The government has found £250 million to protect Jewish schools, synagogues and community buildings. Good – although nobody should have to smuggle their children past armed guards to attend nursery. Spend five minutes thinking about what that money actually represents, and the applause should stick in your throat.
Security funding is what a state pays when it has decided not to solve the underlying problem. It is the cost of managing symptoms rather than treating the disease. Every bollard, every guard, every CCTV camera is effectively an admission: we are not going to stop the people creating this threat, so here is some money to help you survive them. It is triage, not treatment – and triage, repeated indefinitely, stops being an emergency measure and starts to become policy.
Consider the arithmetic. A sum of £250 million is a serious amount of money. It buys steel, glass, trained personnel and technology. What it cannot buy is a single additional prosecution, a single successful contempt-of-court action against an organiser who calls for intifada on a London street, or a single preacher losing his platform for inciting hatred against Jews. Money spent on defence and money spent on deterrence are not substitutes for one another, and a government that only ever reaches for the chequebook is telling you, whether it means to or not, which of the two problems it considers solvable.
Meanwhile, marches that call for intifada, chants that stray well past protest into open incitement, and preachers who traffic in the oldest hatred in Europe continue largely unmolested, waved through under the banner of “proportionate policing” and “community tension management”. These are phrases doing an enormous amount of work. They convert operational timidity into the language of careful judgement. Nobody at the Home Office wants to be the one who authorised a heavy-handed response to a protest; far easier to let the CPS’s charging thresholds absorb the blame while the community absorbs the fear.
You cannot fortify your way out of a hate problem. You can only survive it more comfortably while it festers. A synagogue with better locks is still a synagogue whose congregants get spat at on the way to shul. A school with a higher fence still has children inside it who know exactly why the fence is there. Security spending treats the target, not the source – and treating only the target, indefinitely, is not a strategy. It is a subscription.
There is a version of Winston Churchill’s line about appeasement that applies here almost too neatly: an appeaser, he said, is one who feeds the crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. Swap “appeaser” for “policymaker” and “crocodile” for “impunity”, and you have a fairly accurate diagnosis of the current strategy: feed the problem enough security funding and hope it eats the community last.
The community has turned gratitude into a reflex as every funding announcement is met with a warm statement of thanks, issued with the punctuality of a Swiss train. What is conspicuously absent is the harder ask: sustained, public pressure on the CPS and the Met over the yawning gap between what the law permits and what the authorities actually enforce. Diplomacy has its place, and access matters. Nobody serious thinks the community should be picketing the Home Office. But if we only ever say thank you and never say “and yet”, we are not holding anyone to account – we are providing cover.
Access without leverage is just proximity. Sitting in the room with ministers means nothing if every meeting ends the same way: warm words, a photograph, a press release thanking the government for its generosity. To actually move policy, we must pair gratitude with an unmistakable “and yet”: thank you for the funding, and yet we still need to see charging decisions that reflect the law as written, not the law as politely interpreted.
If £250 million reliably buys gratitude regardless of what happens on the streets, the government has no incentive to close the enforcement gap. Why would it? The security money is popular, visible and easy to announce. Enforcement reform is none of those things – it is slow, politically awkward and invites accusations of clamping down on protest. Given the choice between an easy win and a hard one, most governments will take the easy win every time, especially if the community keeps confirming that the easy win is sufficient. That is not strategy – it is moral hazard, dressed up as gratitude.
The community deserves security, but we must also be willing to say, in the same breath: thank you for the money – now do your job and enforce the law. Anything less is not diplomacy. It is a standing invitation for the state to keep doing the easy thing indefinitely while calling it protection.
Shimon Cohen is the Chairman of Roath PR Consultants
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