A protester was arrested for wearing a T-shirt with the words “Plasticine Action” on it – on the day of a mass gathering in Parliament Square in London.
Miles Pickering, from Brighton, admitted the T-shirt was designed to look like the logo of Palestine Action, the protest group banned last month after activists broke into RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire and sprayed two military planes with red paint.
The Terrorism Act 2000 makes it illegal to wear anything supporting a banned organisation.
But on Mr Pickering’s T-shirt, inside the letter “o” was an image of the plasticine character Morph, and the text underneath the logo read: “We oppose AI-generated animation”.
Some 532 other demonstrators were arrested at the pro-Palestinian rally in Westminster on August 9..
Mr Pickering, an engineer, told The Guardian that an officer had glanced at his top and told him: “Right, you’re nicked,” before taking him to Scotland Yard.
He said a supporters were taking photographs of him and “everyone was laughing at how silly it was that I was getting arrested for being a plasticine terrorist”.
He claimed a senior officer asked the arresting officer whether he could arrest Mr Pickering under section 12, which could have brought a more serious charge of supporting a proscribed group.
“[The arresting officer] said: ‘No, I can’t.’ And they said: ‘Why not?’ He said: ‘Because he hasn’t got Palestine Action written on him. He’s got Plasticine Action written on him.’”
He said that five minutes later, the arresting officer told him: “I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news.” The “good news” was that he was de-arresting Mr Pickering.
“And I said: ‘What’s the bad news?’ He said: ‘It’s going to be really embarrassing for me.’ And then I walked free, while all the real heroes are the people that are actually getting arrested,” the demonstrator said.
Mr Pickering is selling copies of the T-shirt to raise money for the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians.
“It kind of works, doesn’t it?” he said. “It’s like we are just going to mock you for your ridiculous decision to proscribe a protest group. It’s just so important that our rights to protest do not get diminished.”
A Metropolitan Police spokesperson said:“Shortly after 14:00hrs on Saturday, 9 August officers on duty in Parliament Square arrested a man on suspicion of an offence under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000.
“At the time of his arrest, the man was wearing a scarf that partially obscured the slogan on his t-shirt which officers believed read Palestine Action.
“He was taken to one of the nearby prisoner processing points where, once officers realised the t-shirt actually read Plasticine Action, he was de-arrested and was free to leave.”
