Stephen Pollard
Spectator Australia, July 15, 2025
“They had, they said, been ‘stunned into silence’ by the evidence gathered during six months of research for the report.”
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.
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:
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. …SOURCE