Antisemitism in the UK

Antony Higginbotham Excerpts

Monday 19th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Chris Philp]

What happened to my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) at his house was completely unacceptable. It was intimidation; it was an attempt, I would suggest, to coerce a Member of Parliament and inhibit him from doing his democratically elected duty. I am sure everyone in the House would unreservedly condemn the behaviour of that mob outside my right hon. Friend’s house.

Various legal powers are relevant, including section 42 of the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001, which gives the police the power to direct people outside a person’s house to move if they are behaving in a way that causes harassment, alarm or distress. That would clearly have applied in this case. My right hon. Friend the Minister for Security, who is in his place, and I wrote to chief constables on precisely that point on 16 February, just a few days ago, raising concerns and calling for robust action. I believe we are having a discussion on that topic in just a few days’ time. Members of Parliament at their home addresses, constituency offices and surgeries need to be protected because they are doing their democratic duty. Where people seek to intimidate them, the police need to take extremely strong action, because aggression against Members of Parliament is an act of aggression against democracy itself and in my view that makes it particularly serious.

[Antony Higginbotham (Burnley) (Con)]

I welcome everything my right hon. Friend has set out today and that the Government are trying to tighten the law where necessary, but evidence suggests it is not yet working. Every week we see protests and people marching through London with placards with antisemitic, conspiratorial tropes—the same things we saw in October, November, December and January. We know that antisemitism is still running rife on university campuses, in schools and in our communities. I urge my right hon. Friend to look not just at how we deal with prosecutions and crime, but at how we tackle the root causes and how we get into our schools, educate people and try to rid society of this evil scourge once and for all.

[Chris Philp]

My hon. Friend is right. Where the law is broken, whether that is inciting racial hatred, intimidation or harassment, the police must act and make arrests, and they have arrested 600 people already. That is necessary as a law enforcement response, but he is right that we need to tackle the ideology at source. We need to make sure that schools are teaching young people the right thing and explaining what British values of tolerance actually mean. The Department for Education is doing work in that area, as is my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, who is in the Chamber. We need to make clear to every member of our society that antisemitism and anti-Jewish racist hatred have no place in these islands of ours. We must eradicate it wherever we find it.