conspiracy, but the fact that DOJ are following the same strategy of mass arrests (and not just that: mass convictions) as previous orgs like JSO, XR, UK Uncut, Don't Pay etc. which has never been shown to work, is pretty damning in itself. You can still be a useful idiot for the establishment without intending to be. And at least the people involved - quite a lot of whom have seamlessly jumped from one campaign to the next - should by now be at least questioning their strategy.

cheers,
I

*****

https://www.patreon.com/posts/psyop-defend-our-140164037

A “psyop”? Defend Our Juries is where the interests of establishment media, military intelligence and Zionism converge

A different Narrative

4 days ago

“He is used by the secret police of most countries to incite students, soldiers, or sailors to legal illegal activities in order that certain troubles may be artificially fomented, plots brought to light, or in order that people with certain political tendencies may fall into the net of the police.”

– George Alexander Hill on the activities of the Agent Provocateur, Go Spy the Land, 1932, p. 4.

The purpose of this long article is to analyse the behaviour and connections of the Defend Our Juries Campaign as a means of understanding its likely purpose and outcome, following the raising of points of concern about its organisers and tactics.

Over the past few weeks, Defend Our Juries has been making headlines for creating the spectacle of hundreds of activists being arrested at their “Lift the Ban” campaign protests. In terms of getting headlines for the protests against the ban on Palestine Action, Defend Our Juries appears to have been successful. For example, DOJ’s activities have received the glowing coverage we might expect from the politically sympathetic Novara Media, which reported the 11 August 2025 protest as an unqualified success, supporting the line of the protest organisers. For Novara, Charlotte England argued that, although “it’s impossible to tell for certain if there were more than 1,000 people holding placards, as Defend Our Juries claims”, Novara’s own accounts support the numbers provided by the protest organisers: “having attempted to count and estimate several times throughout the day, we don’t think this number is unrealistic. It’s safe to say there were at least several hundred more holding placards at 1pm than the 522 arrested.”

In their writeup, Novara also suggests that

“the Met has also been unreliable with numbers. The police initially said in a statement on Saturday that Defend Our Juries’ claim that they only arrested “a fraction” of those present “simply isn’t true”, insisting that there were only “around 500 to 600 people in Parliament Square when the protest began, but many were onlookers, or people not holding placards”. Taking into account that videos show hundreds of supporters, press and passers-by in the square, this is clearly inconsistent with the final number of arrests.”

Novara’s report is essentially a validation of Defend Our Juries’ claims that the 9 August action is

“a story of state overreach and of police weakness, with hundreds more having walked away after successfully sitting for an hour with signs that read “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”. The group has described it as a “major embarrassment to [home secretary] Yvette Cooper” and the Met police.”

Novara Media’s coverage of the 6 September DOJ protest is similarly positive.

“At 1pm on Saturday, more than 1,300 protesters, the majority of them over 60 and some visibly disabled, sat down in Parliament Square in London and wrote “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine action” on cardboard signs. By 9:15pm, the Met said officers had managed to arrest “more than 425” and called its operational plans “effective” – despite having failed to arrest everyone, as it had claimed it would.

Later on Sunday afternoon, the Met said it had arrested 857 people for supporting a proscribed organisation, with 890 arrests in total. 33 were for assaults on police officers and other public order offences.*

As the day unfolded, there was a sense of complete calm among the mostly elderly people taking part in the demonstration, organised by Defend Our Juries (DoJ) to protest the controversial proscription of non-violent direct action group Palestine Action.”

DOJ’s actions have not only been covered extensively by the usual sympathetic hybrid media sites like Novara Media but have also received significant coverage by mainstream news, if not quite in such glowing terms. The BBC coverage of the 6 September protest action by DOJ is at least “balanced”.

While it reported the Metropolitan Police’s claim that the protest “turned violent” , the BBC also relayed protest organisers’ narrative that the Met Police’s claims were “false” and include the following statement from Amnesty International in their report:

"We have long criticised UK terrorism law for being excessively broad and vaguely worded and a threat to freedom of expression. These arrests demonstrate that our concerns were justified."

Though the BBC may take pride in its “impartiality”, many on the “left” do not recognise this as an accurate characterisation of their output. For the record, I also don’t regard the BBC as generally impartial and so it is surprising that what I consider to be the mouthpiece of the international establishment has published a balanced report on what is, on its face, a supposedly anti-establishment protest action.

Even the coverage of the day’s events by the Daily Mail – infamously hostile to “the left”, gave a reasonably fair assessment of the day’s events, perhaps leaning more into the Metropolitan Police account of the protest, emphasising the alleged status of event as “The UK's biggest ever mass arrest”.

Certainly, the Mail gives a lot of space to Deputy Assistant Commissioner Claire Smart, quoting her as follows:

“I'd like to thank all officers involved in yesterday's operation for their professionalism and tireless work despite the level of abuse that they faced.

The violence we encountered during the operation was coordinated and carried out by a group of people, many wearing masks to conceal their identity, intent on creating as much disorder as possible.

Many of those individuals have now been arrested and we have begun securing charges.

The contrast between this demonstration and the other protests we policed yesterday, including the Palestine Coalition march attended by around 20,000 people, was stark.”

Even so, the Mail gives significant coverage to the talking points that Defend our Juries might have themselves chosen to highlight, such as the case of Mike Higgins. According to the Mail:

“Mike Higgins, 62, who is blind and uses a wheelchair, returned to the Parliament Square protest after making headlines last month as one of 532 people arrested at a previous demonstration.

He said: 'What choice do I have? Nothing is being done about the genocide other than by us. And I'm a terrorist? That's the joke of it.”

Interestingly, the sympathetic figure of Mike Higgins is described and quoted by many of the mainstream articles detailing the September event, including the Guardian, The National, The London Evening Standard, Times of India, and the Independent. Many of these articles recycle the phrase “who is blind and uses a wheelchair” verbatim, indicating that, in my view, these platforms were probably producing content in reference to a press release from DOJ itself.

Judging by mainstream media coverage alone, which, as we have seen, reproduces talking points sympathetic to Defend Our Juries, its actions could be considered very successful in terms of the media coverage received. As DOJ activist Tony Greenstein argued in response to one of my previous posts,

“Success in starting a national conversation about how 'terrorism' laws are being used to clamp down on legitimate protest. With articles such as t he one by Jonathan Sumption in the Independent saying people shouldn't be prosecuted simply for supporting a 'terrorist' organisation. Leading articles in Times and Guardian etc.

What are you advocating? Doing nothing. Accepting everything. This is where your conspiracy theories lead you. [DOJ frontman] Tim Crosland has been very open about the fact that he was a govt. lawyer. He is not exceptional. When I sued the Campaign Against Antisemitism my barrister had also been a Treasury counsel. So what? Does that make me CIA or MI5? This is utter paranoia, nothing more”.

Probably unintentionally, Greenstein evaluates the apparent success of DOJ's events according to the terms outlined by Corbyn, Just Stop Oil and Your Party media adviser James Schneider in Our Bloc, where he elaborates his thesis on the need for a politics of “spectacle.” Composing a strategy to address the deficit in attention and coverage received by the left from mainstream media, Schneider argues that movement populists should grab the attention of the media and their audiences through dramatic stunts that cut through the background noise of everyday life and the mundanity of 24 hour news coverage:

“What will be heard by people not paying close attention and what stories do we want our controversies [my emphasis] to tell them? What’s our Churchill statue and Channel patrol? Antagonism, direct action and controversy can make news, change opinions and set the political weather, whether they come from the left or the right. The openings created through movement populist spectacle will need to be taken up by progressives with large platforms and access to the media [my emphasis].”

However, while focusing on media coverage is important, let’s not forget Defend Our Juries’ actual stated goal: is to overwhelm the capacity of police to arrest and courts to process the high number of activists declaring their support for the proscribed Group Palestine Action on designated “event” days of spectacle and political theatre.

In their initial briefing for the 9 August action in the Defend Our Juries “Lift the Ban” campaign, the group stated:

“That 500 [people] is more than double the total number of people arrested under the Terrorism Act in 2024. It would be practically and politically difficult for the state to respond to an action on this scale. Even assuming it had the physical capacity to arrest so many people on the same day, the political fallout from such an operation would be incalculable, causing irreparable damage to the reputation of the government and the police. Our assessment is that an action on this scale could be enough for the ban to be lifted. Charging and prosecuting at least 500 more people, in addition to the 200 people already arrested, is likely to be beyond the capacity of the state, given the current situation in the criminal justice system.”

However, Defend Our Juries’ own report of the 9 August disproves at least part their initial claim that it would be “practically and politically difficult for the state to respond to an action on this scale”, admitting that the police succeeding in arresting over 500 protesters.

The political ramifications of 9 August were clearly not enough to force “the state” to “lift the ban”, prompting a further, bigger and more dramatic spectacle planned for 6 September. Presumably, had the 9 August action had its intended effect, the 6 September follow up would not have been necessary. Indeed, their September briefing, which escalates the necessary number of arrests confirms that 522 arrests was not sufficient to gum up the works of the UK’s legal system.

“This action will only proceed if at least 1,000 people have committed to it. Based on the response to 522 people being arrested on 9 August, we believe that if 1,000 hold signs on 6 September, until arrested or until the police give up, there is a good chance the ban could be lifted. The government will no longer be able to silence those exposing its complicity in genocide.”

If Defend Our Juries’ and their supporters at Novara Media are to be believed, the September action was more successful, with the police failing to arrest the 1500 protesters who supposedly turned out to support Palestine Action with placards.

However, an analysis of the account provided by Jewish Voice for Labour Activist Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi suggests the truth is a little less clear cut. Wimborne-Idrissi claims that “the police were clearly logistically overwhelmed by the task”. However, a close analysis of her narrative, particularly the details of her own arrest, suggests that the police were a bit strung out and disgruntled but not “overwhelmed”:

“After arrest, I was in the processing queue along Millbank from 10pm to 3am. My arrest was one of the last, so by that stage there were far more cops than prisoners, loads of them hanging about with little to do apart from chat in small groups.”

This section of Wimborne-Idrissi’s account implies that either Defend Our Juries estimate of the number of protesters explicitly declaring support for Palestine Action on placards was wrong, or that some of these protesters left before the could be arrested. If, as Wimborne-Idrissi suggests, by the end of the day, or, indeed, the early hours of the morning, there were more police officers than protesters, it’s clear the police had been able to stay the course long enough to process the arrests of all protesters still present.

Moreover, Defend Our Juries had advised activists

“to remain in place, until arrested, to maintain the collectivity of the group. This could take many hours, depending on where you are sitting. If you need to move at any point, to get into some shade, or for health reasons or you can not stay seated for longer, please do what you need to do to look after yourself. But the longer we can be there, the more powerful the action, so please come prepared to stay for as long as it takes.”

If either 1500 people did not turn out with placards supporting Palestine Action or left before arrests, this represents a failure by Defend Our Juries to meet its own stated aims and objectives. Worse, if the 857 people arrested is a true reflection of Palestine Action supporter turnout, DOJ may have, perhaps accidentally, broken their promise not to go ahead without 1000 people committed to the action.

More to the point, following 6 September, the Government doubled down on the decision to ban Palestine Action, meaning that roughly 1500 arrests later, the DOJ strategy of clogging up and breaking down the legal meat-grinder on account of the sheer numbers of fodder being fed into the system during a storm of popular outrage has failed already. Nevertheless, DOJ is undeterred, now claiming, with regards to the 4 October action plan,

“charging and prosecuting another 1,500 people for Terrorism Act offences, in addition to the 1500 already arrested, would be beyond the capacity of the state, given the current situation in the criminal justice system. These thoughts were echoed in the House of Lords, with peers urging the arrests and prosecutions to stop when they were not in the interest of the public.”

It’s important to note here that Defend Our Juries never provided the analysis behind their figures, beyond their own simple assertion that they have worked it out, why they previously miscalculated the capacity of the police to upscale their ability to make arrests on a given day, or why each time they miscalculate, they appear to simply raise the number of arrests required to crash the system by the curiously round figure of 500. The result is that people have been encouraged to get themselves arrested, and potentially convicted, on a false pretext.

As I think is now clear, measuring success by MSM coverage alone obscures DOJ’s more substantial failures. Furthermore, a lopsided evaluation of success, based largely on the scale and positivity of media coverage, provides rhetorical cover that allows the group to move forward, while encouraging every more people to feed themselves into the legal meat grinder every single time. So far, there has been no discernible practical outcome other than an increase on the number of lives potentially ruined through terrorism convictions that can never be spent.

Moreover, the focus on spectacle and media attention obscures the uncomfortable reality of failure and its very serious real-life consequences for those convicted. Instead, it encourages people to repeatedly defer judgement until the next action, which, due its promise of being “the biggest and bestest spectacle yet,” will surely succeed where others have failed; rinse and repeat. Had DOJ actually conducted a reasonable evaluation of their strategy – DOJ’s focus on ever-escalating rehashes of a demonstrably failed strategy suggests they have not – they would surely have stopped at the first wave of mass arrests, when it became clear that their calculations regarding the strength of the system in the face of the pressure exerted by their civil disobedience campaign were completely wrong.

This ongoing failure by DOJ has a history; it is built on the foundation of previous failed strategies by Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion. DOJ's continuation along the same path is preventing a proper evaluation of the drawbacks to the type of criminal-conviction-driven activism.

[contd at link]