Threats, abuse and organised intimidation have reached new levels in British public life. It feels like almost every week brings a fresh example, each one a little more brazen than the last.
The latest emerged quietly over the weekend, when it was revealed that a Jewish Labour MP had been barred from visiting a school in his own constituency because his presence was deemed liable to “inflame the teachers”. I wouldn’t have thought such a sentence could be written in 2026 Britain without stopping us cold.
The disclosure came not from the school or the relevant authorities, but from the Communities Secretary Steve Reed, speaking at the Jewish Labour Movement conference. “I have a colleague who is Jewish,” Reed told Jewish News, “who has been banned from visiting a school and refused permission to visit a school in his own constituency, in case his presence inflames the teachers. That is an absolute outrage.”
The MP in question is Damian Egan, who represents Bristol North East. His visit to Bristol Brunel Academy last September was cancelled following a successful campaign by far-left activists from Bristol’s National Education Union (NEU) branch and its local Palestine Solidarity Campaign. The pretext was “safeguarding”. But the real objection was openly flagged on social media, Egan himself, and everything that comes around his association with Labour Friends of Israel.
There was a warning sign. Last year it emerged that the NEU was actively coaching members on how to bring the “Palestinian struggle” into schools. The line between education and activism has been dissolving for some time. Now we see the trickle of results.
This happened five months ago. Five months in which a teaching union branch appears to have endorsed and encouraged racial exclusion, applied pressure to a public institution and then boasted about it online, without any known consequence so far. Five months in which regulators, academy trusts and ministers have yet to act. Five months in which we, the public and the press, had no idea.
Reed has promised that those responsible will be “called in” and “held to account”, because, as he put it, “you cannot have people with those kinds of attitudes teaching our children”. Quite so. But what does “called in” actually mean? And why only now? Antisemitism allowed to fester in schools surely warrants something more robust than vague ministerial concern voiced months after the event.
There are serious questions here for the academy trust that runs the school, for the NEU, and for the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson. Why was no action taken earlier? And why does accountability in cases like this so often arrive late, if at all?
It is worth asking how we allowed such a situation to arise in the first place, let alone to go unaddressed for nearly half a year. It is a grotesque position to put Mr Egan in. Yet one might also hope that either he or the Communities Secretary would have felt able to speak out sooner. Too often the scale of intimidation in public life remains hidden because its victims are frightened of making things worse by going public.
Education cannot be surrendered as lost ground. It cannot be acceptable for teachers to veto elected representatives on such grounds. Nor can it be shrugged off when, as another recent news story highlighted, a foreign government like the UAE restricts funding for study in Britain over fears of campus radicalisation.
Silence and secrecy are what allow these episodes to multiply. This is another example of the slow creep of public intimidation becoming normalised. A new cross-party body, launched by Tory MP Nick Timothy alongside the government’s former anti-extremism tsar Lord Walney, has been established to examine how hostile states, Islamist groups and activist movements are exploiting democracy.
As Timothy put it to The Times: “People are very nervous about being divisive but guess what? We’re already divided.”
This version of division is antisemitic ostracisation. A Jewish MP excluded from a school to placate bigoted staff. Football fans barred from matches because police allow themselves to be manipulated by violent activists. Metropolitan Police officers standing by while protesters harass an Israeli restaurant in Notting Hill, chanting calls for “armed resistance, by any means”.
Each incident is treated as an aberration. Together, they form a pattern.