The new Labour government must continue efforts to confront forces fostering hatred

This is the final week of Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership. He leaves office at a time of profound uncertainty, with our country facing formidable challenges both at home and abroad. Britain will have had seven prime ministers in ten years. Our community knows from bitter historical experience that political instability can itself breed insecurity.

Yesterday morning, Sir Keir gathered Jewish communal leaders in the gardens of 10 Downing Street to say farewell and announce two significant measures for the security of the Jewish community. The first was the long-awaited proscription of the Iranian regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The second was a major increase in protective security funding, with more than £250 million committed over the next three years to help safeguard our community.

These measures follow a succession of fire-bombings, arson attacks and stabbings in London earlier this year, the killing of Adrian Daulby z’’l and Melvin Cravitz z’’l at Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester last year, and the conviction in Preston of extremists who were plotting an ISIS-inspired mass shooting of Jews in Manchester.

Sadly, and with wearying predictability, the announcement of additional security funding has itself prompted hostile and antisemitic commentary online, including allegations of favouritism towards the Jewish community. Such reactions serve only to demonstrate why this protection is necessary.

The failure to proscribe the IRGC has long been a source of concern to the Jewish community, as well as to others alarmed by the malign influence of the Iranian regime. Labour Friends of Israel, the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council have campaigned for proscription over many years. Labour supported it in opposition but, like the previous government, concluded that the existing legislative framework was inadequate and was constrained by competing political and diplomatic considerations.

Those obstacles have now been overcome. This reflects not only the escalation of attacks against the Jewish community and Iranian dissidents, but also the changed perception of the Iranian regime following its brutal killing of tens of thousands of its own citizens earlier this year. The Government has now established a framework for dealing more effectively with threats emanating from hostile states like the tyrannical regime in Iran.

The proscription also encompasses the Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right (HAYI), which the Government regards as an Iranian regime proxy believed to be responsible for most of the recent attacks against the Jewish community in north London.

Taken together, these measures represent substantive and welcome progress. They will significantly strengthen the community’s ability to confront the very real security threats with which we live every day. Nevertheless, the deeper causes of those threats remain unaddressed and unresolved.

The announcements also come amid concern over the intervention last Thursday by the prime minister-in-waiting, Andy Burnham. While he rightly expressed his abhorrence of antisemitism, he failed to connect it adequately with its drivers. These include the exceptionalism and partiality with which parts of the political class in the UK approach Israel and its conflicts with Iran and Iranian proxies, as well as a wider failure to confront the ideological forces underpinning contemporary antisemitism.

We hope that, in the weeks ahead, the new administration will engage closely with communal representatives and develop a coherent, considered response to the serious challenges facing both our community and the country more broadly, particularly in relation to social cohesion and public safety. In that regard, Mr Burnham’s endorsement of the measures announced by the outgoing Government is welcome.

As the new Government takes office, we look forward to working with it to ensure that these challenges are addressed with the resolve that they demand. A failure to confront the forces that foster hatred encourage the corrosion of our common life; the dangers we face will not simply persist: they will deepen and spread, to the cost of our country as a whole.

Adrian Cohen is Senior Vice President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and Chair of its International Division