Ministers have failed to act as extremist ideologies move into mainstream, warns Met chief

Successive governments have failed to act on warnings that extremist ideologies are falling through gaps in British law and being allowed to flourish, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has said, also describing how protest laws passed 40 years ago are no longer fit for purpose, even with amendments introduced earlier this year.

Speaking exclusively to Jewish News for a three-part documentary series, What Next?  Britain’s most senior police officer said the authorities were too often left tackling the intimidation, hate crime and violence produced by extremism, while its ideological roots remained largely untouched.

Rowley helped lead a landmark review with former counter-extremism commissioner Dame Sara Khan, examining whether existing legislation was equipped to deal with hateful extremism.

Published in 2021, Operating with Impunity: Hateful Extremism – the Need for a Legal Framework warned that extremists could legally radicalise others, spread violent propaganda and undermine democratic freedoms without crossing the threshold into terrorism or hate crime.

“The recommendations made in that report haven’t been acted upon,” Rowley told      Jewish News.

“We’ve got law that’s constructed around terrorism and we’ve got law that’s constructed around hate crime, but extremist ideologies can fall between the cracks of those two legal frameworks.

“There were things in there: some of the survey data then was worrying, and it’s even worse now in terms of antisemitic attitudes; the prevalence of content online; recommendations about sharper online regulation; and concern that some of the most extreme material was still not illegal.”

The review argued that some extreme material relating to terrorism and terrorist violence should be illegal to possess, in the same way as child-abuse material.

“We suggested there should be a legal framework around extremism,” Rowley said. “Those recommendations haven’t been acted on.”

He acknowledged the difficulty of balancing new restrictions with freedom of speech, but pointed to democratic countries such as Germany, where such attempts at a legal equilibrium have been made.

“Their law has protections that are about protecting democracy that go beyond dealing with the threat of violence, because it’s about countering the threat of ideologies which are designed to undermine a democratic state,” he said.

“We don’t really have that in our legislation at the moment.”

Rowley said successive politicians and governments had expressed interest in the proposals but had failed to take them forward amid concerns about freedom of expression.

Dame Sara Khan told Jewish News that although Rowley had previously touched on the issue, including in an interview with the Telegraph, he had not discussed it publicly “in that depth”.

She described his intervention as “brilliant to see”, adding that the failure to tackle hateful extremism was “clearly a continuing worry of his”.

Rowley said the consequences of that inaction were now being felt across society, with antisemitic ideologies increasingly escaping the fringes and entering mainstream discourse.

“There have always been racists at the margins of society,” he said. “But what we’re seeing now is the level of racism, the level of hate crime, which is when racism becomes a crime and we get involved.

“You’re more likely to be a victim of that as a British Jew than you are [as members of] other religions and other protected characteristics. So it’s felt most intensely.”

He added: “I’m concerned that it’s become part of mainstream debate. It’s not just vile individuals who propagate these ideologies.

“There have always been people like that and there always will be, but they’ve been way beyond the extremes of society. They might be extreme right-wing neo-Nazis or Islamists, but now antisemitic ideologies are almost ubiquitous online.”

The Commissioner also highlighted the threat posed by the Iranian regime, saying police had disrupted more than 20 plots in Britain targeting Iranian dissidents or Jewish communities.

“You overlay that more intense hatred, more legitimised intense hatred, with the state threat, and it’s a really worrying time,” he said.

Rowley said he had been particularly disturbed by the failure of some figures in public life to distinguish between British Jews and the actions of the Israeli government.

“It’s really upset and worried me over the last couple of years,” he said.

“People who you would hope would know better, legitimise that anger about the foreign policy of the Jewish state be visited on London’s Jews – and the inability of too many people in public life to draw a distinction between those two things.

“That’s worried me most of all, because that adds to that sense of, ‘actually, it’s okay to behave like this’, when clearly it isn’t.”

He said the long-term exposure to antisemitic content, particularly through social media, was helping to normalise hatred and push extreme ideas into public life.

While police could respond to criminal acts, Rowley said they could not solve the underlying problem alone.

“We often see in policing, and this is a particular example of that, where we’re dealing with the consequences more than the causes,” he said.

“We can deal with the intimidation, the arson, the hate crime and the violence, and we can constantly get better at capturing offenders and, ideally, preventing it.

“But the underpinnings of that have to be tackled: the drivers of that hatred and violence. That’s for wider civic society, for politicians and others, to find a way of solving.”

He added: “Otherwise, all we’re doing is allowing ideologies to magnify through social media, public debate, etc and then saying to the police, ‘Well, just deal with the consequences as well.’

“That’s not the right way to do it. You’ve got to get upstream to solve it.”

Rowley, who has faced repeated criticism over the Met’s response to antisemitism found on pro-Palestine protests, also suggested that protest laws created in the 1980s were struggling to address the impact of repeated marches on communities’ sense of safety.

“Protest legislation was created in the 1980s,” he said. “If you just pause and reflect on the world it was being designed in and the protests it was being designed for, that almost seems a million years away from what we’re dealing with today.”

Although the legislation had been amended, most recently earlier this year in the Crime and Policing Act 2026, Rowley said it did not adequately capture the cumulative impact of repeated protests.

“Fundamentally, what it doesn’t capture is the sustained impact on a sense of safety,” he said.

“I don’t think individual events were the problem so much as the sustained effect that has had on some communities and how they feel in London.”

He drew a distinction between static demonstrations and marches travelling over long distances through the capital, while stressing that it was for politicians, rather than police, to decide where the balance between protest rights and public safety should lie.

“I think the ability to take account of that sustained impact, with more assertive powers, is something I’m never going to ask for, because it’s not for the police to demand how much freedom of speech versus disruption,” he said.

“But I think it’s something politicians can consider.”

The Independent Review of Public Order and Hate Crime Legislation, chaired by Lord Macdonald, submitted its report to the Home Secretary in late May. Jewish News understands that the report itself, and the government’s response, is due to be published in the coming period. Additionally, the government will publish an annual State of Extremism report, to provide frontline public sector workers with the information needed to identify and respond to extremism.

Asked about chants including “globalise the intifada” and “death to the IDF”, Rowley said the Met had decided to push harder to bring cases under existing hate-crime laws as the threat to Jewish communities increased.

“We took the view, as the threat was rising and on the back of Heaton Park, that some of the chants we hadn’t been able to prosecute before, we were going to arrest and put it to the CPS and say, ‘This must be across the threshold now’.”

He denied that this amounted to demanding new legislation, saying it was instead an attempt to test the boundaries of the existing law.

“Given the rising threat to Jewish communities, we took the view we were going to go to the outer edges of what we thought was within the law,” he said.

“The CPS agreed and followed through on some of those cases with charges, and disagreed on others. But I’m happy the officers made sensible arrests.”

Rowley acknowledged that the context surrounding words and slogans meant decisions were not always clear-cut and could lead to different approaches among police forces.

“It’s a very difficult balance to find, because there is: that act is never a criminal offence, ever; that one very obviously is; and there is a chunk of stuff in the middle which is so contextual,” he said.

“We’ve had cases where we make decisions on marches, maybe to restrict them, or people have been arrested, and five years later the Supreme Court decides the police got it wrong – or the police got it right.

“Well, we didn’t have five years to think about it. That’s how tight the margins are.”

He said officers were required to police demonstrations “without fear or favour, under the law”, even when the limits of that law left Jewish Londoners feeling insufficiently protected.

“It’s all well and good for me to give a very analytical, dry, legal answer, but I do get that if you’re feeling, ‘This is my home, I’m a British Jew, and I’m feeling more and more anxious,’ you’re not going to think about the detail of what is possible,” he said.

“You just feel, ‘This doesn’t feel right. I want the police to do more.’ I completely understand that.”

Rowley said the Met regularly negotiated with protest organisers over routes, including seeking to prevent pro-Palestinian marches passing synagogues.

“Sometimes they will agree and sometimes they won’t,” he said.

“At the end of the day, we’ll always put conditions on it which insist those things don’t happen, because we can put conditions on what the route is, even though we can’t stop them having the march.”

He said clearly defined conditions also made it easier for officers to intervene when protesters attempted to leave an agreed route or approach protected premises.

Policing demonstrations involving thousands of people also presented significant practical difficulties, Rowley said, particularly when officers were expected to recognise symbols connected to different extremist and terrorist organisations.

“There is no way we’re going to have 40,000 geopolitical or global-culture experts,” he said.

“When it comes to protests and those nuanced judgements, that has been really challenging for us, because sometimes we’re marshalling 1,000 officers from across London. You’re forming a scratch team for that event.”

The Met now uses specialist officers whom Rowley described as “flag experts”, capable of identifying small differences between the symbols used by proscribed terrorist organisations and related political groups.

Specialist public-order crime officers also provide advice from the control room to police on the ground.

Rowley gave the example of a protester photographed wearing a Hamas headband during a march. The man had briefly put it on for a photograph before removing it, making it unlikely that officers among the thousands of protesters would spot him at the time. Police did later identify and locate the individual.

“But then there are those who want to increase hatred, circulate that online and say, ‘The police are doing nothing about this,’” Rowley said.

“On top of all the other causes of anxiety and fear, some of that deliberate misinformation adds to it as well.”

A series of arson attacks and a knife attack in Golders Green had been a “tipping point” in the Met’s decision to move beyond temporarily surging officers into Jewish areas and instead establish a long-term protection operation, Rowley revealed.

Almost 300 additional officers are dedicated to the operation, with most deployed in north west London and Stamford Hill.

The plans also include counter-terrorism specialists trained to identify suspicious behaviour, additional armed-response vehicle patrols and a central team focused on improving hate-crime investigations.

Funding has been agreed for three years, allowing officers to build expertise and lasting relationships with the communities they protect.

Rowley said it was important that other Londoners understood why the Jewish community was receiving additional protection.

“Every community, whatever your protected characteristic, if you’re a victim of hate crime, deserves an equally vigorous and successful approach from the police,” he said.

“But on top of that, if there is one community that is at the most intense risk, we should have some extra protection around them, and that is what we’re trying to do here.”

Rowley said visits to synagogues and Jewish community meetings had brought home the intensity and deeply personal nature of the community’s fears.

“I find it upsetting because I’m a proud Londoner,” he said. “I’ve been here for most of my adult life. I can never imagine living anywhere else. I think it’s the most amazing city.

“To have one of London’s communities not feeling as safe as they should, that offends me personally, and it’s my job to do something about it.”

Having visited communities across London while preparing the Met’s future plans, Rowley said the anxiety expressed by Jewish residents stood apart.

“Lots of communities are concerned about crime in their area: ‘Can you do more on this? What about this?’” he said.

“But in some places things felt more intense and more personal. The Jewish community is one of them. That’s really powerful, and you feel that.”

He also praised the work of the Community Security Trust, Shomrim and other Jewish organisations providing their own security.

“There is that sense of, ‘We’re a community that is under threat, and we’re doing extraordinary things from within the community to protect ourselves that no other community is doing,’” he said.

“We’d all wish it was such that that wasn’t necessary, but it completely makes sense in this context.”

Rowley said it was “tragic” that growing numbers of British Jews were questioning whether they had a future in the country.

“The number of British Jews who are feeling unnerved, anxious and fearful, and thinking about their own safety more – thinking, ‘Is this the country I want to live in for the rest of my life?’ – makes me sad.”

He also urged members of the public to report concerns about people showing signs of radicalisation, saying information from neighbours and local communities had helped police prevent terrorist attacks.

“Some of the plots we foil are because a neighbour or someone in the community says, ‘I’m really worried about them,’ and has the confidence and instinct to phone the police or speak to a local police officer,” he said.

“Those are sometimes the first time we knew about a planned attack, and that’s where it starts.”

Once someone had been identified as a potential risk, he said the police and security services could deploy powerful surveillance and evidence-gathering capabilities.

“But you only do that when you get to the starting point of needing to worry about them,” he said.

“That insight from communities is really valuable. I would always encourage people: if you wonder whether the police are interested in this or not – please just contact us.”

Rowley also pointed to instability at the heart of government, noting that there had been seven home secretaries and five prime ministers since he was appointed Commissioner.

“Those are just facts, but that doesn’t help the public service overall,” he said.

Despite the political and legal challenges, Rowley promised that the Met would continue trying to rebuild trust and ensure Jewish life could thrive in London.

“We will always start from: every community deserves the right to thrive in London, and we’ll do everything we can to make that happen.”

Sir Mark Rowley’s full interview will appear in Jewish News’ three-part documentary series, What Next for British Jews?

A Home Office spokesperson said:

“We recognise extremism takes many forms, which is why the powers available to tackle it remain under constant review. Successive governments have continued to assess and strengthen the tools needed to respond to evolving threats.

“Work is ongoing to ensure our response remains necessary, proportionate and effective in countering the threats posed by extremism. Alongside this, we are investing more than £250 million over the next three years to strengthen neighbourhood policing and help protect Jewish communities from threats, abuse, harassment and the incitement of antisemitism.”