At 94, former human rights lawyer Margaret Owen had been trying for months to get arrested.

Jewish and an old friend of the Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband's mother, she said she had persistently sat, along with hundreds of other pensioners, at silent vigils holding paper signs which read: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”

But while others were hauled away by the police, she said she had “failed miserably”.

“I’ve been holding that sign a long time,” Owen told Middle East Eye. She even mounted it in her front room window, and sent photographs to the Metropolitan police, to no avail.

“Even if it’s behind glass, they should have arrested me,” she said.

But on 27 September, at a protest outside the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, she was finally granted her wish.

“I was quite proud to join the arrestees last Sunday,” she said.

Owen recalled that she was among around 200 other people, “many of us old, disabled. There were a lot of white hairs around, people with crutches, somebody was in a wheelchair.

“We were just sitting quietly with our placards round our necks, and then we see the police wandering through the crowd and photographing at random with their cameras, and then they begin to encircle people,” she told MEE.

Owen has a bad back and struggled to climb into the back of the police van, so she sat up front with a police officer.

“She looked really cruel and vicious when she was arresting me. But when I sat next to her in the van, I looked her in the face and said, “I’m so sorry for you. This is not what you joined the police force for.”

Owen said the officer's face “completely crumbled, she suddenly became human again”.

She said was driven “a long way away” to a police station where she was finger printed and issued her bail conditions which stipulate she must report to a police station on 27 December.

“I think they’re trying to ruin our Christmas,” she said, smiling.

“We are actually now descending and embracing all the features of a police state. It's very, very worrying indeed.”

Defend our Juries (DoJ), the campaign group that called the protest, reported that after over 16 hours, 150 arrests were made.

Merseyside Police told MEE that it does not comment on individual cases, but confirmed that " 83 people were arrested on suspicion of wearing or displaying an item, or publishing an image, in support of a proscribed organisation, and a further 105 people were reported for summons".

"As with all significant policing operations, a debrief process will take place to identify any learning and inform future operational planning," it added.

Starmer’s government proscribed Palestine Action in July 2025, making expressions of support for, or membership of the group a criminal offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

Since then, DoJ estimates that some 3,850 people have been arrested, with at least 2,250 charges for allegedly expressing support for the banned group.

The group’s co-founder, Huda Ammori, is appealing a Court of Appeal decision earlier this year upholding the proscription as lawful.

The case is due to be heard at the Supreme Court later this year.

A Home Office spokesperson told MEE that the proscription "followed a rigorous and evidence-based decision-making process, endorsed by Parliament".

They added that the Court of Appeal, which overturned a High Court ruling finding the ban to be unlawful, found that the group "carried out acts of terrorism, celebrated those who took part in them and promoted the use of violence".

“The proscription of Palestine Action does not affect lawful protest in support of the Palestinian cause, which remains a fundamental democratic right,” they said.

Match words with actions

As Owen was being hauled away, Miliband addressed the conference, declaring a “reset” in Labour’s approach to foreign policy.

He condemned “ethnic cleansing by the settler terrorists in the West Bank”, Israel’s “war crimes in Gaza”, and its “illegal occupation of Palestine”, vowing to “match words with actions”.

Addressing the "millions of people... who were moved and outraged by the plight of the Palestinian people," he said: "We hear you, you were right.”

“That gave us huge cause for hope,” Owen said, but warned that the raft of sanctions against Israeli settlements announced by the foreign secretary “wasn't enough for us".

"He didn't, and he couldn't go far enough, because he has to deal with a very fractured Labour party," she added.

Activists have pointed to the glaring discrepancy between Miliband’s words and the now-familiar sight of white-haired protesters being arrested for supporting Palestine Action.

Burnham’s government, and Miliband in particular, is facing mounting pressure to reverse the controversial ban.

Footage circulated online showed Miliband being accosted by activists in a Pizza Express minutes away from where protesters were being carted away for holding the signs.

In the recording, an activist is heard informing the foreign secretary that “200 people, 100 metres from here are being arrested” and inviting him to “have a conversation” with them.

“They’re being arrested for holding pieces of paper, Ed,” he said.

Miliband responds that he is “happy to have them chat to me”, but that he was currently speaking to his constituents.

Subsequently, Miliband said in an interview with LBC: “I believe in the right to protest”, but said he would let the ban's Supreme Court appeal hearing “play out”.

Responding to a question from Andrew Marr about the arrests of "grannies and vicars", Miliband said he didn’t think it was “anyone’s intent” to "criminalise" them as a result of the proscription.

On Tuesday, DoJ wrote to Miliband on behalf of Owen and another arrestee, 76-year-old Jonathan Porritt CBE, accepting his offer of a meeting to discuss the proscription.

Responding to Miliband's comments about the arrests, the letter says that the elderly arrestees "have not just been criminalised. They are being prosecuted by your government as terrorists, under the most draconian branch of the criminal law".

“That's an important concession that the government has made. This is not the intention. This is not working as it should be working,” former government lawyer and DoJ co-founder Tim Crosland told MEE.

He said that the acknowledgement is “really significant” to the appeal hearing at the Supreme Court which will assess the ban’s proportionality.

“When the government itself is saying this is a disproportionate interference, it's a bit difficult to see how they defend the case now.”

Crosland noted that Miliband's deferral to the courts “feels disingenuous”, noting that the Home Office is defending the appeal against a High Court ruling that the proscription should be quashed.

“The government's got a choice. At any moment it could concede the appeal,” Crosland said.

Burnham has been less explicit in critiquing the ban.

When asked by Nick Ferrari whether he considered the sign holding vigils to be “terrorist activity” he conceded that the elderly arrestees sit at one end of the Palestine Action “spectrum”, with activists who have “carried out attacks" on military sites on the “extreme end”.

‘She would have ticked Ed off’

Owen can claim a connection with Miliband. She was a close friend of his mother, Marion Kozak, a Polish Holocaust survivor and feminist-socialist campaigner who was a member of Jews for Justice for Palestinians.

Kozak, who died in May, witnessed the Nazi occupation of her hometown Czestochowa.

“She’s one of the women I really admire so much,” Owen said.

Owen said that she, Kozak and Marlene Hobsbawm - the wife of Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm - were known as the “three M’s”.

“She was incredibly modest, but incredibly strong in her calls for justice and for supporting victims of injustice,” she said, adding that Kozak “had always been for the Palestinian people”.

Reflecting on what Kozak would have made of Miliband’s policy shift on Israel, Owen said: "I think she would have ticked Ed off."

“And yet I salute him, because I think he's made a dramatic shift in our foreign policy," Owen said.

"That is a chink of light in the dark tunnel. We must encourage that and support him and build on that, whatever the obstacles are and however difficult it is.”

Owen recalled that, when David and Ed Miliband were competing for the Labour Party leadership in 2010, she asked MP Jeremy Corbyn who should be the party leader.

“You know what he said? Their mother.”

When asked if Kozak would be among the people risking arrest outside the Labour party conference, Owen responded: “Absolutely, she’d be with us holding a sign.”