THREE pro-Palestine activists in Hove were found guilty of criminal damage, sentenced to six months conditional discharge and given fines of over £600 by district judge Amanda Kelly last week over a paint protest against Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Peter Kyle.
 
Maggie Clifford, 61, Mary Stuart, 65, and Helen Skilton, 66, were arrested around 1am on the night of August 17 2024 after they painted “Stop arming Israel, stop killing children” on Kyle’s office window.
 
They also painted three stencils of the image Flower Thrower onto the glass, the famous Banksy piece first painted in the Palestinian town of Beit Sahour. Soon after the action, they were picked up by the police and taken to Hollingbury police station.
 
“We were held for 16 hours and it was awful,” Clifford tells the Morning Star. “I give respect to people putting their lives at risk spending weeks and months locked up in support of Palestine ... I didn’t sleep at all.”
 
After the police interview the next day, they had to wait hours more for the police to make their decision.
 
Prior to the action, Clifford says the activists were involved in stalls and petitions and emailing their MP to seek a meeting as constituents who were horrified by British support for Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza. “We got no response,” she says.
 
Clifford contrasts this with the revelation of Kyle’s frequent meetings with big tech companies both prior to and since he became Science Secretary.
 
Eventually, they caught up with him. “We had a quick meeting with him to discuss Palestine last year when we met him while he was out canvassing before the election,” she says.
 
A video of the encounter was posted on Facebook: no harsh words were spoken by either side as they politely asked Kyle to call for a ceasefire months into Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, which has killed an estimated 60,000 people over 15 months and is under investigation for genocide by the International Court of Justice.
 
“Since October 7 [2023, the date of the Hamas attacks on southern Israel] he’s refused to meet anyone in the Palestine movement — the whole pro-Palestine movement, our opinions haven’t mattered, he’s just refused to meet any of us.
 
“And that’s obviously a strategy, they just don’t want to go into it, it’s too sticky for them.”
 
The Starmer government maintained its military support for Israel throughout the war, including hundreds of surveillance flights over Gaza from British bases in Cyprus.
 
This was despite Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and former defence chief Yoav Gallant being charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.
 
Kyle is a long-time member of Labour Friends of Israel.
 
There were two parliamentary votes on the Gaza war, one in November 2023, when Labour MPs were whipped to vote against it, and one in February 2024 proposed by the SNP. Kyle claimed last year that he voted for a ceasefire, but the SNP motion calling for one never went to a vote, due to a controversial intervention by the House of Commons speaker.
 
Labour’s replacement motion was widely criticised for failing to condemn Israel’s war crimes and repeating Israeli talking points justifying its brutal campaign.
 
“Then the general election was called, and when we met with Kyle, he said we [Labour] are going to review export licences once we are in office.
 
“As we know they got into government and nothing happened, and so we decided to do something more visible and get the message out. We weren’t being heard and people in Hove and Portslade were not being heard.
 
“We did it in the early hours of morning … police were a couple of minutes away and we were arrested, and held in custody at the Hollingbury station for 16 hours. We were told we wouldn’t get off with caution.”
 
Two weeks after their action on August 17, the Labour government announced a small reduction in arms export licences for Israel, leaving 90 per cent of licences in place, including the vital F35 jet programme. Thirty licences were removed.
 
On their first hearing in September, the three pleaded not guilty to criminal damage.
 
The trial was scheduled for February 4. “Kyle and another official had to give evidence, the police gave evidence, and then we gave evidence.”
 
According to reports of the hearing, Kyle claimed that the action had made him feel intimidated and threatened, and his staff said that it took hours to remove the water-based paint from the office window.
 
Clifford disputes this. “We did it ourselves again, and it took minutes to take off. We did it to show there was no criminal damage. We played a film of it in court, [showing] that actually it took minutes to [clean] it.”
 
The three defended their actions through their lawyer partly on the basis that their demand for an end to arms sales to Israel was actually “in consent” with the government’s subsequent actions to limit weapons sales to Israel.
 
Clifford says she has no regrets about what she and the others did. “I feel it was worth doing because it brought the topic to the attention of the people in Hove, and people in Hove got to see that — and Kyle has been pressured into thinking about it and speaking about it.”
 
With dozens of arrests and prolonged detentions of activists from Palestine Action and other groups and the heavy-handed crackdown in January at the London Palestine march, Clifford says the repression is “part of the attempt to keep the pro-Palestine voices quiet.”
 
There is a wider issue at stake, which is the right to protest in a democracy. “What the three of us have done is also about the right to protest and to be heard. Government officials work for us, so even if it’s going to be an uncomfortable conversation and even if they don’t agree with us for whatever reason, they shouldn’t think they have the right to say go away, I’m not going to talk to you.”