Seven protesters who allegedly vandalised Donald Trump's Ayrshire golf course will face trial with a "terrorist connection".
Activists from Palestine Action are alleged to have committed criminal damage at Trump Turnberry, including spraying weedkiller on greens and fairways, digging up the golf courses and spray-painting walls.
A protest by the group was held in March 2025, and it was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in July of that year.
If found guilty, the seven defendants could face longer sentences with prosecutors alleging a "terrorist connection".
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The Scottish Counter Terrorism Board, known as CONTEST, noted the damage to Turnberry in a May 2025 board meeting but said "currently within Scotland, this group has been focused on protest activity which has not been close to meeting the statutory definition of terrorism".
A preliminary hearing was due to take place at the High Court in Glasgow on Monday but that has since been discharged and a new hearing set for Wednesday 28 October.
This news that the defendants will face potential terror sentencing comes as Trump’s administration announced it is banning Palestine Action as a terror group and imposing sanctions on Palestine Action, including freezing any assets belonging to the group that are either based in the US or in the control of US citizens.
A spokesperson for Defend Our Juries said: “It’s now all too clear why the White House has designated Palestine Action as a global terror organisation, alongside Al Qaeda. It’s because members of Palestine Action upset the President in March 2025 by making a mess of his golf course.
“This is the terrifying reality of the ‘leader of the free world’. While he wreaks havoc on the global population, backing genocide and launching deranged wars of choice, issuing threats to China, Canada and Greenland, sanctioning the judges of the International Criminal Court, and turning the military on his own population, his primary concerns are his ballroom, his interns and his golf course. This presents the rest of the world with a stark choice. What’s more important? Obedience to the mad emperor or standing up for democracy and the rule of law?”
Labour MP and former Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, John McDonnell MP, said: “The Government has serious questions to answer about the evidence that Donald Trump politically interfered in this matter and influenced the Home Secretary’s decision to ban a protest group under terrorism legislation for the first time in British history.
“It would be utterly shameful if the British Government launched an unprecedented attack on free speech in our country - resulting in more than 3,500 people being arrested under terrorism laws for peacefully holding seven word signs - because Donald Trump threw a tantrum over some red paint on his golf course. The President of the United States performing one of his increasingly convincing Nero impressions cannot be the basis for British counter-terror legislation.
“The news that the protesters who allegedly sprayed red paint on Trump’s golf course could face terrorist sentencing, coupled with Trump himself now announcing that he is following Britain’s lead by proscribing Palestine Action as a ‘terrorist’ group, is profoundly embarrassing for Britain. Andy Burnham has inherited this mess from the previous Government. This must be the wake up call to drop this absurdly authoritarian ban, before Starmer’s blueprint is adopted by repressive governments around the world to criminalise protest and suppress political dissent.”
Palestine Action-co-founder Huda Ammori, who has been granted permission by the UK's Supreme Court to challenge the proscription said: “This lays bare what the ban on Palestine Action has always been about. We used direct action protests to save lives - the opposite of terrorism - by disrupting the flow of arms being used to murder Palestinians.
"By hitting the profits of arms companies and by daring to spray paint on the golf course owned by the demagogue who has enabled Netanyahu’s crimes, we made powerful enemies. The British Government chose to appease them by criminalising us as ‘terrorists’.
“It has already been revealed that Trump and Keir Starmer discussed Palestine Action twice on calls before Starmer’s Government announced that we would be proscribed under terrorism legislation. Trump has been characteristically open about this, posting on Truth Social at the time to label the spray-painting of his golf course ‘terrorism’ and saying he greatly appreciated Keir Starmer’s swift and robust response.
“As someone of Palestinian and Iraqi heritage, there is rank hypocrisy in the country that has helped destroy both my homelands working with the British Government to criminalise me and the organisation I co-founded as ‘terrorists’. The news that the defendants could face terror sentencing - and that Trump is now following Britain’s lead by banning Palestine Action in the US - should be the final nail in the coffin of this ban, which has become one of the most extreme attacks on free speech and the right to protest in modern British history."
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