Contribution
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I thank the hon. Member for Hornsey and Friern Barnet (Catherine West) for securing this debate on an issue important to so many of her constituents.
Despite having been in this role for only a couple of years, I have too often stood opposite Ministers to condemn violence against and, on solemn occasions, mourn the loss of life in the Jewish community—people targeted for no reason other than being Jewish. When those tragedies happen, we seem to find ourselves in the same post-tragedy discourse, with public figures stating that antisemitism has no place in our society, rightly acknowledging that it is an evil that must be vanquished. Yet how hollow must those words ring when British Jews know that another incident could merely be round the corner?
When the Golders Green attack occurred, my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition was right to state clearly:
“This is a national emergency”.
As with any emergency, there is no single solution. It requires multiple measures, but underpinning those must be a willingness to tackle the underlying ideologies that allow this hatred to fester. Today the facts are stark. Having visited the Community Security Trust’s headquarters, I join hon. Members in recognising the organisation’s incredible professionalism. The CST data released in August showed that between January and June, antisemitic incidents reached the second highest total ever reported to the trust in the first six months of any year. That is a disgrace.
Prior to October 2023, the CST had only ever recorded monthly incident totals exceeding 200 on five occasions. In the first half of 2026, the organisation logged more than 200 incidents of anti-Jewish hate in every single month, and more than 300 a month from March to June. Those incidents ranged from threats to life, assaults and arson to damage and desecration of Jewish property and abusive behaviour.
But there is another statistic that should stop every Member of this House in their tracks. The latest Home Office figures show that in England and Wales, there were 106 police recorded religious hate crimes targeting Jewish people for every 10,000 Jewish people. Across the population as a whole, the equivalent rate was 1.7 recorded religious hate crimes per 10,000 people. If we put those figures alongside one another, the disparity is extraordinary and horrifying. On that population-adjusted measure, the rate of recorded religious hate crime targeting Jewish people was more than 60 times the rate in the overall population—I repeat, more than 60 times the rate. Religious hate crime is concentrated against Britain’s Jewish community, and on an extraordinary and horrifying scale.
In modern Britain, that fact should shock every one of us: it is a stinging indictment of where we are and why this debate is so necessary. It also illustrates why the Government were right, in the summer, to allocate further police resources to tackling the issue. Ultimately, across matters of enforcement, we need to increase police presence, see urgent prosecutions, put a moratorium on hate marches, implement maximum sentencing and deterrence, conduct a comprehensive audit of counter-terrorism cases involving antisemitic motivation, deport foreigners who express antisemitic views supporting violence or terrorism, and better use existing powers to ensure that hatred cannot be targeted at Jewish communities.
The question I have is this: is enforcement enough, when the ideas that fester continue to be popular? Many of us across this House were fortunate enough to go to university; yet, as has been said, polling conducted for the Union of Jewish Students earlier this year paints a horrendous picture. How can someone feel safe when one fifth of the university campus would not share a house with them and one in four have seen behaviour targeting Jewish students? Can the Minister confirm when the Government will publish the Bell review into antisemitism in schools, and whether they will accept its recommendations in full?
There is nothing intellectual about prejudice, there is nothing progressive about excluding Jews and there is nothing enlightened about recycling vile conspiracy theories that are centuries old. The same polling found that 16% thought it was not antisemitic to claim that Jews control the media or government. We need to tackle the ideologies creating this mindset, because antisemitism does not begin with an attack on a synagogue. It begins with ideas and conspiracy theories. It begins when Jews are treated as a sinister collective and ancient prejudices are allowed to spread under new guises. The need to tackle this across communities is unfortunately clear.
Polling by Policy Exchange this year found that more than two in five British Muslims believed that Jews had too much power over the media, weapons manufacturing and the banking system. We should be capable of saying two things at once: the overwhelming majority of British Muslims are not responsible for antisemitism and should never be treated as though they are, but when antisemitic attitudes exist within any communities, we do that community and British Jews no favours by being frightened to confront them.