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Addressing David Lammy, who was deputising for Sir Keir Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions, Blackman said: “The Jewish population of our country have had to put up with weekly protests in our towns and cities since October 7, 2023; now we have Jewish businesses and restaurants having protests outside trying to close them down.”
He went on: “The chants are antisemitic. The meaning behind them is antisemitic, and we see where it leads. The massacre on Bondi Beach, what happened in the US and unbelievably, two of our Jewish population being murdered in Manchester.”
The senior Tory acknowledged that former director of public prosecutions Lord Macdonald was carrying out a review of public order and hate crime legislation on behalf of the government.
However, he urged the government to act swiftly regarding the intimidation by pro-Palestine protestors.
“Lord Macdonald's review is going to obviously look at this, but the Jewish population of this country do not have two years to wait before this hatred is extinguished”, he said, urging Lammy to “take concrete steps to ensure that antisemitism is driven out of our country”.
Responding, the deputy prime minister said he was grateful to Blackman for raising the topic.
“He and I have worked cross party on these issues over many years, particularly as I represent Stamford Hill, one of the historic homes of the Jewish community,” he said.
Lammy said Blackman was “quite right” and that “the rising antisemitism that we see, the nature of some forms of protest is intolerable and unacceptable”.
That, he said, was why Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood had set out plans to tackle the “cumulative impact” of repeat protests to crack down on the behaviour of some pro-Palestine activists in the aftermath of the Heaton Park terror attack.
The deputy prime minister and justice secretary continued: “I will continue to work with her closely to drive antisemitism out of this country.”
Lammy was covering PMQs as Sir Keir Starmer is on a visit to China and Japan.
He started the session by noting yesterday’s historic remarks by Holocaust survivor Mala Tribich to the cabinet in Downing Street.
“I found her testimony profoundly moving, especially having recently visited the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland. We owe it to every survivor and to the six million Jewish people murdered in the Holocaust to never forget. We will build a national Holocaust Memorial and learning centre next to this Parliament, so that the voices of survivors are never forgotten, and their courage inspires future generations”, he told the Commons as he and other MPs were donning pins to mark Holocaust Memorial Day yesterday.
Elsewhere in the session, Lammy was asked by Lib Dem MP Sarah Olney about whether the government intended to proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in response to the mass-killing of civilians by the regime – something which Lammy said Labour would do while in opposition.
Lammy responded that while he utterly condemned “the Iranian regime's brutal repression of peaceful protesters”, it was “a long standing position under successive governments not to comment on whether a specific organisation is being considered for proscription.”
He went on: “We have long criticised Iran's authoritarian regime and taken robust action to protect UK interests from Iranian state threats. And that includes over 220 sanctions on Iran, placing the entirety of the Iranian state on the enhanced tier of the foreign influence registration scheme”, adding that the government was also “working at a pace … to explore what further measures can be taken”.
