In December 1795, William Pitt’s government introduced the Treasonable Practices Bill and the Seditious Meetings Bill—the “Gagging Acts” as their opponents called them. They were designed to suppress the radical democratic societies that had flourished in the wake of the French Revolution. The great crime these organisations were deemed guilty of was to demand parliamentary reform and an end to Britain’s wars. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, then a young radical lecturing in Bristol, responded to Pitt’s “reign of alarm” with a pamphlet titled The Plot Discovered. His analysis of what those Bills represented remains strikingly relevant 230 years later, in the context of sustained assaults on democratic rights in Britain today.

Writing about the two Acts, Coleridge warned that with their passage ‘[all] political controversy is at an end’. He went on to note, those ‘sudden breezes and noisy gusts, which purified the atmosphere they disturbed, are hushed to deathlike silence. The cadaverous tranquillity of despotism will succeed the generous order and graceful indiscretions of freedom’. 

Coleridge provides us with a historically rich way to name what is happening  in Britain, and indeed globally, today: a shift from messy, disruptive democratic contestation towards a formally constitutional but substantively despotic, or authoritarian, order that pre-emptively criminalises effective dissent. The proscription of Palestine Action in July 2025—designating a direct action network as a terrorist organisation on the basis of property damage to arms manufacturing sites—invites this comparison not as rhetorical flourish but as analytical framework.

Constructive crimes: from treason to terrorism

In the 1794 treason trials, the Crown attempted to extend ‘compassing and imagining the King’s death’ to include the peaceful advocacy of parliamentary reform by the London Corresponding Society. The logic was audaciously constructive: reform leads to a representative assembly; a representative assembly supersedes the King’s authority; a King without authority is vulnerable to deposition; deposed Kings are usually killed; therefore, advocating reform is ‘imagining the King’s death’. The chain of implications transforms advocacy into existential threat.

The juries refused to convict. Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke, and John Thelwall were acquitted. But the state’s failure in court necessitated a legislative solution. The Gagging Acts of 1795 closed the gap that the juries had insisted upon, making it treasonable to ‘compass, imagine, devise, or intend’ to depose or intimidate the monarch or overawe Parliament, with words and writings treated as sufficient proof even absent any armed rising. What could not be secured by constructive interpretation of the 1351 statute was achieved by expanding the law’s reach. The Acts created a preventive category: not treason committed but treason imagined, not insurrection attempted but opposition contemplated.

The proscription of Palestine Action follows a structurally similar pattern. The Terrorism Act 2000 defines terrorism to include action involving ‘serious damage to property’ designed to ‘influence the government’ for a ‘political cause’. Palestine Action—which has, since 2020, targeted sites involved in manufacturing or transporting weapons used in Israel’s violence against the Palestinian people and its genocide in Gaza—was proscribed in July 2025 following an action at RAF Brize Norton in which activists reportedly damaged military aircraft alleged to be carrying weaponry to Israel. The designation relied on the property-damage threshold, a provision rarely invoked before.

The analogy is close enough to be deeply troubling. Just as Pitt’s government tried to make the idea of reform treasonous because it threatened the aristocratic order, the contemporary British state has made effective anti-genocide protest “terrorist” because it threatens the imperial-defence order. Both rely on a constructive legal fiction: that a challenge to state policy is an existential threat to the state’s political existence. Both transform political opposition into a threat category that permits pre-emptive neutralisation. Terrorism now performs the function that treason once did: not a description of actual conduct but a mechanism for foreclosing political possibility.

This is not just a metropolitan story. As Michael Lobban has shown, ‘constructive’ treason—treating conspiracies or riotous protest as compassing the King’s ‘political’ death—was progressively curtailed in Britain following the 1795 controversies, but it ‘remained part of the law, and was given new life in imperial contexts’. The Crown deployed expansive readings of ‘waging war’ against Irish republicans, Canadian rebels, and Indian opponents of British rule. Treason law was repurposed as a colonial instrument. Today’s terrorism law, shaped through colonial and counter-insurgency contexts from Malaya to Ireland, is being turned inward against anti-imperial solidarity at home. The law of empire comes home to roost.

Anticipatory repression and structural crisis

Coleridge also saw clearly that the Gagging Acts were not responses to actual insurrection but pre-emptive strikes against the possibility of effective opposition. As he noted, the ‘present Bills were conceived and laid in the dunghill of despotism among the other yet unhatched eggs of the old Serpent’. The metaphor matters: eggs, not yet hatched, containing future dangers the state has decided to destroy in embryo. The Acts targeted not what the democratic societies had done—their meetings were peaceful, their publications lawful—but what they represented: an organised capacity for political mobilisation that might, in future, seriously challenge the existing order.

This is what can be termed anticipatory repression: the pre-emptive design and deployment of legal, policing, and ideological architectures intended to neutralise the capacity and political effects of dissent before they can seriously disrupt the reproduction of a crisis-ridden order. It is less about restoring a disturbed equilibrium than about enclosing political space in advance, in full knowledge that the grievances driving protest will continue. The state does not wait for the disorder it fears; it acts to prevent the conditions in which effective opposition might crystallise.

The proscription of Palestine Action exemplifies this logic. Criminal prosecutions for property damage were already proceeding, with activists receiving custodial sentences under ordinary law. Recent Court of Appeal decisions (R v Trowland, R v Hallam) have entrenched a punitive stance towards disruptive protest, explicitly endorsing deterrence of wider movements as a legitimate sentencing aim and rejecting arguments about an impermissible chilling effect on ECHR rights. The courts have made clear: the chill is not a regrettable side-effect; it is the purpose.

Proscription goes further. It criminalises the organisational form itself. Under sections 11 and 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000, membership, inviting support, or even displaying an item arousing suspicion of support becomes criminal, with sentences up to ten or fourteen years. The aim is not to punish discrete offences but to remove from political life a particular mode of organising—highly networked, materially targeted, openly anti-imperialist—before it can be replicated or expanded. It targets not what Palestine Action has done but what it represents as a potential model.

Why this severity? Because the structural conditions generating anti-genocide protest cannot be addressed within the existing order. Since October 2023, Israel’s assault on Gaza has produced destruction so extreme that the International Court of Justice has found a plausible risk that rights under the Genocide Convention are being violated, and major UN bodies and human rights organisations have concluded Israel is committing genocide. Britain has provided military, economic, and diplomatic support throughout. Palestine Action targeted precisely this nexus: the factories and airbases where complicity is materialised. In doing so, it sits at the intersection of imperial alliance, racialised violence, and arms capital—the circuits Britain cannot break from without fundamentally reordering its global position.

Within the confines of liberal capitalism and junior imperial partnership, these are not problems any government can solve; they are produced by the system’s routine operation. The same is true of climate breakdown and deepening inequality. Protest against these conditions is not an aberration but a rational response to structural contradictions. Anticipatory repression is the state’s admission that it cannot—or will not—address the causes, and must instead fortify itself against the inevitable opposition, particularly where that opposition is led by racialised communities and targets core circuits of capital and empire.

As John Barrell notes of Pitt’s measures, their effectiveness lay less in mass prosecutions than in the terror they instilled: ‘there was no need for the police if dissidents learned to police themselves’. The severity of potential punishment induces self-censorship. A similar logic operates now. Proscription raises the costs of solidarity to the point where many will conclude that solidarity is not worth the risk. Reports speak of thousands caught up in arrests, surveillance or investigation for alleged “support”—including for carrying placards expressing solidarity with Palestine Action. The intended effect is demobilisation: not the suppression of every individual act but the attrition of collective capacity.

Forms without substance

Coleridge’s most penetrating observation concerned the relationship between legal form and political substance. Of the right to petition and assemble, he wrote, the ‘forms of it indeed will remain (the forms of the Roman republic were preserved under Tiberius and Nero) but the reality will have flown’. This captures precisely the condition of protest rights in contemporary Britain. On paper, Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention remain in force. Proportionality is recited. Judicial review is available. The Human Rights Act structures argument. Independent commissions issue reports critical of overbroad terrorism definitions and inadequate proscription safeguards. The forms of rights protection remain intact.

Yet their substance has been hollowed out. Since 2022, successive legislative interventions have constructed what can be called a siege architecture: the cumulative construction of offences, powers, and narratives that progressively close down space for disruptive protest. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, the Public Order Act 2023 (including Serious Disruption Prevention Orders), the National Security Act 2023 (recasting arms factory protest as potential sabotage), and the Crime and Policing Bill 2025 (targeting sustained campaigns through “cumulative impact” provisions)—each addition is presented as a discrete, proportionate response. But the cumulative effect is systematic: a legal encirclement designed to exhaust the capacity for effective dissent. The forms of protest rights remain; the possibility of disruptive, effective protest is progressively extinguished.

This is Coleridge’s cadaverous tranquillity: the stillness of the grave mistaken for peace. We retain the right to protest, provided we do not use it to achieve anything that materially affects the state’s imperial and economic priorities. The doctrine of proportionality, which was supposed to protect protest by requiring the state to justify restrictions, has been repurposed as the vehicle for calibrating and legitimating repression. The courts ask whether Parliament has adequately balanced competing interests; the answer is almost invariably that it has. Proportionality becomes not a constraint on power but its endorsement.

Bodies in cells, pressure in the system

The consequences of this logic are playing out in British prisons. A group of Palestine Action-linked detainees have undertaken a sustained hunger strike over their treatment and the use of terrorism powers against them—a strike that UN experts have described as one of the most serious in recent decades and one that risks organ failure and death. Many are held on remand on terrorism-related charges. Absent the proscription and the terrorism label, these would be ordinary criminal damage cases in which bail would routinely be granted. The terrorism designation transforms the entire procedural environment: it justifies extended pre-trial detention, restricts communication, subjects prisoners to heightened security regimes. Their mail is censored, their communications restricted, their bodies breaking down while MPs jeer when their plight is raised in Parliament.

In a statement from prison, Heba Muraisi wrote: ‘I’ve been force-fed repression and I’m stuffed with rage and that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing now’. That line condenses the whole structure: repression is not a glitch, but the staple diet. Coleridge, however, did not conclude his pamphlet in quietism. Instead, he warned that ‘THEY WHO SOW PESTILENCE MUST REAP WHIRLWINDS’. The point is not theological but political. The attempt to enforce cadaverous tranquillity does not eliminate the underlying causes of protest; it merely suppresses their expression. The grievances remain. The injustices continue. And the pressure builds.

The Two Acts did not prevent democratic and working-class radicalism; they drove it underground, where it re-emerged in more militant forms, culminating in episodes such as Peterloo in 1819. The law of treason, ostensibly tamed in England, found ‘new life’ in the colonies before returning, in altered form, through security and terrorism law. Whether the contemporary siege architecture will produce a similar dialectic cannot be known in advance. What can be said with some confidence is that the genocide in Gaza continues, Britain’s complicity continues, and the structural conditions generating protest—climate breakdown, spiralling inequality, imperial violence—will persist.

The state’s response is to proscribe the organisations that name these connections and act on them, to imprison those who attempt to make solidarity materially consequential, and to insist that the right to protest remains intact. Naming this as anticipatory repression—recognising it as a systemic logic rather than a series of discrete errors or excesses—is a precondition for building the solidarities and organisational forms capable of withstanding it. They who sow pestilence must reap whirlwinds.