Northerners for a Free Palestine

Header image designed by Pete Mercer, using photographs by Jacob Turnbull

Originally published on statmagazine.org

May Day. It’s International Workers’ Day and in deepest Lancashire workers assemble from far and wide to blockade the gates of Samlesbury’s BAE Systems arms factory. It’s a gargantuan complex sitting rather innocuously amongst the surrounding farmland. Sheep graze on the adjacent land and behind its gates sit a gym and social club, all seemingly oblivious to the war machine that overshadows them. I remember being carted past the place as a kid on drives further north, glimpsing the fighter jets displayed proudly out front. At that age planes seem to attract a neutral curiosity – they’re wonders of modern technology. As a family we’d visit Southport Air Show. Overhead would fly the now disgraced try-hard patriots, the Red Arrows, and my favourite plane at the time, the Eurofighter Typhoon. Only with age did I realise how disgusting of a machine it really was. 

Unbeknownst to passers by, it is at this Lancashire factory that the rear fuselages of Israel’s F-35 fighter jet fleet are manufactured. Jets which continue to be used in a genocide against the Palestinian people. The workers arriving here on this May morning form just part of a coordinated and nationwide arms factory blockade by Worker’s for a Free Palestine demanding a UK arms embargo, a full and permanent ceasefire, and an end to the British government’s complicity in Israel’s war crimes against Palestinans. The coordinated action prevents access to all gates of the compound right up until midday, rendering the workday lost.

While BAE’s manufacturing capabilities were certainly hindered that Wednesday, their presence is felt far beyond the confines of Lancashire’s countryside. The sixth largest arms manufacturer in the world as of 2022 and among the largest employers in the area, BAE preys on young engineers, physicists, and mathematicians in higher education job fairs across the North-West. They offer fat payslips to our brightest and best should they turn a blind eye to the bloodshed; it’s a profitable business going by the live stock value proudly displayed on the footer of their website. In our universities too, arms companies make appearances. Research deals in materials and computer software fund PhDs thanks to BAE and Raytheon, and all university staff benefit from the arms investments of a ubiquitous USS pension fund. Complicity is everywhere, even in those institutions which we are so often told are bastions of progressivism.

Still, in spite of their vice chancellors, students across the UK, spurred on by those in the US, have taken action in the form of encampments. In the North-West of England, students and staff of the University of Manchester, University of Liverpool, John Moore’s University, and University of Lancaster have set up camp on university land demanding their respective administrations divest from arms companies and companies operating in illegal Israeli settlements. In Liverpool and Manchester this comes just months after their respective student unions voted overwhelmingly in favour of adopting Boycott Divestment Sanction demands. Students here stand firmly against the arms trade. On their encampment Palestinian food is shared in the evenings, bands play intimate gigs, academics are invited to speak. Local comradery is on full display with food, generators, and camping equipment donated daily by a range of individuals and local businesses. A number of encampments have now lasted for months, and across the country it is a strategy proving effective in spite of the smears and police hostility: London’s Goldsmiths and Cambridge’s Trinity College have already pledged to divest from arms companies.

Unfortunately, complicity spreads further. Across the water in the Wirral, more frequent actions are taking place to disrupt the local arms trade, this time in the unassuming suburban town of Bromborough. Tucked away behind a B&M Bargains, directly opposite an autism charity, is another arms factory: Teledyne Composites. Here workers have been gathering regularly to blockade the factory to varying degrees of police hostility. Again, you wouldn’t know it from the main road, but there is evidence of British complicity in war crimes everywhere, hidden even amongst the cushy commuter towns. Protestors explain to one passing woman of the arms factory on her doorstep; shocked and ashamed, she bursts into tears.

Amongst this rising tide of opposition to the UK’s ongoing complicity in the war crimes of Israel, Westminster types decry the disruptive protests happening across the country, suggesting we need more stringent police powers to combat an “unacceptable rise in antisemitism.” To conflate anti-arms and anti-apartheid demonstrations with genuine antisemitism in this way is dangerous and wholly exclusive of the Jewish workers, students, and activists ever-present at these protests. While antisemitism is a very real evil, undoubtedly compounded by recent events, it should not be accepted that to be in favour of a free Palestine is to be antisemitic. It is yet another distraction from the fact that complicity in genocide is being opposed, by tooth and nail.

The message workers and students across the North-West, across the country, and across the world are sending is loud and clear: they will not be complicit in the genocide of Palestinians. The country’s institutions of power however, are choosing not to listen at the cost of more Palestinian lives.

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Postscript

For each of these necessary direct actions, there are many more smaller expressions of solidarity with Palestinians. Creatives across the North hold gigs, jumble sales and poetry nights with profits going to aid charities. Thousands gather weekly in the streets of each city calling for an end to the killing. Window frames from Bolton to Blackburn don Palestinian flags. 

There are remarks made by detractors that the fight for a free Palestine is a uniquely middle-class phenomenon or that it’s only of relevance to our Muslim population. This is entirely unfactual. People taking these actions have often taken time away from work, scheduled childcare and taken personal losses of income in support of a free Palestine. These groups form a beautiful cross-section of all ages and faiths: students, workers and pensioners. They draw from various strains of leftism, setting aside their factionalism for a common goal: the fight for a free Palestine. It would be a great disservice not to join them.