Britain has now done something that would once have been mocked as a thing only other countries do. One of the best-known novelists of her generation has been effectively removed from the shelves of an entire country because she wanted to give her own money to a political cause.
Be precise about the villain. It is not Faber, her publisher, which is doing what any lawyer would tell it to do. Send a living author her U.K. royalties, knowing she means to pass them to a proscribed organization, and you risk being on the wrong end of a 14-year sentence. That is how modern censorship works. Nobody has to ban a book. The state creates a crime vague and heavy enough that every private intermediary does the banning for it.
The defenders of the proscription will say Palestine Action broke things, and they are right that it did. Its activists have wrecked equipment at arms-linked sites, and the government says serious damage was done. People who do that should be prosecuted for criminal damage, burglary, and worse where the evidence supports it. They were being prosecuted. Britain has plenty of law for property crime. None of it required putting a direct-action group in the same legal category as organizations that murder civilians.
That category is the whole point. Labeling a group terrorist does not just punish its members. It makes everything around it radioactive: a donation, a sign, a sentence of sympathy. Thousands of people have been arrested under it, many for holding placards. A state that arrests thousands of mostly peaceful protesters and then declares its own law a success is not defending the public. It is discovering how much dissent it can intimidate.
The Rooney case shows the absurdity. She is not hiding. She announced her intention openly, in the manner of someone deliberately testing a law she believes is unjust. Either she is a financier of terror, which no sane reader believes, or the law is stretched past any sane purpose. Governments that have to choose between those two conclusions should not be shocked when the public chooses the second.
This is also a test for the Labour government, and a damning one. This is a party whose own history includes civil disobedience, suffragettes, anti-apartheid boycotts, and miners' picket lines, all of which were denounced in their day as threats to order. It now presides over the largest mass arrests for peaceful protest in recent British memory, and its answer to criticism is that the courts will sort it out. The High Court ruled against the designation. An appeal court reversed that. The Supreme Court will decide next month. Good. But rights should not depend on whether ministers can survive a lawsuit. A government that wanted to be on the right side of this would not wait to be told.
The Left should be careful here too. It is tempting to treat Rooney as simply a martyr, and to excuse every act the group has committed. Property destruction has consequences, and workers at those sites are not abstractions. But a movement that claims to care about civil liberties cannot demand them only for the tidy and the likable. The test of free expression has always been whether it protects people the powerful find disruptive.
If the Supreme Court upholds the ban, Britain will have confirmed a rule by which supporting a disruptive anti-war campaign can be treated like supporting the worst violence imaginable, and by which a publisher will pull an author before risking the argument. If it strikes the ban down, the government will have wasted a year, thousands of arrests, and a good deal of the country's reputation for tolerating dissent. Either way, a country that quietly removes a novelist from its bookshops should ask what else it has decided to stop looking at.
How it may affect me
In the U.K., existing copies of Rooney's books can still be bought, but new retailer orders are blocked, so stock may run out. More broadly, the law makes donating to or showing support for Palestine Action a criminal risk, including at protests. Check current guidance before attending demonstrations or donating, and watch next month's Supreme Court hearing.
