It is important to reflect on the recent incident in Golders Green, which has left the Jewish community in a state of shock and despair at what has been recognised as an acute act of antisemitism. When random Jewish community members are targeted on the streets of Golders Green for no other reason than that they are Jewish, then clearly there is a sense of fear and alarm that needs to be expressed and understood. When the incident happened, I was a little resistant to speak out directly because, clearly, a great deal of political capital was being made by various individuals and political parties who wanted to instrumentalise this attack in order to weaponise it against protests, particularly of the pro-Palestinian kind. Somehow there is a kind of causal association being drawn — incredibly ridiculous in reality, even if widely and sincerely felt — but it does not stop people on various political and institutional platforms from making this association, including the independent adviser on counter-terrorism and various party political leaders. The link is spurious at best. Many who take part in pro-Palestinian protests are indeed Jewish community members who are liberal, progressive and secular, just as many who do so in these protests are also Muslims who are liberal, secular and progressive. To paint the connection in this way is to disarm the problem of the reality of the attack itself, which was carried out by a Somali man in his mid-40s with a particular history and record of mental health problems that clearly were not adequately attended to. It has also come to light that on the morning of the same day, this perpetrator tried to kill a Muslim man — somebody he had known for 20 years, in fact. There is also a video of the same perpetrator chasing what looks like an Orthodox Jewish man on the streets, who ran away as he was being pursued. And then there are the scenes of the attack at the bus stop itself, where two men of Jewish origin, one in his 70s and one in his 30s, were thankfully not fatally wounded. I am, of course, fully aware that the Metropolitan Police have formally declared this a terrorist incident, that the UK threat level has been raised from substantial to severe in its aftermath, and that an Iran-linked group has claimed responsibility for the attack. But here I would urge real caution. Claims of responsibility from such actors — whether ISIS, Al-Qaeda affiliates, or Iran-linked formations — have for two decades now followed a well-documented pattern of being opportunistic, unverified and frequently unconnected to the actual operational facts of an attack. The pattern of this attack points not to a directed ideological actor but to a man in profound mental health crisis, who began his day by attempting to kill a Muslim friend of twenty years before travelling across London and assaulting Jewish strangers — a sequence that does not survive even cursory scrutiny as the work of someone acting on coherent ideological instruction. There are also serious questions to be asked about the institutional incentives around threat-level designations, which tend to ratchet upwards because expedient escalation gives security actors more powers, more budget, and more political leverage; this is not conspiracy theory but a well-established critique within the academic literature on counter-terrorism. Acknowledging the official framing does not foreclose the messier reality of what actually unfolded on the ground, and it is precisely that reality I want to hold space for here.
This is all messy in reality, because first of all, antisemitism is real, serious and a problem in British society. Modern racial antisemitism is predominantly a European phenomenon, created in Europe through specific historical accidents that relate to deep-seated ideas of intolerance and bigotry, as well as conspiracy theories that have taken hold particularly in Europe over the last thousand years or so, and over the last four or five hundred years in particular. Today’s roughly 270,000 British Jews are concentrated in particular patches of the country. In my home city of Birmingham, where there are some 300,000 Muslims, there are barely 1,700 Jews. But antisemitism is real: survey after survey confirms that it exists, and there is no doubt that it exists among Muslim communities too. The reasons for that are relatively straightforward to appreciate. Muslim and Jewish communities rarely share any physical, institutional or social spaces. Muslim communities are often trapped in the poorer inner-city areas of towns and cities, with half living in some of the poorest areas in the country. These Muslims do not see Jewish communities apart from what they see in the media — and what is portrayed there, some of which is itself antisemitic, becomes believable to some Muslim communities. There is also the rather problematic situation of what may be going on in relation to intergenerational transmission of antisemitic ideas, which have taken hold over the generations largely because of a lack of contact, familiarity and engagement, and the wholly problematic but widespread conflation between Judaism and Zionism — the latter being a political project, the former being a global religion with distinct Abrahamic traditions that has far more in common with Islam and Christianity than separates it from them. And of course, the conflation runs both ways: some anti-Zionist rhetoric does shade into antisemitism, leaning on older tropes of conspiracy and power, and to acknowledge that is not to surrender the argument but to be honest about the terrain we are walking. But all of this is lost on a lot of people because of the lack of shared contact, and also because of a perception of one community being treated unfairly relative to the other. This takes hold in Muslim communities who fear their own realities — all to do with discrimination, Islamophobia and racism, which are real — but who also perceive themselves to be relatively more disadvantaged compared with Jewish communities, who are perceived to be treated favourably. This creates a triangular relationship.
Antisemitism is widespread in wider society too, without a doubt, and this is unfortunate and problematic. And it has been escalating: the Heaton Park synagogue attack in October 2025, which killed two worshippers, and the steady drumbeat of antisemitic incidents at Jewish institutions in the weeks before Golders Green, form a cumulative pattern, and it is precisely that pattern which makes the fear of British Jews so specifically and rightly acute. To pretend otherwise would be dishonest. A lot of this antisemitism is also driven by problems in the Middle East, which create impacts locally. The Gaza effect in relation to the 2024 election was sometimes framed as a problem of antisemitism, but it was actually a vote of resistance and resilience against Labour Party statements that seemed to disregard the plight of the Palestinians. Such was the level of emotion in response to the Gaza war, which still persists, that come the 7 May local elections, the Labour Party looks set to be decimated in places like Bradford and Birmingham, and replaced by Independents, Greens and Reform. The Conservatives may also be affected but will probably remain relatively untouched, as will the Lib Dems. This will all unfold against the backdrop of Labour’s capitulation in Muslim-population strongholds and local authorities in the Midlands and the north. It will be very interesting to see how this pans out in reality. There will be pundits who see this rise of intolerance, bigotry and the move away from mainstream politics as the death knell of politics itself, and who will argue that underpinning this vote is antisemitism. But of course it is not antisemitism per se: it is seriously a question of disaffection and disillusion at the hands of the major political parties, which have abandoned communities in the face of growing influences such as oligarchic global tech policymaking agendas driven by large corporate actors taking away liberties and freedoms while doing nothing about inequalities, wealth redistribution, and crucially local issues such as potholes, parks and libraries — all of which have been devastated as a result of austerity. And then through the fiscal budgetary alignments that have left social welfare in the distance while balancing the books, cutting costs across all swathes of the public sector, which has led to capital escaping the city centres as a result of rent increases, supply chain costs and wider investment uncertainty, leaving Britain as one of the most fragile nations in the G7, hugely susceptible to external shocks with huge internal impact, especially on minorities and the working classes, as capital continues to drift to the south.
As usual, a lot of the people in the Westminster bubble are simply out of touch and too busy playing internal politics to stay relevant within a game that is highly loaded, hugely imperfect, and arguably unfit for purpose. But I digress. What I really wanted to say in this thought piece is to talk about antisemitism and the prejudices that Jewish communities live with, in a state of fear and alarm. This is very true and it needs to be taken very seriously. There needs to be some degree of confidence on the part of Jewish communities that they are not the targets of specific hatred levied at them by particular communities, but that there is a wider problem of antisemitism in which many different groups have a role to play. Intrinsically I think this is the case, but political actors will take any opportunities they can to gain support for individual ambitions. It is also interesting how British Muslim community actors, who have a role to play in civil society and in the third sector in general, have been hugely outspoken from the very outset in relation to antisemitism — as they should be, and rightly so — but then when remarks transcend to stating “look, hold on, do not blame entire communities for the actions of an individual,” it is almost entirely ignored. And then when the bigger picture comes into play — that the perpetrator behind these heinous acts of violence towards innocent Jewish individuals was in fact also trying to kill Muslims — this is completely disregarded by all. Too much of the language of extremism and terrorism is used when in fact much of this has to do with mental health and underlying social problems that have existed for far longer than any policy maker was willing to appreciate, understand or do anything about. Given the short-term agenda-ism that goes on in society and in politics, there is always an uphill battle to climb just to make sure that people understand the facts, the bigger picture, and the longer story, before the next opportune moment arises for the agenda to shift further away into an obscure, inward-looking, elitist conversation that does not speak to the wider truths affecting all of us.