Amu Gib was in prison when the High Court ruled the Palestine Action ban unlawful in February. “I heard it on the radio, I was like, ‘Yes!’” Gib said. They were laughing hysterically.

“I was like, ‘Is this how people feel if they actually care about football?’” Despite the High Court’s judgement, Palestine Action remains proscribed pending government appeal, and more than 500 people were arrested at a recent protest against the ban. Gib, who uses they/them pronouns, is imprisoned in HMP Bronzefield in Surrey, awaiting trial for alleged Palestine Action offences. Last November Gib began a hunger strike that lasted 49 days, demanding, among other things, immediate bail and the shutting down of the Israel-based defence firm Elbit Systems’ operations in the UK.

After Gib began refusing food, seven other prisoners joined the strike; one, Heba Muraisi, lasted 73 days, longer than Bobby Sands and many of the Irish republican strikers who died in the 1980s. Gib lost around 11kg and resorted to using a wheelchair; they ended their strike after being hospitalised. Now, still on remand, Gib is standing in the May local elections to be an independent councillor for Finsbury Park, north London.

Prisoners have gone into politics before. In 1981, while on hunger strike in a Northern Irish prison, Sands ran as an MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone “to raise public consciousness” about the republican movement. He won the seat, but died a month later, still on strike.

In response, the British government introduced a law to prevent prisoners serving jail terms of more than one year from running in elections. As Gib is awaiting trial, they are still allowed to run. But their team stress that they cannot directly compare Gib’s experience to Sands.

“Bobby Sands wasn’t a British prisoner,” Gib’s friend Nida Jafri told me. Gib is a British prisoner in a British prison. “We were inspired by [Sands], but it’s different, because we don’t live in occupation… It’s a different kind of incarceration.” Gib’s winter hunger strike provoked a surprisingly muted reaction.

The media largely focused on stories about their demands for DVDs and access to Al Jazeera while in prison, and their reported £1.5m Islington childhood home. The government refused to meet any of the strikers, or concede to their demands, although when Elbit failed to win a £2bn government contract in January, the remaining strikers counted that as a victory and announced they’d begin refeeding. It is a contrast to the panic over the mid-1970s hunger strike undergone by Irish republican sisters Marian and Dolours Price in Brixton Prison.

The sisters were force-fed and, from jail, listened to “daily broadcasts about their condition”, Patrick Radden Keefe writes in Say Nothing, his history of the Troubles. Benefit concerts and regular protests were held in support of the sisters; even the loyalist Ulster Defence Association asked the British government to return the girls to Northern Ireland, as they wished, or let them die. Roy Jenkins, then home secretary, had “forebodings of menace” that if the girls did die, he might never be safe.

After 208 days (they were force fed for the first 165), the sisters’ demand was granted and they were transferred to Northern Ireland. Gib, who worked as an ambulance driver, masseuse and bike mechanic before prison, doesn’t want any kind of fame. They would prefer if the leaflets didn’t focus so much on them, Gib’s friend, Nida Jafri, told me.

“They want people to vote for the ideas, not the name,” she said. “All they care about is the policy.” Gib had toyed with the idea of changing their name to “Two Bricks” before the election – referencing their abolitionist project: one brick to dismantle, one to rebuild. (They decided against it, realising it might look confusing on the ballot paper.) I joined Jafri and Sharon Matthews, another campaigner, on a rainy Sunday afternoon in early April as they canvassed residents on the Six Acres estate to support Gib’s campaign. Two boys walked past in puffer jackets.

“How are you?” Jafri called out. “I’m hungry as fuck,” one shouted back. On the estate’s balcony, they rang doorbell after doorbell.

A small boy appeared and ran to get his mum. “I’m just canvassing for my friend, a prisoner for Palestine,” Jafri told her. “I’m sorry,” she replied.

“I really have to rush for work.” Jafri has a job in tech, but also DJs – although, she said, she hadn’t performed at the same level since Gib went to prison. She had been friends with Gib since they went to school together in north London. “They’ve always had a very good moral compass,” she said.

“It’s really important to them that they’re still a really good friend.” For Jafri’s birthday in May 2024, she and Gib did the Camino pilgrimage in northern Spain together. For six nights, they slept in hostels, and on each stop Gib bought Jafri a different present: poetry books, a notebook, a record, a flower press. Jafri had leaflets in English, Somali and Arabic, which s