Full text of the Shadow Justice Secretary’s speech to Conservative Friends of Israel:
Thank you, Kemi. It’s not every day you’re introduced by your own party leader. And after
watching you take on Bridget Phillipson last week, I’m relieved! Thank you for your kind
words.
Chief Rabbi, my lords, ladies, friends, and our next Conservative prime minister, good
afternoon.
And Daniela, you’ve served your country brilliantly during these most testing times. You will
always have true friends here in Britain, and wherever your career takes you in future, we all
wish you great success.
And thank you to my friend Jeremy Brier and everybody at CFI. There are too many heroes
among you to name, but the work CFI has done for more than fifty years is remarkable.
If anybody wants to understand the strength of support for Israel among Conservatives, the
explanation lies not only in the righteousness of the cause, but the skill of CFI in telling this
incredible story.
And the story is incredible: a liberal democracy in the Middle East, the rule of law and civil
rights, an innovation economy — a start-up nation — that in so many ways leads the world.
All achieved in 78 short years, all achieved in the face of existential danger.
For those of us who have visited Israel many times, this is what’s remarkable. Not the wars or
the terrorism or the threats that loom so large, but the vibrancy of Israeli life itself.
From those who pray in Jerusalem to those who play in Tel Aviv, this is a country in which
we, the British, find so much that’s familiar and so much that inspires us.
And yet, this has become controversial to say.
The Labour Party got rid of Jeremy Corbyn but continued his policies toward Israel.
Keir Starmer suspended export licences at a time of war, halted trade negotiations, restored
funding for UNWRA, and reversed our position at the International Criminal Court.
He recognised a Palestinian state while the hostages were still held in tunnels by Hamas.
Starmer will soon be gone, but we already know his successor is no better.
When asked if Israel had committed a genocide, Andy Burnham said, “I can’t judge that.”
Well, I can. The war in Gaza was no genocide.
To use that language is a deliberate and offensive provocation to Israel and to all Jews, a
people who really did suffer that terrible crime against humanity.
Those who make that appalling and baseless claim, and those who lack the courage to reject
it, are cowards.
But their actions reveal something bigger, something terrible, that is tearing our country
apart.We are living through a crisis of anti-Semitism, fuelled in part by anti-Zionism.
When those thugs chant “from the river to the sea,” they are calling for a genocide of Israelis.
When they chant “death to the IDF,” they don’t mean they are taking sides in a war; they are
demanding death to all Israelis.
This is what it’s all about. Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
These people reject the very existence of Jews in the Middle East, in the land that is Israel.
But we don’t. We celebrate it, and that is why we are proud to be Conservative Friends of
Israel.
Of course anti-Semitism comes in many forms and from different quarters.
We see it on the Left, with the Greens, and in the Labour Party.
It’s not on the same scale, but today we see anti-Semitic language among some on the Online
Right.
But the source of anti-Semitism hardest to admit and confront is among our Muslim
population.
Polls show around half believe Jews have too much power over the Government, four in ten
say the same for the media and the City, and only one in four believes Israel has a right to
exist as a Jewish homeland.
Our country’s failure to confront this extremism is the reason we face an anti-Semitism crisis
today.
Just look at the scandal we exposed when Maccabi Tel Aviv came to play Aston Villa last
November.
Soon after Villa were drawn to play Maccabi, the campaign to cancel the match began.
Ayoub Khan, the local Gaza Independent MP, demanded cancellation, saying Aston is a
“predominantly Muslim community.”
Labour and Lib Dem councillors told the Safety Advisory Group, the local committee that
plans the policing for large events, “the community want it stopped.”
They didn’t quite get their way. The game was not stopped, but the Israeli fans were banned
from coming, and what we uncovered was shocking.
The police had intelligence that local Islamists were planning to arm themselves and attack
the visiting Israelis.
But the police covered that up.
Instead, they fabricated intelligence that presented the Israelis as uniquely violent and a
danger to innocent locals.The police lied to the home affairs select committee and to the Jewish population in the
Midlands.
But we never gave up and the chief constable, Craig Guildford, was forced out.
I want to thank the MPs on the committee, its chairman Karen Bradley, my friend Lord Ian
Austin, Gabriel Pogrund from the Sunday Times, and an unsung hero from Birmingham,
Simone Schehtman, for getting to the truth.
People ask me how on earth this happened, but I don’t believe Craig Guildford is an anti-
Semite who wanted to go after Israelis.
The truth is far worse.
The police faced political pressure, and they faced a serious threat from extremists. They
judged they would be unable to control the streets, and they surrendered.
And yet it was far worse even than that.
Our campaign found disturbing connections between the police and extremists.
Green Lane Mosque in Birmingham is known by the police and others to be a serious
problem.
It’s where the head imam gave a sermon on how to correctly stone a woman to death. But we
found the police had held a recruitment fair there, and when Craig Guildford was appointed
chief constable, a mosque representative sat on the interview panel.
This is how the logic of communalism, where ethnic and religious identities come before the
common good, corrupts.
The police never consciously decided to become anti-Semitic.
Believing in Robert Peel’s maxim that the police are the public and the public are the police,
they wanted to be a part of the community.
But that noble idea gave way to the logic of multiculturalism, and a kind of community
corporatism, and that gave way to the corrupting effects of communalism.
The frog boiled, and the police found themselves outsourcing their decisions to “community
leaders,” making themselves the willing tools of anti-Semites and lying to Parliament about
doing so.
Justice was replaced by injustice.
Equality before the law was lost to ethnic favouritism.
If we think this is limited to the West Midlands or it begins and ends with policing, we are
deluding ourselves.From local councils to the most sensitive government departments, from the rape gangs to the
Saturday marches, our institutions are being corrupted and the power of the state is being
used to pursue ethnic, sectarian interests.
And if we think this is only about Israel or only about Jews, we are deluding ourselves about
that too. Because this intolerance, this hatred of others, will come for all of us.
The response cannot be to build ever-higher walls around synagogues and Jewish schools,
just as it cannot be to install ever-more concrete barriers around our most important national
monuments.
We must be unyielding before the threat, and we must be unashamed of standing up for our
way of life.
We will protect our democratic institutions.
Reform the police and prosecutors.
And change the law to stop two-tier public order policing.
We will stop importing hatred.
And start deporting the haters.
Stop tolerating anti-Semitism on our streets.
And get tough not only with the morons with placards, but with the organisations that fund
and encourage them.
We will restore our free speech, and with it, the freedom to scrutinise and criticise ideological
and, yes, religious ideas and beliefs.
We will take apart the organisations that exploit our freedoms and subvert our democracy,
like the Muslim Brotherhood and the IRGC, because Iran poses a serious threat here as well
as in Israel.
Not just with vague promises to ban them, but a total strategy with specialist organisations
tasked with the clear instruction to bring them down.
And we will ban those weekly protests that intimidate Jews, hand the streets to extremists,
and have done so much to radicalise, normalise hatred, and incite violence.
We will make this country feel like home again for Jewish people, for everyone, because you
are us and we are you.
I know the conversation around Jewish dinner tables is about who among us today would do
the right thing and save you.
I know the talk among some of you here today is about whether your families need to leave.My heart breaks when I hear these things, but it makes me even more determined to stand up
to our enemies, stand up for our way of life, and put everything we have into the fight for the
future of our country.
I am proud to be in the one political party that really understands this fight, and to be led by
the one party leader with the moral clarity to take on the people, the organisations, and the
ideologies that want to destroy us.
And I am proud to take inspiration from Israel itself, because Israel’s fight is our fight.
Israel proves that democracy works, that through will and ambition and brilliant education
you can build a thriving economy, that nations that are proud of their culture will flourish.
I know there is much to do if we are to root out the evil of anti-Semitism, defeat the
extremists, and build a country brave, resilient, and confident in our way of life once more.
But if we want to live in a Britain where walls and fences and security guards are no longer
needed at our schools, synagogues, and places of national significance, this is what we need
to do.
And I know, together, we can do it.
So thank you.
And thank you all for being Conservative Friends of Israel.