Antisemitism on University Campuses

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Wednesday 7th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Cryer, for securing this debate. I declare an interest as a past trustee for the Council of Christians and Jews—the CCJ—a wonderful interfaith organisation established by the then Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chief Rabbi in 1942, as the tragedy of the Holocaust unfolded.

A core part of the CCJ’s work is on campus. Through its campus leadership program, which is currently training 12 students across seven UK universities, the CCJ is empowering Jewish, Christian and students of other faiths to be the interfaith leaders of tomorrow. Since its launch in 2016, more than 80 students have been trained by the CCJ to stand up to antisemitism and Islamophobia, and, crucially, to conduct balanced and mutually respectful debates. I applaud them for their courage in what is clearly an increasingly febrile and hostile climate.

I commend the Union of Jewish Students on its work, and those students who contributed testimonies to the StandWithUs UK report, already mentioned by other noble Lords. I commend them for their courage and for their admirable forbearance in the face of, at best, institutional indifference and, at worst, outright racism. I commend them for standing up for British values: the values of tolerance, interfaith dialogue and free speech.

Those values are absent from the appalling and shocking treatment meted out to those cited in the StandWithUs report. What is not absent is the vile, divisive, un-British poison of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood from whence they came, which, like the IRGC, as we have already heard earlier today, bizarrely remain unproscribed in the UK. Hamas may not be winning the war in Gaza, but this report shows that their viciously distorted and fundamentally racist propaganda is helping them win the battle of ideas and the battle for hearts and minds on our campuses.

I fear that we are letting them do this. The law is being broken, as we have already heard, in plain sight, while the authorities—the universities, the police, the Government—might as well shrug their shoulders and wring their hands. Surely this report should leave us all holding our heads in our hands.

I close with one question for the Minister: unless urgent action is taken, how long does she think it will be before one of our students is killed for the crime of being Jewish?