The Filton Four, Henry Nowak, and the Death of Left and Right.
Neither left nor right: a Bristol sergeant's fractured spine, jailed Palestine Action activists, a boy dead in police handcuffs.
[Neither left nor right: a Bristol sergeant's fractured spine, jailed Palestine Action activists, a boy dead in police handcuffs.]
Okay folks. Let’s start with a name, because almost nobody else has. Sergeant Kate Evans. Avon and Somerset.
In the early hours of the sixth of August 2024, at the Elbit Systems site in Filton, she was on the ground when a seven-pound sledgehammer came down across her lower back. Twice. A fracture to the lumbar spine. Nearly two years on, she is still having treatment. Last Friday the man who swung it was jailed at Woolwich Crown Court alongside three others — the Filton Four — and a question that has nothing whatever to do with her back swallowed the whole story in one gulp. Were they left, or were they right?
It is the wrong question. The same fortnight, the same question buried Henry Nowak — the eighteen-year-old who died handcuffed in a Southampton street, still telling officers he had been stabbed as they treated him as the attacker. Two cases, two crowds, one label that fits neither.
Take Nowak first, because the two cases break the labelling machine in opposite directions, and his is the starker of the two. A death in restraint: strip the names off it and you have the most left-coded grievance in the modern repertoire — the template of every police-accountability march of the last decade. Yet the crowds that formed around it were read, almost instantly, as right: England flags, anti-immigration placards, counter-marchers chanting back. The grievance was one thing. The costume the press hung on it was another. What decided the label was not the principle. It was the ethnicity of the man who died and the man who killed him.
Now turn to Filton. On the surface the cleaner case: anti-arms-trade direct action, the pro-Palestine cause, mourned by John McDonnell and the Green leader, backed by an open letter of novelists and comedians. Textbook left. Except look at what people were actually arrested for outside the court — not damage, not violence, but expressing support for a banned organisation. A speech offence. And the principle underneath that — the state deciding which dissent is permissible and jailing you for holding the wrong one — is the precise civil-liberties argument the right has spent two years shouting on behalf of its own marchers. Left in cause. Free-speech-against-the-state in mechanism. The two halves no longer sit on the same wing.
So here is the part the labels are built to hide. What the two protests genuinely share is not a side. It is the relationship between the individual body and the machine. A boy dying in handcuffs. Four people jailed as terrorists for criminal damage. The real fault line running under both is not left against right. It is the state’s power over the person in front of it, and the quiet editorial decision about which persons it chooses to crush and which it chooses to mourn.
And this is where the institution can be held against its own paperwork, because the paperwork is a contradiction with a date stamp on it.
The terrorism finding applied to the Filton Four was not a jury verdict. The jury convicted them of criminal damage; one of GBH. The terrorism connection was added afterwards, at sentencing, by the judge — and the jury was never told that conviction could carry it. That uplift rests entirely on Palestine Action’s proscription as a terrorist organisation. And the proscription, at the moment these four were convicted in May, had already been ruled unlawful — by the High Court, in February, which found that only a handful of the group’s hundreds of actions met the statutory definition of terrorism at all, and that ordinary criminal law already covered the violent ones. The ban survived only because it was suspended pending appeal. Then, last Monday — the fifteenth of June, three days after the sentencing — the Court of Appeal reversed the High Court and declared the ban lawful after all.
Read that sequence slowly, because it is the whole story. The same justice system convicted four people under a framework its own senior civil court had called disproportionate and unlawful, then validated that framework seventy-two hours later. The terrorism label was not discovered in the evidence. It was switched on at the sentencing stage and confirmed by a higher court the following week. Whatever else that is, it is not a thing the words “left” and “right” can hold.
Which returns us to the woman on the floor at Filton.
Sergeant Evans does not appear in the slogans. She is not the right’s cause — they have not heard of her, and a Palestinian-solidarity case offers them no purchase. She is not the left’s martyr — she is the inconvenient body on the wrong end of the hammer, the detail that complicates the line about non-violent direct action, so the line simply steps around her. She has been written out of both scripts because she fits neither. A Bristol officer with a fractured spine, still in treatment, who was also sent a message during the trial telling her she worked for an occupying power. She is the one figure in the entire affair who cannot be sorted onto a wing — and so, in the great national exercise of sorting everyone onto a wing, she has effectively vanished.
That is the tell. When a frame is working, it explains the people inside it. When a frame has died, the people start falling out of the bottom of it, and you are left watching commentators argue about the costume while the actual person lies on the floor unaccounted for.
So the next time a procession moves through the centre on a Saturday and the only question on offer is left or right — decline it. It is not that you have lost the plot. It is that the plot was filed under the wrong system years ago, and you can feel it not fitting. The honest question was never which wing the crowd belongs to. It is the older one. Where is the power, and what is it doing to the person standing in front of it. The crowd will sort itself into red and blue by morning, because that is the only filing cabinet the press still owns. The body on the floor does not get a wing. It just gets a name.
Hers was Kate Evans.
A Freedom of Information request is now with Avon and Somerset Constabulary, asking three things: what the Filton operation cost, how the force classified the raid on the night it happened, and when counter-terrorism policing took the file. When the answers come back, so will I.
Sources.
Drawn deliberately from across the spectrum — from The Jewish Chronicle and The Times of Israel to Al Jazeera and Liberty — so the record holds whatever the reader brings to it.
The Filton Four — conviction, sentencing and the terrorism connection
ITV News — Four Palestine Action activists jailed over £1.2m factory raid, 12 June 2026. https://www.itv.com/news/2026-06-12/four-palestine-action-activists-jailed-over-12m-factory-raid
LBC — Four Palestine Action activists jailed, as over 100 arrested outside court, 12 June 2026. https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/palestine-action-sentenced-trial-latest-elbit-court-jailed-5HjdbXf_2/
The Jewish Chronicle — Palestine Action activists jailed over Elbit raid, 12 June 2026. https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/palestine-action-activists-jailed-elbit-raid-sog0s0hw
The Times of Israel — Four UK pro-Palestinian activists jailed for violent raid on Israeli defence factory, 12 June 2026. https://www.timesofisrael.com/four-uk-pro-palestinian-activists-jailed-for-violent-raid-on-israeli-defense-factory/
Al Jazeera — Palestine Action activists could face UK ‘terror’ sentences: what we know, 11 June 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/6/11/palestine-action-activists-could-face-uk-terror-sentences-what-we-know
The proscription — High Court (February) and Court of Appeal (June)
NPR — Britain’s High Court says government illegally banned pro-Palestinian group, 13 February 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/02/13/nx-s1-5713346/britain-court-palestine-action-ban
Liberty — Breaking down the Court of Appeal judgment on Palestine Action’s proscription, 15 June 2026. https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/issue/breaking-down-the-court-of-appeal-judgment-on-palestine-actions-proscription/
The Jewish Chronicle — Palestine Action proscription is lawful, Court of Appeal rules, 15 June 2026. https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/palestine-action-proscription-lawful-ng7wzyce
Al Jazeera — UK Court of Appeal upholds ban on Palestine Action as ‘terrorist’ group, 15 June 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/6/15/uk-court-says-proscribing-palestine-action-as-terrorist-group-was-lawful
UnHerd — Upholding Palestine Action proscription creates a policing nightmare, 15 June 2026. https://unherd.com/newsroom/upholding-palestine-action-proscription-creates-a-policing-nightmare/
Henry Nowak
NPR — In Britain, video of a dying teen handcuffed by police sparks outrage, 3 June 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/06/03/nx-s1-5844898/british-student-nowak-handcuffed-police-video-farage
CNN — Henry Nowak: handcuffed student’s death sparks uproar in UK, 3 June 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/03/uk/henry-nowak-death-far-right-intl
The Almighty Gob has covered the policing of protest in Bristol and the two-tier framing question across the BID Rangers investigation and the earlier Filton coverage. Continuing coverage at thealmightygob.com.
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