Seven Protesters Face Terror Sentencing for Spray-Painting Trump's Scottish Golf Resort

Seven people connected to Palestine Action appeared at the High Court in Glasgow on Monday over a protest at Trump's Turnberry golf resort in March 2025. The charge sheet, rather than the conduct, is why this case matters well beyond the seven of them.

What they are accused of doing

The alleged acts are property damage: spray-painting pro-Gaza messages, digging up turf, damaging sprinklers, applying weedkiller to the greens. In ordinary circumstances that is vandalism, prosecuted as vandalism, resolved with fines, community sentences, or short custodial terms depending on the bill.

Instead prosecutors filed a 16-page indictment alleging that the acts carried a terrorist connection. That changes the sentencing exposure dramatically, and it changes what the prosecution is for.

The groundwork was laid last year

The legal basis was assembled in advance. The U.K. formally proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organization last year, and the U.S. Treasury has since sanctioned the group and related entities. Once an organization carries that designation, the acts of people associated with it can be pulled into the terrorism framework more or less regardless of what the acts themselves amounted to.

That is the entire function of proscription, and supporters of it would say so openly: the point is to make association itself costly. The objection is not that this is a misuse of the power. The objection is that the power now reaches spray paint on a golf course.

The comparison running in parallel

There is a useful control case proceeding at the same time. Five Palestine Action members involved in an incident at a Barclays branch in August 2024 — roughly £200,000 in damage, considerably more than a golf course's irrigation system — were prosecuted under ordinary criminal law, after a judge found the damage did not meet the serious-damage threshold the terrorism statutes require. They are due to be sentenced Sept. 4.

So: the same organization, the same category of conduct, a far larger repair bill, and the lesser charge. The distinguishing feature of the Turnberry case is not the scale of the damage or the danger to the public.

Whose lawn it was

It is whose property was damaged. That is an uncomfortable thing to write and a difficult thing to explain away, and the Crown will presumably be asked to explain it at some length before this is over.

Critics have called the escalation authoritarian overreach, which is the expected framing and, in this instance, not obviously wrong. Terrorism law exists because some conduct is genuinely different in kind from vandalism. A legal system that cannot articulate the difference between the two — and appears to locate it in the identity of the property owner — is not applying that distinction. It is borrowing its authority.