A Priest's Home, Raided: Britain's Terror Laws Have Become a Machine Against Its Own Dissenters

On Friday, counter-terrorism officers raided the home of Sue Parfitt, an 84-year-old retired priest, days after she stood outside Westminster with Just Stop Oil calling on the UK government to stop new North Sea oil and gas licenses. Parfitt has also publicly supported Palestine Action, the direct-action group banned as a "terrorist organisation" under the Terrorism Act 2000 in July 2025. Her home, not her body, was the target this time — the state has moved from arresting protesters at demonstrations to going through their belongings afterward.

This raid does not stand alone. It is one data point in what has become the largest sustained campaign of political policing Britain has run against its own civil society in a generation. Since Palestine Action's proscription, holding a cardboard sign reading "I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action" has been treated as a terrorism offence carrying up to fourteen years in prison — a penalty designed for bomb plots, applied to pensioners with placards. The numbers tell the story better than any single arrest can: this is not sporadic overreach, it is a policy.

Look at the pattern. A demonstration that draws 29 arrests one week draws 890 a few months later — not because the "threat" escalated, but because more people refused to be intimidated out of solidarity with Palestine. Every spike in the chart is a spike in state resources thrown at silencing people who never lifted a weapon, never damaged property that week, never did anything but stand in a square and hold up words. The Metropolitan Police itself has complained the operation "took officers out of neighbourhoods" — an admission that criminalising speech is politically convenient even when police view it as operationally absurd.

The raid on Parfitt's home is the logical next step of an apparatus that has already normalised treating elderly clergy, screenwriters, and Guantánamo survivors as terror suspects. Once a state accepts that "support" for a proscribed group can mean a sentence held up in public, everything downstream — home raids, seized phones, dawn arrests of the retired and infirm — becomes procedurally routine. The UN's human rights office called the ban a "disturbing misuse" of counter-terrorism law back in July 2025. Britain answered by expanding the crackdown, not narrowing it, and the incoming government under Andy Burnham has so far shown no sign of lifting the ban despite mounting internal police fatigue and international condemnation.

None of this is unique to Britain, and that is exactly the point. Anti-terror statutes written for one purpose get repurposed for whichever dissent is inconvenient this decade — Kurdish solidarity organising in Germany, "extremist" designations for climate blockades, "foreign agent" laws everywhere from Budapest to Tbilisi. The Parfitt raid is a small, ugly instance of a general rule: when a state cannot win an argument about genocide, occupation, or fossil fuel expansion, it reaches for the terrorism statute instead. Solidarity with Palestine Action's supporters, with Just Stop Oil, with everyone being made an example of, is not a side issue — it is the frontline of what "protest" is still allowed to mean.

Sources

Middle East Eye: UK police raid 84-year-old retired priest's home over activism
BBC: Arrests at rally against Palestine Action ban rise to 890
Wikipedia: Palestine Action (arrest timeline and references)
OHCHR: UK Palestine Action ban a "disturbing" misuse of counter-terrorism legislation