Led by an Oxford graduate ex Government lawyer, Defend Our Juries group plotting pro-Palestine 'mass action' to overwhelm police in London days after synagogue terror attack
Britain has become wearily familiar with activists who block roads, deface artworks and generally make life challenging for police trying to maintain order.
Protesters from Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain and Extinction Rebellion have been causing disruption and vandalism for years.
But in recent months, a new group has come to the fore – Defend Our Juries. It was started to highlight a perceived threat to Britain’s long-cherished jury system.
However it seems to have morphed itself into the legal wing of the activists’ army.
Whether it is climate campaigners being hauled away by police or Palestinian activists being arrested for supporting a terrorist organisation, there is increasingly someone sporting a Defend Our Juries badge to be found nearby, protesting they are being made ‘political prisoners’.
For Defend Our Juries – led by, among others, an Oxford classics graduate – has become a legal pressure group seemingly willing to lend its crusade to almost any left-wing cause.
Oxford graduate Tim Crosland, a former government lawyer, is one of the leaders of Defend Our Juries - seen here addressing Just Stop Oil activists outside the High Court in April
Police officers arrest a protester during a mass demonstration in Parliament Square against the ban on Palestine Action in London in September
Climate campaigner Trudi Warner, a retired social worker, was the inspiration for Defend Our Juries - which has spawned into a campaign group supporting Palestine Action
And tomorrow marks its biggest act of rebellion yet as it throws down the gauntlet to police in London by organising a day of ‘mass action’ in defiance of widespread requests to cancel.
The Met has written to the group asking it to cancel the planned march in the capital this weekend following the terror attack at a synagogue in Manchester on Thursday.
A letter from the force raised fears about the amount of police resources the protest would divert at a time when 'visible reassurance and protective security' is needed in communities across London.
But the organisation wrote online: 'The Metropolitan Police wrote to us to ask that we postpone Saturday's mass protest in Trafalgar Square, citing 'significant pressure on policing'.
'Our response in short: Don't arrest us then.'
Defend Our Juries was formed in 2020 by a ‘movement’ of people including Tim Crosland, a ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’.
Vegetarian Mr Crosland has gone from being a government barrister holding senior positions at the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) and National Crime Agency (NCA), to being a radical activist using street protest to challenge the will of the state.
Mr Crosland, 55, was born in Hammersmith, West London, and was one year ahead of George Osborne, the future Chancellor, at private school St Paul’s, before going on to study classical literature and philosophy at Pembroke College, Oxford.
He quit his legal career - after deciding ‘you do not make substantial change from the inside’ – in dramatic fashion by committing contempt of court in 2021 over a protest against Heathrow’s third runway, and being fined £5,000 and disbarred as a barrister.
The inspiration for Defend Our Juries (DOJ) is said to be climate campaigner Trudi Warner, a 68-year-old retired social worker arrested for alleged contempt of court for holding a placard outside a crown court urging jurors ‘to acquit a defendant according to your conscience’.
DOJ began organising protests outside courts where other climate activists were on trial, and quickly picked up support from various luvvies, including Chris Packham, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Juliet Stevenson.
Presenter and naturalist Chris Packham outside the court where Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam and four other climate protesters were given jail sentences in July 2024
Hundreds of people in a mass demonstration in Parliament Square in September holding signs supporting banned Palestine Action in an act of defiance orchestrated by DOJ
Extinction Rebellion founder Roger Hallam looking cheerful in Parliament Square on a Just Stop Oil day of action in October 2022. Mr Hallam was later jailed
Police officers arresting a protester during a mass demonstration in Parliament Square against the ban on Palestine Action in London on September 6
Success for the group came when juries acquitted several climate protesters. Yet in an almost comical misnomer, DOJ did not like it when Just Stop Oil veteran campaign Roger Hallam and four others were convicted and sentenced to years behind bars – with the group set up to defend juries now openly attacking jurors’ verdicts by complaining to the Attorney General that Hallam and his co-conspirators were ‘political prisoners’.
However it is its support for Palestine Action – with which DOJ signed a ‘statement of solidarity’ in November last year, before it became a banned terrorist organisation – that has given it such prominence.
DOJ has engineered mass arrests by encouraging its growing army of supporters to openly break the law with placards supporting the proscribed terror group. Organisers now plot to gather on such a vast scale as to overwhelm the police and render the law unenforceable – despite costing millions to the public purse in extra policing.
No matter what happens tomorrow, DOJ will only grow in notoriety. In August, when Mr Crosland himself was being handcuffed and hauled into the back of a police van for supporting Palestine Action, he was filmed by a fellow campaigner – with the footage of him grinning going viral.
