I lived in London for six years. I don’t know if I should send my son.
I studied in Britain and lived there for six years. London was where I learned to think in another language, where I built friendships I still keep, where I first encountered the country’s peculiar genius for combining intellectual seriousness with civic decency. When my eldest son told me he wanted to apply to read at a British university – the same path I had taken – I was, at first, quietly proud.
He applied, but I do not know whether to let him go.
On Wednesday, two Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green, the north London neighbourhood that has been the heart of British Jewish life since the early 20th century. The Home Secretary announced £25 million in additional security funding and called British antisemitism an “emergency”. The government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation called it the biggest national security emergency Britain has faced in nearly a decade. After nearly three years of hate marches, antisemitic incidents at record levels and a series of violent attacks, half of British Jews now say they have considered leaving the country.
Britain is not alone in this. France lived through it first and worst, between 2000 and 2015, while the French elite spent more than a decade calling it “intercommunity tensions”. Germany is living through it now, and so are the Netherlands, Belgium, and Sweden. The American campus discovered in October 2023 what European campuses had discovered 15 years earlier. The pattern is continental, and it has a single shape: a violent Islamist current, a political left that has decided not to see it, and a Jewish community paying the price for the discrepancy.
And yet there is something specifically, peculiarly British about how the UK is failing. Britain is not the worst case in Europe by the numbers. But it may be the most disappointing case, because Britain had the deepest reserves of any European democracy to draw on – a long-integrated, exceptionally civic Jewish community, a political tradition with strong post-war norms against antisemitism, a state that prides itself on the rule of law – and Britain is squandering those reserves faster than any other European country.
Begin with the political class. The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn –between 2015 and 2020 – was the only major political party in post-war Western Europe to be formally found, by its own equality regulator, to have engaged in unlawful discrimination against Jews. This is not an opinion but the conclusion of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The Corbyn leadership had spent years describing Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends”, laying wreaths at the graves of terrorists, defending murals featuring textbook antisemitic caricatures, and assembling around the leader an inner circle for whom the word “Zionist” had become a slur with the cadences of a much older one.
The British Jewish community – famously discreet, famously slow to make a fuss – took the unprecedented step of taking out the front page of the Jewish Chronicle to declare a Corbyn government an “existential” threat.
When Keir Starmer took over, the relief was enormous. Here, finally, was a Labour leader who said the obvious things and seemed to mean them. Anglo-Jewry – grateful, civic, polite to a fault – exhaled. It exhaled too soon as the poisonous cultural sediment was not removed and once Starmer was in government, the accommodation began. The marches were tolerated, then routinised. The slogans – “globalise the intifada”, “from the river to the sea” – were debated as questions of free speech rather than of public order. Police removed anti-Hamas protesters rather than pro-Hamas ones.
The boycott campaigns moved from student union motions to council chambers to mainstream professional bodies. Cabinet ministers competed to denounce Israel’s conduct in Gaza in language indistinguishable from the placards outside their offices. The Foreign Office spent more political capital lecturing Jerusalem than on the Iranian regime, which had attempted at least 20 plots on British soil. The party that had been rescued from antisemitism quietly resumed the habit of pretending not to notice what its activist base was doing in the streets. Worse, it was trying to catch up with those gaining votes on its left.
And here we hit a specifically British problem. The country’s Jewish community is one of the most integrated, civic, and quietly successful diaspora communities in the world. It has produced peers, chief rabbis, Nobel laureates, and the editor of nearly every major British newspaper at one moment or another. It is also, by long cultural training, exquisitely polite. It does not, by instinct, take to the streets or embarrass its hosts, preferring instead to write letters and commission reports. It has faith –perhaps too much faith – in the institutions that it helped to build. That instinct – that confidence in British decency – is now being tested in a way it has not been tested since 1936, and the institutions are not passing the test.
Which raises the question that the British political class is most desperate to avoid: is there something specifically British about how this is going wrong?
There is – call it Anglo-wokeism, for want of a better term. It is not identical to the American variety. It is more genteel, more establishment, more deeply embedded in the institutions – the BBC, the Foreign Office, the universities, the Crown Prosecution Service, the senior ranks of the Metropolitan Police, the major charities – and far less contested by any countervailing institutional force.
American wokeism faces a Republican Party, Fox News, and a tenured conservative intelligentsia. British Anglo-wokeism faces, effectively, no one. The Conservative Party that governed for 14 years did not seriously challenge it; it adopted its assumptions while complaining about its tone. The result is a political culture in which a particular set of fears – of being called racist, of being seen as “Islamophobic”, of being on the wrong side of “community relations” – has become the supreme regulating principle of public life. Higher than the rule of law, higher than the protection of minorities and higher than the truth.
We have seen it before, in this exact country, very recently. The grooming-gangs scandal – the systematic rape of thousands of working-class British girls, over decades, in town after town, by gangs of predominantly British-Pakistani men – was not a failure of intelligence. The police, the councils and the social workers all knew. They did not act because acting would have required them to name a pattern that crossed the line of what could be politely said in 21st century Britain. The Jay Report on Rotherham documented this with a clarity that should have ended careers and changed institutions. It changed almost nothing. The same mechanism – the same supremacy of “do not be called racist” over “protect the victims” – is the mechanism now operating against British Jews. Different victims but identical mechanism, political class, and silence dressed up as tolerance.
The second specifically British problem is that the country has no idea how to fight things that are not technically illegal. Britain is excellent at counter-terrorism. MI5 stops the bombs and the plots that reach the prosecution stage are usually prosecuted competently. What Britain cannot handle – what no British institution has begun to develop tools against – is the dense fabric of legal but corrosive activity that surrounds the violence and feeds it: Muslim Brotherhood networks, weekly marches, campus encampments, slogans, BBC vocabulary, boycott motions, academic conferences, social-media ecosystems, the influencer who travels to Golders Green on Shabbat to film himself accosting Orthodox Jews. None of this is a crime under British law as currently interpreted and yet all of it produces the climate in which the crimes happen. And the British state, paralysed by a tradition of free-speech tradition that it applies selectively and a fear of being called illiberal that it applies promiscuously, has decided it cannot touch any of it. The marches got their permits, the chant leaders got their interviews, the encampments got their negotiations, the Muslim Brotherhood organisations grow without being challenged – and the men with the knives got their permission slip.
Underneath all of this is something newer than classical antisemitism and harder to fight. It is not the racial, nationalist antisemitism of the 1930s; it is a configuration in which the old accusations against the Jews – domination, exploitation, criminality – are recycled into the language of radical anti-Zionism, fused with Islamist themes, and laundered through the moral vocabulary of the contemporary Western left: anti-colonialism, anti-racism, the global South against the global North.
“Zionism” becomes the new name for the devil. “Genocide” becomes the routine descriptor for a Jewish state defending itself – a word forged in the murder of European Jewry, now repurposed weekly to describe the survivors’ children. The Hatzola arsonists, the Golders Green attacker, the Manchester killer are not deviants from this discourse. They have heard, week after week, that the Jewish presence in their country is illegitimate, settler-colonial, genocidal, and they have drawn the inference. The marches did not cause the stabbing but the marches and the stabbing share a vocabulary, and that vocabulary is the British political class’s gift to the men with the knives.
What is to be done is not a mystery. The tools exist – what is missing is political will. Six steps, none of them radical, all of them overdue.
Confront the Islamist political infrastructure, not just the violent fringe. Proscribe the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps now and move against the Muslim Brotherhood’s front organisations as France did in 2020. Stop treating organisations with documented Islamist roots as legitimate community partners. Audit and shut down the foreign funding pipelines –Qatari, Iranian, Turkish – that finance the British Islamist ecosystem from mosques to media to university chairs. Counter-terrorism is necessary but it is also insufficient. The state must be willing to act against the ideology, not only against the men it eventually produces.
Take back the universities. Make the IHRA working definition of antisemitism a binding condition of public funding, not an aspirational gesture. Suspend funding to institutions that cannot guarantee the physical safety of Jewish students. Disband student unions that platform terrorist sympathisers and reconstitute them under regulatory supervision. Investigate, suspend and, where appropriate, dismiss academics who use their lecterns to legitimise October 7. End the polite fiction that what is taught in significant parts of British Middle East studies is scholarship rather than activism.
End the weekly intimidation marches. A democracy is permitted to demonstrate but it is not permitted to mount relentless mass mobilisations, past synagogues, chanting for the elimination of a UN member state, while the police film from a respectful distance. The Public Order Act 1986 already provides the powers – so use them. Ban the slogans the courts have already ruled to be incitement and charge the chant leaders. The right to protest does not include the right to terrorise the country’s Jewish community – the British state has degraded itself by pretending otherwise.
Reclaim the language. “Genocide” is not a synonym for “war one disapproves of”, “apartheid” is not a synonym for “security policy one disagrees with” and “colonialism” is not the description of a people returning to its historic homeland. The British government, the BBC, and the universities have allowed a vocabulary forged to describe the unique crimes of the 20th century to be looted for use against the Jewish state, and the looting is itself a form of antisemitism – because it strips Jews of the words their own history wrote in blood. Ministers must say so clearly. The state broadcaster must be held to editorial standards that distinguish reporting from advocacy.
Be firm with allies and adversaries alike. The Foreign Office must stop spending more political capital lecturing the State of Israel on the conduct of a war than it spends on the Iranian regime that has tried to murder British residents at least 20 times. The asymmetry is morally indefensible and operationally self-defeating. A government that signals to Tehran that British policy can be moved by attacks on Jewish targets in London is a government that will see more attacks on Jewish targets in London. Firmness is the precondition of deterrence.
Recover the courage to be called names. This is the British problem distilled. Until Britain’s political class, media, universities, and police are prepared to be called Islamophobic, far-right, racist, hysterical, McCarthyite – the entire vocabulary of professional cowardice deployed against anyone who tries to name what is happening – and to keep doing the work anyway, none of the other measures will hold. The grooming-gang scandal taught Britain that the supremacy of “do not be called racist” over “protect the victims” produces atrocity. The same lesson is now being offered, to the same political class, with different victims. There is no excuse for not having learned it the first time.
My son’s acceptance letter is sitting on the desk in front of me. He worked for years to receive it. The university it came from has produced ministers, and the better part of the modern Anglophone literary canon. The Britain that wrote that letter is the Britain I love.
The Britain that is being asked to receive him is something else – a country that has spent 20 years refusing to defend the conditions that made it free, that learned nothing from Rotherham about the cost of polite silence, and that has decided, once again, that the price of being thought decent is higher than the price of actually being so.
I do not yet know whether to let him go. The fact that, after six years of my own life there, this is even a question I have to ask – that is the measure of what Britain has lost.
Simone Rodan is senior envoy for Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD)
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