Will the new anti-Semitism report change anything?

Spectator

7 hours ago

For any Jew – or anyone who is alive to Jew hate – a report from the commission on anti-Semitism to be published tomorrow will make for uneventful reading. That is no slur on the report or its authors. The Board of Deputies of British Jews asked Lord Mann, the Labour peer who is the government's anti-Semitism adviser (incongruously often described as the 'anti-Semitism Tsar') and Penny Mordaunt, the former Conservative cabinet minister, to look at the state of anti-Semitism in the UK today.
John Mann and Penny Mordaunt have done Jews and those who care about Jew hate a great service
Their findings have already made front page news, even before the report has been officially published. But there is not a word or a finding in it that will not be entirely familiar to any Jew. Britain's Jewish population of 287,000 see daily – indeed, on social media it is hourly – reports of anti-Semitism in the professions, on the streets, online and elsewhere, and then we wonder why so few people seem to care about the re-emergence into supposedly polite society of the world's oldest hatred. It always surprises me, for example, how few people are aware of the intense security around Jewish schools and communal buildings – and how pupils at Jewish schools undergo regular training in how to respond to a terror attack.
But for all the familiarity of its findings, the report – which essentially concludes that anti-Semitism has been normalised in middle-class Britain – is nonetheless a vital piece of work. This is precisely because it brings home in unrelenting, unsparing detail the extent of anti-Semitism in Britain in 2025.
Mann and Mordaunt find anti-Semitism to be pervasive in the NHS, on campus and in the arts and it highlights the appalling policing of the 'Free Palestine' hate marches. As they wrote yesterday:
We heard about the noisy demonstrations and how intimidating people find the current environment, but as we dug deeper, what really scared us was the increasing normalisation of far more extreme, personalised and sometimes life-changing impact directed at individuals purely and simply because they are Jewish.
They had, they said, been 'stunned into silence' by the evidence gathered during six months of research for the report.
So what is going on? The story underlying the ever-widening and growing incidence of contemporary anti-Semitism in Britain is how it has changed. The late Lord Sacks described Jew hate as a mutating virus and Britain is now demonstrating this.
Anti-Semitism was essentially dormant in the decades after the Holocaust, for obvious reasons. Where it did emerge, it was what one might call 'skinhead' anti-Semitism, and was from the far right. Such people still exist, but their role in today's anti-Semitism is so minuscule as to be almost entirely irrelevant. Today's anti-Semites are from the so-called Red-Green alliance: self-declared progressives and Islamists.
Islamist Jew hate is so prevalent as to be one of its defining features. Spend ten minutes on social media and you will be shocked at the range and ubiquity of sermons in which the evil Jew is the target. (I recommend following @habibi_uk on X). Yet nothing is done. Literally, nothing. These imams are left free to spout their hate in sermons which regularly do not merely incite violence against Jews but urge it as part of being a good Muslim.
When politicians come out with their usual blather of there being no place for anti-Semitism in Britain, they are speaking utter drivel. Anti-Semitism is not merely tolerated; many of the mosques which host these sermons are lauded as beacons of inclusivity. (It is of a piece with the police standing and watching as crowds on the hate marches shout chants calling for the murder of Jews, such as 'globalise the intifada'.)
The other arm of this alliance is progressives. The incidence of anti-Semitism has increased sharply since the Hamas massacre of 7 October 2023 – in the year to 30 September 2024 official figures show a rise of 204 per cent to the highest level ever recorded. (Let that thought sink in – the response to the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust has been a rise in Jew hate). But it did not arise out of the blue.
Much of it can be traced back to the advent of Corbynism, which gave license to the left's Jew hate to escape from the shadows. But many Jews – I include myself – mistakenly thought that the return of the former Labour leader and his followers to the political fringes would mark a better period. We were ahistorical to think that. History shows that the quiet years after 1945 were the aberration, not the Corbyn years.
We have now reverted to the norm, which is open Jew hate, with the difference that the main purveyors are progressives. In the professions, in the arts and on campus, as well as in other spheres, those who consider themselves to be part of the community of the good direct their ire at the familiar target of history – the all-purpose villain, whether it's the Jew as coloniser, the Jew as baby-killer, the Jew as media manipulator, the Jew as financial domineer, the Jew as…the list is endless. To cite Lord Sacks again:
Anti-Semitism is not about Jews. It is about anti-Semites. It is about people who cannot accept responsibility for their own failures and have instead to blame someone else. Historically, if you were a Christian at the time of the Crusades, or a German after the First World War, and saw that the world hadn't turned out the way you believed it would, you blamed the Jews. That is what is happening today.
John Mann and Penny Mordaunt have done Jews and those who care about Jew hate a great service. Their findings matter to everyone, because rampant anti-Semitism is a symptom of a diseased society, and its impact always moves beyond Jews. But count me a sceptic as to whether their report will make the least difference to anything.