Tom Southerden

speaker

104 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 19 Feb

Tom Southerden’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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Pod Save the UK · Can she fix it? Hannah the plumber and politician on tackling Reform · 19 Feb 2026 podcast

You must be over the moon.

Yeah, I mean, it was a really exciting day on Friday.

We didn't feel hugely optimistic.

The legal structure and the way the laws are written on terrorism gives the government a lot of

and the courts tend to be quite deferential to the government in this sort of thing.

So it's a really big, important judgment and a really strong statement from the court that this time the government have gone too far in the use of these powers.

I should say that if you talk to my colleagues, I always expect the worst.

When we do cases like this and they ask, what do you think is going to happen?

I don't think I've ever said.

It's a Tom problem.

Don't ask Tom.

Yeah, so it found it unlawful for two reasons.

They're interconnected.

The first one is that the Home Office have a published policy on how it will use its terrorism powers, particularly its powers to ban an organisation, prescribe an organisation.

In recognition of how broadly worded the general criteria are, not everybody or not every organisation that could theoretically fall within the definition should in fact be prescribed.

So that's what the court

saw the policy was there for.

And what it ruled was that the Home Office went beyond the terms of that policy and essentially relied on reasons to do with how convenient it would be for the authorities if Palestinian action were prescribed as a justification for prescribing them.

Well, the intel part of this is interesting.

So in the case, there was a period called a closed material procedure, which is secret evidence that the rest of us can't see.

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