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

And the court found, well, very obviously, yes, there is.

There's the criminal law, which is what everyone has been saying all along.

And that is a sufficient mechanism for dealing with this kind of direct action protest.

It was disproportionate and excessive to go beyond that and move to calling it terrorism.

Obviously, I would say yes to that question.

So at the moment, one of the major reasons why it was ruled to be disproportionate is not just the banning of the organization itself, which is itself a major interference with human rights, particularly the right to association.

We have a human right to gather and form groups to activate and to progress our interests.

The point of a prescription is that it completely obliterates that right.

So it's a major interference and requires very major justification.

But beyond that, the effect of prescribing an organization under our terrorism laws is the imposition on the freedom of speech rights and freedom of assembly rights that everybody else has.

So you mentioned already thousands of people have been arrested.

But also, most importantly in this judgment...

The vast majority of Palestine action-related activists are not accused of serious criminal damage and any of the other charges that are currently being prosecuted.

They've engaged in what you would regard as more traditional protest.

And all of that has been banned as a result of this organization as a whole being prescribed.

As I said, there's a great deal of chaos at the moment and things are moving.

So on Monday, the chief magistrate that is ultimately responsible for specifically the cases of the placard protesters, let's call them, what they've got to is postponing everything until the Court of Appeal has had a chance to look at this and make its own decision.

And the key thing, as we've mentioned, is really what happens with the High Court's decision about are they going to implement their decision now or are they going to suspend it until the Court of Appeal rules on it?

Because if they implement it now, there really is no legal basis for any of this to continue.

I don't mean to.

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