Starmer’s Palestine Crackdown Just Blew Up In His Face

The Starmer government's determination to see palestine Action sent down appears to now be providing cover for something even more sinister... Right, so a café owner in Manchester went to a police station to pick up devices the police had taken off him in an earlier case, and the police, instead of just handing them back, sat him down and tried to recruit him as a spy. Shams Sadiq, fifty-one years old, owns two cafés in Manchester, is known locally for his pro-Palestine activism, and he says that on the fifteenth of May two officers at Ashton-under-Lyne police station asked to speak to him "man to man," told him they'd been through his devices, told him they knew he was, in their phrase, fully involved with Palestine Action, and then told him he wouldn't be charged in relation to that earlier arrest. No charges on that. Just a favour. They said there were benefits in helping them. He asked what kind, financial? Were they going to pay his taxes? And the answer, more or less, was yes, we can help with things like that. One of them added there were other benefits too. They weren't saying he could go out and commit a serious crime, you understand, they were far too professional for that, but they could turn a blind eye to certain low-level things. So this is the law-and-order government, isn't it? This is the terrorism crackdown. The one that's already blown up in the government's own face in the High Court, though we'll get to that. And it has arrived at the point where the actual mechanism is a copper leaning across a desk offering financial benefits and leniency around low-level offences if you'll grass on your mates.