Andy Burnham today became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, after his appointment as Labour Party leader on Friday.
Campaign Against Antisemitism has written an open letter to the new Prime Minister, which you can read in full below.
Dear Prime Minister,
Congratulations on your appointment to lead our country. These are challenging times for many in society, and they are particularly difficult for British Jews.
Synagogues and Jewish schools require a quarter of a billion pounds of police protection.
Jewish volunteer ambulances are firebombed and charitable institutions are targeted by arsonists.
Jewish pupils, students, parents, employees, customers, union members, hospital patients, performers and tourists are experiencing abuse and discrimination.
Jews have been murdered at synagogue, stabbed in their neighbourhoods and attacked when they dare venture farther afield.
Hate has been given free rein on our streets, with incitement to violence and genocide against Jews chanted in towns and cities up and down the land.
Jewish people are over nine times more likely to be victims of hate crime than any other religious group in the UK and even these statistics are thought to drastically understate the reality.
We are at crisis point. Indeed, the crisis has gone on so long now – over two and a half years, under two successive governments – that it has become the new normal. Our politicians recite the mantra that there is no place for antisemitism in Britain. But recent experience has taught the Jewish community that there is very much a place for antisemitism in Britain. On average there are multiple antisemitic crimes every single day. Antisemitism has once again become part of our social fabric in a way that none of us could have imagined.
As Mayor of Greater Manchester, you saw the effect firsthand at Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation. Now, as Prime Minister, you have an opportunity to do what your predecessors did not: you can do something about it.
It was disheartening to British Jewry that you recently found time to announce specific policy measures relating to a foreign policy matter over which Britain has very little influence, but managed only a passing reference to antisemitism without mentioning a single policy. British foreign policy in the Middle East may exercise some politically significant communities over here, but Government action or inaction on antisemitism is literally a matter of life and death for the Jewish minority in this country.
The Jewish future in Britain – if there is to be one – cannot be lived behind ever higher walls. Our children already learn evacuation procedures at their primary schools, our students already know when to avoid campus, congregants know when it’s their turn to stand outside synagogue in a stab vest as the last line of defence, and Jewish people know to keep their identity invisible when they go out. Protection and anonymity are precautions; they are not a solution.
This is the Britain that you have inherited from your predecessors, but it does not have to be the one that you leave to your successor.
The solution is to stop appeasing the extremists and to bring the fight to them and their ideologies. No concession will ever be sufficient to those whose values are antithetical to ours, who want to see our liberal society overturned and who are prepared to ostracise, discriminate, abuse and even murder to achieve their goals.
Islamism, both home-grown and foreign, is plainly the biggest threat to the Jewish community and to British values, but our politicians shy away from identifying it and acknowledging its terrifying reach, and our criminal justice system and regulators are petrified of prosecuting and punishing its adherents. It is time, finally, for courage.
Its fellow traveller, the far-left, is treated as a virtuous movement that occasionally becomes a nuisance, instead of the profoundly subversive and hateful ideology that it is. It is past time that the far-left receives the same treatment by the authorities as the far-right, which is rightly suppressed.
Well over two years of appeasement and two-tier justice have embedded anti-Jewish racism in Britain. The task ahead is gargantuan, and it will take uncommon political fortitude and resilience to carry it out.
It will also require a plan. Fortunately, we have one ready, and we would be happy to share it with your team and discuss it with you directly.
There will be some who advise a meeker approach and more modest policies out of misplaced optimism, misguided confidence that the situation is not as bad as it seems or because of their own political aspirations. Heeding their proposals would represent a failure to rise to the occasion and would be tantamount to yet more appeasement. History teaches that extremists cannot be merely contained but must be confronted.
Antisemitism is not just about the Jews. Throughout history it has represented a barometer of the health of a society. Your inbox is overflowing, and everyone is seeking your attention for any number of urgent and worthy causes. It may be tempting to disregard this issue as parochial, but antisemitism is not a narrow communal matter: it speaks to the character of this country and the path that it is forging.
Your legacy will not be remembered solely in terms of tax rates and hospital waiting times. It will be whether Jews were murdered or thrived in Andy Burnham’s Britain.
It’s time to take a stand for Britain, Prime Minister, by committing to come to the aid of this country’s Jews and actively confronting the threat against them and our nation’s values. We call on you to do the right thing, and make combating antisemitism a central mission of your Government, not just rhetorically but with real, radical and robust action.
If you do, we will be with you every step of the way.
Yours sincerely,
Gideon Falter
