I am one of 24 co-defendants collectively known as the Filton 24, and am currently being held at HMP Peterborough on remand (before trial) since November 2024.
In August 2024, heavily armed police arrested me and one other person, pointing multiple large guns at us, flying a drone above our heads, while we were completely unarmed and in our pyjamas. I was let go, then arrested again four months later. Police surrounded me in my bed while I was sleeping and naked, breaking down my front door and destroying my bathroom. In another brutal example, 30 police officers entered a family home to arrest one person.
We were all detained in specialist counterterrorism units around the country, interrogated multiple times a day and experienced sleep deprivation, with lights kept on 24 hours a day with no windows. We initially had no contact with loved ones and were kept in isolation for up to a week before being remanded to prison.
We have all pleaded not guilty and have been split into three connected trials taking place in London in November 2025, April 2026 and June 2026. I will be in the third trial. Like many of us, I have been denied bail, facing one and a half to two years in prison without trial. All of us are being held under the Terrorism Act but are not charged with terrorism offences.
Conditions for all the prisoners in Britain are awful, and our families on the outside are doing amazing work to shine a light on what’s going on in here. A prison diary by William Plastow, one of my co-defendants, exposed the conditions in HMP Wandsworth, an old Victorian prison he has been incarcerated in.
The conversation about prisons — both in terms of the harsh sentencing of prisoners and the harsh conditions of these neglected structures themselves — have come into the public eye. This has forced a custodial sentencing review by the government, with a certain focus on probation and community sentence, that will come into effect next year, with Justice Minister Shabana Mahmood recently admitting that prisons currently make‘better criminals, not better citizens’, with an 80 percent reoffending rate for former inmates.
Britain has the highest rates of incarceration in Western Europe. I am being held in one of two women’s prisons where women have been restrained and handcuffed to officers during labour in the hospital. Hearing prisoners’ stories, many that are vulnerable survivors of abuse. Some are homeless and recalled to prison for missing probation or failing a drug test, sometimes coming back after only a week.
During the first two months in here, I saw someone come back three times. One elderly lady who could barely walk, was homeless and was struggling with alcohol, smashed the window so she could go to prison for winter and have a warm place to stay with food and clothes. I’ve met women who need proper mental healthcare which the prison is unable to provide. They get moved between general population wings, healthcare and the segregation unit which they call ‘Separation and Care.’
It is an endless cycle of violence. I’ve seen guards think it’s funny to start the day by shouting ‘Last Call!’ to prisoners held on a detox wing when they are still in their cells, simply to cause panic and distress for those waiting for essential medicine to manage their withdrawal symptoms. I’ve met three women who have lost babies due to arrest or prison. Without any justice for them, their trauma goes on.
In prison, I spend my days painting and drawing, reading and writing letters, although mail is limited because we are being held under conditions in prison which include increased surveillance and censorship.
I am actually enjoying my time away from my smartphone. I have been an organiser in the DIY punk scene in London for 20 years and seen the effect of individualism as the rise of this style of technology has become more and more popular over the years.
Neoliberalism has worn away at the deepest bonds of friendship and camaraderie with great success, making it increasingly difficult to keep a community together as a place of collective organization and freedom, where ideas for a better future are expressed — in my case, through music.
Social media has been a big contributor to this, as it is easier to be destructive and self-serving behind the keyboard than build collective face-to-face. Too often, things fall apart and collective efforts stop because of nonsense. I feel people are forgetting how to talk to each other in constructive, accountable and restorative ways.
What gives me hope is looking at all my co-defendants’ faces on my video screen every time we attend court for another hearing, preparing for the trials that are up to a year away. As we are all split up among different prisons, we attend court digitally and sit through the day hardly able to hear or say anything but each other’s faces.
When I see my co-defendants, I realise that we represent a microcosm of what the wider movement has achieved: bringing together the broadest possible coalition of people to assist the cause of Palestine. No wonder we have experienced such an abuse of power — the machines of power are clearly more scared of us than we are of them.
The state’s attempts to link politically committed people to terrorism is nothing new — it is the possibility of their achieving their political goals that results in their subjugation, and some more so than others.
But as much as we are struggling, seeing people who have never been politically active before attending their first protest, meeting others and being part of a mass movement makes me feel that I have never been freer than I am in prison right now. Knowing that no matter what they do to me it will be nothing compared to the suffering of the Palestinian people; that keeps me going day by day. I’m sure that is the same for all my co-defendants.
Love and solidarity,
Aleks