As a former Director of Public Prosecutions, he is well placed to lead the crackdown on incitement and radicalisation which is needed to dispel the dark cloud over British politics
July 17, 2024 07:32
Only one British prime minister has ever been shot: Spencer Perceval, who was murdered in the lobby of the House of Commons in 1812. I don’t need to point out that the record of the United States is more dismal: four presidents murdered by gunmen in office, and a further three hit but “only” wounded, including the once and probably future commander-in-chief Donald Trump.
Unfortunately, as British Jews know only too well, while we have tougher gun laws, there is no room for complacency on this side of the Atlantic. Indeed, many of us share an alarming sense that abuse and threats in place of reasoned debate are rapidly becoming baked in to our democracy.
We have been exposing and analysing this baleful trend at the JC for many months. But this isn’t enough: we need a strategy to block it.
The UK survived the recent general election campaign without anyone aiming an assault rifle at any of its candidates, although physical attacks on Reform UK leader Nigel Farage escalated from the throwing of milkshakes to rocks. But it’s only eight years since the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox, and less than three since the killing of the Southend Tory Sir David Amess. Ali Harbi Ali, the ISIS-supporting terrorist who stabbed him to death, also came frighteningly close to murdering the Finchley and Golders Green Conservative MP Mike Freer, targeting him because of his unstinting support for the constituency’s Jewish community and Israel. Earlier this year, Freer decided to stand down following months of further threats and an arson attack that destroyed his constituency office.
Last weekend, concerned by the extensive reports of intimidation levelled by radical Muslim groups at Labour election candidates, Lord Walney, the government’s adviser on political violence and disruption, urged Home Secretary Yvette Cooper to commission an immediate inquiry, and drew an explicit parallel with the attempt to kill Trump, saying that the growth in Britain of “US-style politics of aggressive confrontation” was fostering a “toxic environment that could lead to another assassination attempt on a UK politician”.
The Commons Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, who has been facing threats from anti-Israel activists in his Lancashire constituency for months, said he “had never seen anything as bad” as current levels of abuse, and that his fears for MPs’ safety were keeping him up at night.
Anyone who doubts how bad the situation is needs only to look at Instagram, TikTok and other social media platforms and examine some of the posts about Israel’s supposed genocide in Gaza. They will find extreme language and a torrent of false but lurid claims, such as that the terrorists did not commit rapes during the October 7 massacre, or that Israel has been stealing Palestinians’ internal organs, as “evidenced” by corpses “found in mass graves with organs missing and sewn back up”. Such claims were widely circulated by those who accused Labour candidates of “complicity” in Israel’s “crimes”.
Unchallenged, the power of this radicalising discourse is set only to grow. So how might it be curbed?
The rot set in long before the October massacre. Indefatigable researchers such as the person who posts on X as Habibi have been documenting it for many years, uncovering imams whose sermons feature rank antisemitism and support for violence, reporting events such as the annual Quds Day protests organised by supporters of Iran’s brutal regime who proclaim the only route to Middle East peace is by annihilating Israel, and registered charities that disseminate Jew-hatred and extremism.
Time and again, this newspaper has published similar exposés. But if you imagined officialdom would respond to such disclosures by prosecuting those who have incited hatred against Jews or expressed support for a legally-proscribed terrorist organisation, you would be wrong.
In the years before the massacre, such prosecutions were almost unheard of and, as a consequence, this discourse flourished and became normalised. Wary of being accused of Islamophobia, even many Jews chose to ignore it. There might be an occasional ugly incident, but it seemed far-fetched to fear it might start to make aspects of Jewish life in Britain seem dangerous or untenable, let alone expose decent and inclusive politicians to the risk of violence. Not any more.
Of course, October 7 and the war marked the watershed, the point when the discourse exploded into the mainstream world of elite university campuses and a British general election. But the past nine months would not have been so fraught if previous governments and their law enforcement agencies had made it clear by their actions before the massacre that it would not be tolerated.
This week saw two chinks of light. The first was the decision by the Crown Prosecution Service to charge the prominent Leicester activist Majid Freeman with supporting a proscribed organisation. The second was the response of University College London to my report in this week’s JC of the Marxism 2024 conference held there earlier this month, at which speakers voiced overt support for terror groups and defended the massacre. After I shared recordings of them with UCL, it not only denounced them, but called in the police.
It will take a lot more than this to disperse the dark cloud that looms over British politics, but it’s a start.
We don’t need new laws, but simply for existing ones to be enforced. Our new prime minister was once the Director of Public Prosecutions. He knows it can be done.
