Has the British public been tricked about what the Filton trial videos really show?

Starmer desperately needs the trial of six peace activists who targeted Israeli arms firm Elbit to go his way, and bolster his government's claim that Palestine Action is a terrorist organisation

The current trial in London of six peace activists is proving just how determined the British state is to hollow out the public’s civil, political and legal rights to justify its continuing support for Israel’s slaughter of Gaza’s children.

US President Donald Trump launched a narrative makeover, with his phoney “ceasefire” and “peace plan”, designed to obscure Israel’s continued genocidal destruction of Gaza.

In parallel, Keir Starmer’s government has been working strenuously to impose a narrative in which efforts by Britons to stop that genocide – and to highlight his own government’s complicity in it – are branded “terrorism”.

In the summer, the government outlawed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation – making it the first direct-action group in British history to be proscribed.

It was the equivalent of a British government declaring the Suffragettes to be a terrorist organisation a century ago, so that it could avoid giving women the right to vote.

Thousands have opposed the proscription of Palestine Action as an assault on the rights to speech, assembly and protest, and have been charged with terrorism offences for holding signs stating: “I oppose genocide. I stand with Palestine Action.”

However, problematically for the government, which is bent on riding roughshod over our most foundational rights, the six activists on trial were charged before the group’s proscription. None are charged with terrorism offences.

They are accused instead of causing criminal damage – to an Israeli weapons factory in Filton, Bristol, in August last year – as well as aggravated burglary and violent disorder. One faces an additional charge of causing grievous bodily harm. All six deny the charges.

But after months of government narrative spin, you would hardly grasp what the trial at Woolwich Crown Court is really about from the misleading media coverage.

Narrative battleground

The government has been desperately trying to justify proscription by implying, through willing media outlets like the Times, that Palestine Action received funding from Iran. It has only ever implied as much because it has precisely zero evidence to back up such a claim. It is straightforward government disinformation, apparently cooked up by a public relations firm for Elbit.

Israel’s biggest arms manufacturer, with an annual turnover of $7 billion last year, is also ranked as the 25th largest weapons firm in the world.

Now Starmer’s government is using the trial to bolster the idea that the defendants behaved in ways that prove Palestine Action was not just trying to prevent the Gaza genocide by attacking the property of a major weapons firm, as it claims, but was also directing its violence at individuals, and specifically at officials of the state.

This, the government hopes, will convince the public that proscription was warranted – and draw attention away from its own sustained support for Israel’s genocide.

The trial – referred to as the “Filton trial”, because of the factory’s location – has therefore turned into a narrative battleground. The key evidence is video footage from cameras inside the factory, and bodycams worn by the defendants, by Elbit’s security guards and by police officers who attended the scene later.

There have been tight reporting restrictions on the trial – which has been especially helpful to the government, because it has used the lack of detail to build a misleading narrative that advances its cause.

Notably, overlapping the Filton trial was a three-day judicial review at the High Court of the government’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action. The court’s ruling is expected next month.

The government not only wants to lock up the six Filton defendants, to demonstrate it was right to proscribe Palestine Action, but it also needs to make sure the High Court does not reverse its proscription decision.

That may explain why the judge who ordered the judicial review and was due to oversee it, Judge Chamberlain, was removed inexplicably at the last moment. He was replaced by a panel of three new judges who have personal histories and connections suggesting they may take a view more sympathetic to the government.

Footage of tussles

Two days before the High Court review, and in the midst of the Filton trial, the prosecution broke with the strict reporting restrictions to release highly edited “highlights” of video footage of the confrontations between the defendants and the security guards and police.

It consisted of utterly confusing scenes of tussles between people armed with sledgehammers. This footage, according to the prosecution, forms part of the basis for charging one of the defendants, Samuel Corner, with grievous bodily harm. He is accused of injuring a female police officer with a sledgehammer.

The prosecution, in line with the government, is crafting an implicit narrative – one not supported by the charges it has levelled – that the defendants were armed with the sledgehammers with an intent to harm individuals.

That narrative, of course, ignores the fact that the defendants were using the sledgehammers to inflict as much damage as possible, and as quickly as possible, to Elbit’s production line and thereby limit Israel’s ability to keep killing children in Gaza.

The defendants presumably knew they were in a race against time to destroy as much of the factory as possible before the police arrived – as they soon did – and stopped them.

A section of the public have been swayed by the footage into concluding – before the jury has reached a verdict – that all the defendants are, at best, violent low life and, at worst, Iranian-backed terrorists, along with the Palestine Action group that sent them to the weapons factory.

Starmer’s government, and the British state trying to justify a new wave of authoritarianism, will be delighted.

Collusion by police?

But even if we accept at face value the narrative supposedly provided by the video footage – which we most certainly should not – it would still not make the government’s case for it.

The best the government can hope to prove at trial is that one defendant injured a police officer. That would tell us nothing about the aims or methods of Palestine Action as an organisation – let alone confirm that it is a terrorist organisation, as the government claims.

The government’s argument makes no more sense than if I were to claim, after a worker with a children’s charity was found to have abused a child, that the charity itself was in favour of child abuse. It should hardly need pointing out how ridiculous this kind of logic is.

But the “full” video footage, as the Filton trial has been demonstrating, may not actually show what the government and prosecution claim it does.

In fact, we should note that the “full” footage – that is, the footage shown to the jurors, but not the public – is far from complete. Elbit, the police and the prosecutors appear to have colluded in keeping some of the footage out of the trial. One can only speculate about why they would wish to do this.

Here are some key points about the video evidence:

* The state initially failed to provide the defence lawyers with accurate plans of the Elbit factory site. It was eventually forced to submit revised plans that revealed previously missing CCTV camera locations.

* Conveniently, multiple cameras in an “alcove” area, where many of the confrontations took place, were not working, according to Elbit.

* In an email revealed in court, suggesting that Elbit may have edited the footage, a police officer in charge of handling the video evidence warned Elbit’s security manager: “There’s a huge opportunity for the defence counsel to use the gaps and jumps [in the footage] to their advantage.”

As former British ambassador Craig Murray, who has attended parts of the trial, observed: “It is hard to imagine a plainer admission that a serving British police officer saw her primary duty as helping Israel’s largest arms manufacturer to secure convictions, rather than establishing the truth.”

* Inexplicably, the police allowed Elbit to retain exclusive control over the camera footage for two days after the confrontation. Some of the other footage, from critically important cameras, was not sought by police until “much later”, according to a police investigator.

* In a further sign of collusion between the police and Elbit, it was revealed that during a search of the Filton premises last month, as the trial got underway, an Elbit safe was opened that contained Metropolitan Police evidence bags, holding USB sticks of security camera footage.

In other words, evidence collected and bagged by the police had been given over to Elbit, one of the parties involved in the trial, who had been allowed to keep it for more than a year.

There is doubtless much more to be unearthed. Correspondence between UK officials and Israeli arms firm Elbit is either being been withheld or has been heavily redacted, despite it having a bearing on the trial – and future ones facing other activists who have been charged.

Political show trial

Murray further points out: “It is also simply remarkable that the prosecution’s highly selective and edited video evidence has been put into the public domain and has notably affected the public narrative, but that the defence video evidence may not be made public.”

That is how state power works. The government wants to prime the public for a guilty verdict, whatever the actual evidence shows. If the jury rejects the charges, despite these evidential manipulations, the government and media narrative will be that the jury failed in its duty to deliver justice.

It will further bolster the argument being made by the government to get rid of jury trials – which, in the case of political show trials of the kind occurring at Woolwich Crown Court, can serve as an impediment to the British establishment getting its way.

Murray’s account of the trial so far, drawing on the reporting of Real Media, is an important corrective to the government and establishment media spin. I recommend you read it here.

As he states of the video footage released to the public, “had it been put out without the prosecution narrative, nobody would have discerned that is what they were looking at. It shows chaotic, fast moving footage from bodycams.

“The first sledgehammer seen is plainly in the hands of a security guard – as testimony in the trial, ignored by the MSM, has explained.”

Notably, as Murray reports, prosecution witnesses – Elbit security guards and police officers – have had to change their testimony when confronted with the video evidence contradicting their original witness statements.

Under cross-examination, for example, one of the guards, Nigel Shaw, contrary to his earlier witness statement, “agreed that no one in the building had struck him”.

Another guard, Angelo Volante, who had claimed an activist had confronted him with an angle-grinder, conceded that the footage appeared to show it was him, not the activist, wielding the angle-grinder, as well as holding a hammer in his other hand. At another point, he can be seen holding a whip. And later, he appears to seize a sledgehammer from a female activist, Zoe Rogers, and to point its head towards her.

According to Real Media’s coverage:

Ms Mogan [the barrister defending Zoe Rogers] suggested he [Volante] had swung his sledgehammer at Zoe, showing some more footage, in which the shadow of the hammer appeared as though raised, and Zoe covering her face in response. He [Volante] had already accepted that he had kicked [another defendant Jordan] Devlin, and he now acceded that Zoe might have ‘thought’ that the hammer would hit her, but maintained he hadn’t swung it at her.

Evidence indicated that Volante may also have hit Devlin with the sledgehammer and bitten him on the neck.

Volante admitted under cross-examination that “he then put [Devlin] in a choke hold, which under further questioning he reveals he learnt from martial arts training”.

Devlin emerged from the confrontations with serious injuries, according to a description recorded at Hammersmith police station. His “shoulder tricep area was swollen” and there were ”injuries to both wrists and his right cheek, a bump on his head, black right eye, bruised shins, thighs, and left arm, a bruised right elbow, and his left pectoral”.

According to Real Media, one of his fellow activists, Charlotte Head, testified that “he had a pure black bruise all over one side, ‘like nothing she’d seen before’, over mostly his ribs and underarm.”

Unreliable witnesses

According to Real Media, footage appears to show Corner, who faces grievous bodily harm charges, using his sledgehammer defensively, against a sledgehammer being wielded by one of the guards.

What has emerged from the trial is that the Filton activists were taken by surprise by the security guards’ determination to engage with them – in ways the evidence suggest may have been aggressive and violent – rather than de-escalate the situation or wait for the police to arrive.

The evidence indicates that the police, when they did arrive, may simply have fuelled the violence rather than seeking to calm the situation. Police statements seem to have been as unreliable as the guards’.

Real Media again:

After challenging [from] Mr Morris [defence barrister for Devlin] as to whether it was a strike or whether it was a push that the guard administered with the sledgehammer on Devlin’s neck, [PC Aaron] Buxton does agree that his statement claimed the sledgehammer was in Devlin’s hands, but now realises that it was the guard who was actually holding it. The barrister asked the officer whether he knew why the guard had a sledgehammer, and he answered that he didn’t.

One of the female defendants, Leona Kamio, was tasered twice by the police, the second time when she was prone on the floor, reportedly “by accident”.

A police sergeant, Kate Evans, was undoubtedly injured during these confrontations. But what the government and media spin has obscured is that it is far from settled from the video footage and the testimonies how she was injured, or indeed who hit her.

As Murray observes:

What is evident from these exchanges is that the security guards and police are unreliable witnesses.

It is not merely that their evidence differs from what is shown by the video cameras.

It is that, consistently, their sworn evidence is untrue in a way that always makes the Palestine Action activists more aggressive, and themselves more passive, than in fact was the case.

This trial is about far more than whether six defendants are found guilty of damaging a weapons factory. This is the British government’s best chance to cement a series of bogus narratives: that direct-action protest equates to terrorism; that support for the right to protest is identical to support for terrorism; and that the government is the only arbiter of ethical behaviour, even when it is actively colluding in genocide.

You don’t need to support Palestine Action, or even the Palestinian people’s right to be protected from slaughter, to realise how important it is that the government not get away with its criminality – lawbreaking that will harm us all.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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