This was not a victory
The verdict wasn’t the point
4 February 2026
For a brief moment, I could hardly believe my ears. Six Palestine Action protesters had just been cleared of aggravated burglary over a break-in at a UK subsidiary of an Israeli defence firm. Charlotte Head, 29, Samuel Corner, 23, Leona Kamio, 30, Fatema Rajwani, 21, Zoe Rogers, 22, and Jordan Devlin, 31, had also been charged with criminal damage and violent disorder but the jury had reached partial or no verdicts on those counts.
But this was not what I found surprising. What really made me prick up my ears was what happened next.
After the verdicts were delivered, the six defendants hugged in the dock and waved to supporters in the public gallery, who cheered loudly after the judge left the court.
Really? The supporters in the public gallery cheered loudly?
Could they really be that naïve?
Sure — hugging, cheering, waving: all human, all real, all sincere.
But… zero marks for gothic literacy.
If this is how the resistance reacts to such a verdict, we really are fucked.
What didn’t happen
Let’s be clear about what didn’t just happen. This was not a triumph of conscience over power. It was not the law correcting itself. It was not “jury equity” striking a blow against the state. Those are liberal fairy tales — comforting, flattering, and structurally false.
A gothically literate reading starts from a colder premise: verdicts are not outcomes; they are moments in a process. And this particular process has not ended. On the contrary, it has barely begun.
Look at the shape of the result. Aggravated burglary: cleared. Violent disorder: split verdicts. Grievous bodily harm with intent: unresolved. Prosecutors now deciding whether to retry. That is not closure. That is procedural suspension. The case has been kept alive, not buried.
From the system’s point of view, this is almost ideal. Nothing irreversible has occurred. No precedent has been set. No principle has been conceded. The defendants remain legible, retriable, nameable. The sword has not fallen — it has been left hanging.
And while everyone is busy hugging in the dock, something far more important has already happened elsewhere.
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Palestine Action is now proscribed. The break-in took place before proscription. The trial concluded after it. Supporting the group is now itself a serious criminal offence, punishable by up to fourteen years in prison. This single fact should govern how the entire story is read.
The past has been acquitted. The future has been foreclosed. That is the gothic move.
The system has quietly said: You may have this one. You will not have the next.
This is why all the noise about “jury equity” is such a tell. Those posters — The jury decide not the judge, Jurors can acquit on moral grounds — look radical. They feel subversive. In reality, they are structurally harmless. Jury equity is tolerated precisely because it does not scale. It produces no doctrine, no repeatable mechanism, no institutional memory. One jury may follow its conscience; the system absorbs this as an anomaly and moves on.
Indeed, it often prefers this. Occasional acquittals are not a threat; they are a pressure valve. They allow the system to appear permeable while remaining intact. What the system cannot tolerate is predictability — routine acquittal, generalisable mercy, organised refusal. None of that occurred here.
The two-month trial itself should also be read differently. It was not primarily about deciding guilt or innocence. It was informational. It mapped activist tactics. It tested evidentiary thresholds. It explored how juries respond to narratives of belief, intention, and violence. It rehearsed the choreography of future prosecutions under a new legal regime. That knowledge does not disappear when a jury fails to convict. It accumulates.
Notice, too, the asymmetry that everyone has already forgotten. Alleged violence by activists is described in forensic, almost cinematic detail: sledgehammers, whips, fire extinguishers. The conduct of security guards — who are not under criminal investigation — fades into the background as atmosphere. This is not bias. It is role-logic. In gothic systems, violence by the state or its proxies is environmental. Violence by challengers is ontological. One is weather; the other is essence.
Naive jubilation
And then there is the cheering itself — the moment that really gives the game away.
Cheering assumes that something decisive has happened. It assumes a line has been crossed, a danger passed, a victory secured. It treats the courtroom as the site of power and the verdict as its expression. That is exactly the mistake gothic systems rely on.
Once a trial has begun, the decision has already been made elsewhere. Trials do not decide; they translate. They convert political necessity into administrative fact. The real action here took place not in Woolwich Crown Court but in the sequencing of law: allow the acquittal backwards; criminalise the movement forwards.
So what message does this verdict actually send? Not to the six defendants, who will live with uncertainty, possible retrials, and long-term surveillance. The message is sent to everyone else watching: You might get away with it once. You will not get away with it again. And next time, even cheering will be evidence.
Deterrence through uncertainty. Classic gothic governance.
This is why the hugs, however understandable, are so revealing. They show a resistance still thinking in liberal time: verdict → outcome → meaning. But power no longer works like that. Power works diagonally now, across time, across cases, across legal categories. It concedes nothing while appearing to lose.
A gothically literate response would have been silence. No cheering. No triumphalism. Just the grim recognition that the system had allowed a moment of apparent weakness in order to consolidate elsewhere.
The verdict went one way. The law moved the other.
That is what actually happened.
