Transgender direct action group BASH BACK has made a devastating rebuttal to an article in The Times, in which Lord Walney suggests Britain should move to proscribe groups engaging in “systematic criminal disruption”. Lord Walney is former right-wing Labour MP John Woodcock, who quit Parliament following sexual harassment allegations. While serving as the government’s “independent adviser on political violence and disruption”, he was an active lobbyist for fossil fuel interests and the arms industry.

The article was preceded by an extensive news report which repeats quotes from the article, padded with reminders of previous scaremongering coverage of BASH BACK in The Times. In their statement, included below, activists from BASH BACK argue that the “paranoia from the authoritarian right stems from a need to protect property, ideology, and profit”. The group states it stands behind all its previous actions and reiterates its commitment to non-violence.

In the paywalled article, Woodcock castigates BASH BACK for not removing the image of a hammer breaking glass from its website after Ann Widdecombe was murdered with a hammer on 8 June. Walney is careful not to allege any direct connection, and makes no reference to Widdecombe’s infamous crusade against LGBTQI+ rights. Alleging a slippery slope between property destruction and violence towards persons, he suggests that all groups causing “systematic disruption” should be tested “against that same threshold” that was used to proscribe Palestine Action.

The group’s statement follows

This week, John Woodcock, known as Lord Walney, published an op-ed via The Times demanding our proscription as a terrorist organisation. Woodcock is best known for being the government’s former advisor on political violence and disruption, having played a vital role in the proscription of Palestine Action, and has historically argued for similar restrictions on other direct action groups like Just Stop Oil. His attempt to proscribe our organisation in such a similar way despite no direct connection to the Labour government – even going so far as to suggest “test[ing] Bash Back [sic] against that same threshold [as Palestine Action]” – is curious and speaks to an attempt to exert power against political underclasses through his connection to mainstream journalism.

In his article, Woodcock refers to peaceful protest as a political liberty, where direct action and vandalism is a great violence that can in turn lead to other forms of violence, even murder. Woodcock claims, as Zia Yusuf did a week prior, that direct actionists- perhaps even members of BASH BACK -are responsible for the murder of Anne Widdicombe. Justifying this, Woodcock – who has a history of alleged intimidation, bullying, and sexual misconduct – claims that “[p]olitical violence […] begins with the creation of an atmosphere in which intimidation is normalised”. Woodcock continued “That is why the conduct of the militant transgender group Bash Back [sic] deserves far more serious attention […] “This week a court heard that Anne Widdicombe was struck 21 times on the head with a hammer”. His claim follows a slippery slope argument, that one crime must necessarily lead to another, that the presence of a hammer implies a murder victim and not a window, that to claim to be non-violent must necessarily implicate the removal of anything that can even be read as violent, months after the fact. This follows an authoritarian surveillance rhetoric, a panopticon under which historic non-crimes can be turned into crimes through a game of word association. Woodcock even goes on to repeat the lie that “Sgt Kate Evans suffered a fractured spine during a raid on Elbit”, in order to justify more crackdowns on unrelated protest groups, and to draw a line through the past linking non-violent direct action with the violent death of a politician. Despite all of this, Woodcock asserts that “Nobody should prejudge proceedings that are active, and I make no suggestion here about who was responsible or why.”, intending to grant himself a kind of immunity from contempt, while presenting these claims in a major right wing newspaper. We have always been non-violent, will always be non-violent, and no amount of political deception will change that.

We formed BASH BACK with the intention to draw eyes to the strife we as trans people face in our day to day lives. It is our response to a political environment that sees us as easy victims, a response built out of urgency and demand, and in the knowledge that, as the events at Berlin Pride on Saturday attest to, queerphobic rhetoric kills. We see that peaceful protest is not working in the UK the way direct action is, in large part due to the same authoritarian anti-protest rhetoric that Woodcock is very obviously in league with. We have seen this in action; London Trans Pride 2025 was the largest of its kind in history, and yet there was very little in the way of reporting by the mainstream press. By contrast, our action against Wes Streeting’s office that same month continues to be reported on to this day- including by Woodcock in his piece. Our actions have seen material change too, with the EHRC forced to move their London office to a less public place explicitly because of an action in late 2025. It is clear Woodcock seeks to proscribe BASH BACK for one simple reason: because we are effective.

The paranoia from the authoritarian right stems from a need to protect property, ideology, and profit. Allegations of personal harm and distress caused by direct action are used as a smokescreen to defend their ideological bases from threat, despite the harm those ideologies cause to marginalised communities- harm like the EHRC has caused with their new guidance, or harm like Wes Streeting caused when he banned puberty blockers. Politicians’ cruel policies have stripped us of our bodily autonomy and have directly caused trans suicides, and transphobic journalists’ creeds have encouraged a hostile atmosphere and moral panic that has led to a rise in anti-trans hate crimes in recent years, such as the horrific murder of trans teenager Brianna Ghey in 2023. Due to the material actions and active discrimination of organisations like the EHRC, NHS England, and the police force, trans suicides have reached an all-time high, with public discrimination and institutional bigotry as the central culprits. When this happens with little active resistance, the formation of that resistance becomes necessary.

Our actions are destructive, and our action guide (freely available) reflects this. It has, predictably, been the source of much controversy. Now in its second edition, the guide details various methods for taking direct action, including information about their legality. We make clear to potential actionists the risks they take and the harm they face, while also making clear the means to resist and challenge the rising tide of bigotry in the UK. We do so because we recognise that a culture of fear and compliance is exactly what people like Woodcock want. BASH BACK is, if anything, a reminder to the state that we do not fear them, that we are able to resist. Woodcock suggests taking down our posts depicting damage of property, for fear of harming a nation in mourning- but we never claimed to endorse violence, nor had even so much as spoken about Anne Widdicombe before her murder, so why should we? Frankly, until she was brought up, we had never even heard of Sarah Pochin. BASH BACK remains reactive, we stand by all the actions we have promoted, and would not promote them if we did not. Furthermore, we would not encourage taking action were it not for the violence that we face daily as trans people. Perhaps what Woodcock himself fears is our honesty. Perhaps he wants a new boogeyman (is there a gender neutral term for boogeyman I wonder?).

By designating us as “terrorists”, Woodcock belies a Western chauvinism, something rooted in his ties to Israeli arms and the genocide and occupation in Palestine. Terrorism in the UK has always been used by the ruling classes to designate threats to the status quo, and in doing so intimidate them into silence. It is startlingly effective, weaponised by Woodcock himself in his islamophobic demand to remove anti-apartheid activist Moazzam Begg’s passport last year. Terrorism is an insidious descriptor that designates the violence of the state- denoted by the use of extreme police powers, long prison sentences, isolation, medical neglect, and of course overseas bombing campaigns and gun-running- as worth protecting. Where resistance to that- non-violent or otherwise- is viewed as extreme and dangerous. To designate a group as terrorist implies an opposition to “British values”, and it is that that makes the racist pogroms of the past few months, spurred on by right-wing fundamentalists in Reform, the Conservative Party, and the sitting Labour government, unworthy of that designation: for all the true violence they commit, for all the hotels they burn, and all the vicious threats they level at migrants and people of colour, their values remain patriotic to a fault. Of course right-wing violence is not terrorism, terrorism is anti-British, and these people’s actions are in line with a history of extraordinary colonial, white-supremacist, and anti-queer violence performed by and for the British State. Woodcock’s personal silence on this matter, despite his previous job, speaks volumes. His criticism of political extremism is a one-way street, allowing for the victimisation of migrants and queers, who are terrorists for resisting. It is the same as it ever was- as Woodcock states: “no cause, however sincerely held, justifies violence or the threat of it”… that is unless you are a white supremacist, a zionist, or a member of the British state. The Times, too, are implicated in this- only referring to the Berlin attack as “terrorism” when the central murder suspect was alleged to be an Islamist, and purposely in their article drawing a distinction between that and far-right extremism.

The Right’s relentless portrayal of all trans political resistance as inherently violent or adjacent to terrorism – seen across the pond in Trump’s counter-terrorism plans targeting “radically pro-transgender” groups – is a prerequisite for the further destruction of our political autonomy, which would then lead to further segregation. They are smearing us as violent thugs to manufacture consent for state violence against our community in response to a make-believe threat. The systemic violence and stochastic terrorism from the powers that be is clearly violent and murderous, yet it gets little coverage compared to conservatives’ paranoid imaginings. The reality of the state’s genocidal onslaught against us is obscured, and when we bash back we’re treated like we’re over-reacting to nothing, that we’re hysterical animals, that we’re not being polite enough to our oppressors. This presentation of politics as simply a conversation between different sides of a debate, rather than about the exercise of power, is a ruling-class lie. It’s a lie that says state violence is non-violent, whereas disruptive, non-violent direct action by the oppressed in response is the real violence; a lie that says the annihilation of an entire demographic is acceptable as long as it’s done through the proper channels, whereas smashing up a few windows is unthinkable.