This week, Al greets his Jewish readers, who have just spent ten days saying sorry for the sins of the previous year. Would that his colleagues in this place would self-reflect too
Chag Sameach to all my Jewish constituents and readers of this column, who yesterday spent all day in synagogue for the Day of Atonement, waiting for sundown so they could eat again after fasting for 25 hours. When I heard that a man had been stabbed outside a synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur 2025, I was thankful that nobody inside had been harmed. Then I realised that what was supposed to be the holiest day of the Jewish Year – where ten days of repentance were inscribed in the Book of Life so, as one constituent of mine told me, Jews could ‘sin and sin again for another year’ – had been hijacked.
The then Prime Minister, whose wife Vic is Jewish and therefore his children were of the faith, was absolutely correct to pledge his support to the Jewish community, funding police support for Shabbat and festivals to the tune of £330m over this administration’s time in office, plus £7 million to tackle antisemitism in schools, colleges and universities. This is the first New Year since last year’s act of terrorism, and it remains disturbing to see so many men in yellow jackets outside places of worship. Nobody in this great country should fear expressing their faith, be they Jewish, Catholic, Muslim or Baha’i.
And then we come to the State of Israel, a potato so hot that it scalds anyone who touches it. In the chamber a fortnight ago, an atheist Jew Foreign Secretary debated the merits of Israel with his Tory shadow, who is the grandson of a German Jew who converted to Catholicism after he fled Austria. On the same day, I attended the debate at Westminster Hall on the safety of British Jews. God bless Vish, who was tasked last week with summarising 13,000 words of it so I could quote it in this diary entry. He wrote in brackets at the bottom, ‘Definition of irony: MPs so verbose that the presiding chair had to chastise you for talking too much. In a debate about Judaism.’
Don’t worry. He knows plenty of Jews, and they are a garrulous lot. A Westminster Hall debate must last no more than 90 minutes, with 30 of those minutes allowed for winding-up speeches and contributions from government ministers. It was clear that an hour was nowhere near enough for some MPs to grandstand and say Something Must Be Done; I was keenest of all to hear from Jewish contributors to the debate, none of whom were from Reform UK. Jenrick could have been there as he too has married a Jewish woman and his party need to be seen to be Good for the Jews (spoiler: they’re not).
The motion was moved by Catherine West, the only Labour MP not to vote for the PM to be PM, because she had to put herself up as a stalking horse. Ms West was elected in 2015 to be the MP for Hornsey and Friern Barnet, a constituency with several thousand Jewish people who this weekend and last walked to and from synagogues in Southgate and Muswell Hill in a heightened state of awareness. These people had returned her with a majority of 21,500 in 2024, which is more than double the PM’s. She turned 60 years old yesterday so, as my Jewish friends would say, the heartiest of mazaltovs to Ms West.
Her constituency houses people who can speak 180 languages and have sought asylum from wars in Ukraine, Syria and the Middle East, just as a century ago Jews from the former Soviet Union and Poland sought sanctuary from all the pogroms. I did not know that in 1977 the battle of Wood Green at Ducketts Common ‘saw a rainbow coalition led by Jewish, Irish and black communities unite to drive out the far-right National Front’. Four decades before that, Jews stood up to Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts at the Battle of Cable Street in East London, and there is still a massive Orthodox Jewish presence in Stamford Hill.
This is why the arson attack on an ambulance in March was so disturbing, an act of intimidation against a service which also helps non-Jews, and likewise the stabbing in broad daylight in April in Golders Green, who also have a Jewish MP in Sarah Sackman. Enough already.
Last But Not Least Jim Shannon (MP for Strangford: majority 5100) was up second, which was lovely to see. I told him I too was mourning the passing of Dolly Parton, about whom he once tabled an Early Day Motion to say how wonderful she was. He stood up ‘against those who seek to bully or delegitimise the Jewish state…Having witnessed where identity-based hatred leads in my country, we must reject it completely,’ he trembled politely. Indeed, four young Israeli athletes were unable to compete in a triathlon in Derry/Londonderry because they, who are not committing acts of alleged genocide, are from a country whose government are doing so. This is where we are, and will forever be.
Lovely Munira Wilson, who was handed the safe Lib Dem seat of Twickenham by Vince Cable (majority: 21,500, like Ms West’s), said that the University of Cambridge has high incidents of antisemitism. ‘They hid where the Jewish society would meet. One student said she had done Hebrew teaching as part of her extracurricular activities, but is keeping that off her CV because she is worried she will be discriminated against.’ Jews in hiding; never good optics for that. Ms Wilson’s fellow Lib Dem Tom Morrison, MP for Cheadle (majority: 12,000), spoke to the stepdaughter of Melvin Cravitz, the murder victim of the Heaton Park shul attack. She was shamefully assailed by online trolls sending her messages about her dead stepfather, saying Jews were behind his murder.
‘Things need to change. We need solutions, conscious action and resolve,’ he said well-meaningly, starting with proper funding for the Community Security Trust, who train up volunteers to man synagogues on Shabbat and festivals like yesterday’s Day of Atonement. ‘When institutions fail to act against hatred,’ he added, ‘prejudice simply becomes policy.’
Connor Rand, who took Graham Brady’s seat of Altrincham and Sale West in 2024 with a majority of 4200, pointed to The Rabbi & The Imam, a project which goes into schools and tells kids, probably, that shalom and salaam have the same cognate, ‘peace’. Rachel Blake, the Labour MP who took the seat which houses This Place (Cities of London and Westminster: majority 2700), spoke of some of the synagogues whose congregations voted for her, including the very old Bevis Marks and the very young New London in St John’s Wood.
The Jewish community down in Guildford, represented by Lib Dem MP Zoe Franklin (majority: 8400), numbers in the low hundreds, swelling during termtime from 450 to 600. She hoped Jews could light the menorah on Guildford High Street on Chanukah without the presence of armed police, and agreed that it was shameful that some Jewish people were removing visible symbols of their faith and taking the mezuzah – a metal casing with a Star of David which contains passages of holy scripture – off their front door.
‘Our local rabbi has received death threats and has even been physically assaulted in public,’ she said. ‘Jewish residents have faced verbal abuse, a swastika has been drawn at a local golf course, and a single Jewish mother had a rotten chicken thrown through her open window while she was with her five-year-old child.’ Enough already. This isn’t Berlin in 1938; it’s Surrey in 2026.
There’s a big Jewish community down in Bournemouth, who are represented by Labour MP Tom Hayes (majority: 5500). He celebrated the opening of a new synagogue by the Chief Rabbi, for whom this time of year is Christmas and Ramadan rolled into one, and added that how some voters hired extra security when they held wedding anniversary celebrations at synagogue. Matt Vickers, the Conservative MP for Stockton West up in the north-east (majority: 2100), reminded us that Kemi Badenoch called antisemitism ‘a national emergency’ and he ran the numbers on antisemitic attacks: ‘In the first half of 2026, the organisation logged more than 200 incidents of anti-Jewish hate in every single month, and more than 300 a month from March to June. Those incidents ranged from threats to life, assaults and arson to damage and desecration of Jewish property and abusive behaviour. But there is another statistic that should stop every Member of this House in their tracks.
‘The latest Home Office figures show that in England and Wales, there were 106 police recorded religious hate crimes targeting Jewish people for every 10,000 Jewish people. Across the population as a whole, the equivalent rate was 1.7 recorded religious hate crimes per 10,000 people. If we put those figures alongside one another, the disparity is extraordinary and horrifying. On that population-adjusted measure, the rate of recorded religious hate crime targeting Jewish people was more than 60 times the rate in the overall population; I repeat, more than 60 times the rate. Religious hate crime is concentrated against Britain’s Jewish community, and on an extraordinary and horrifying scale.
‘We need to tackle the ideologies creating this mindset, because antisemitism does not begin with an attack on a synagogue. It begins with ideas and conspiracy theories. It begins when Jews are treated as a sinister collective and ancient prejudices are allowed to spread under new guises. The need to tackle this across communities is unfortunately clear…We must combat the intellectual idiocy that upholds and spreads antisemitic views. The test of a liberal democracy is not whether the majority feel safe; it is whether minorities can live openly as themselves, without fear.’
Hear hear. How soon will it be, with the conflict in the disputed territories not abating and Israel poised to go to the polls again at the end of next month, until British Jews decide enough is enough and take their traditions and ways of life to Israel itself. We will lose so much if they do, not least the comedians and writers who have brought us Borat, Friday Night Dinner, Little Britain and the complete works of David Baddiel.
One of the great thrills of working as an MP is being invited to book launches, and not just for the subsidised nibbles. I am often told Jews are the People of the Book, and Britain is such a tolerant place (at least on Tuesdays) that it has permitted Jewish people to stand for Parliament. Some of them are elevated to cabinet, as in the case of Foreign Secretaries Malcolm Rifkind and the Milibands, Ed, David and Steve (Miliband, Miller Band).
Hamish Falconer (MP for Lincoln: majority 8800) is one of the rising stars of government, having followed his dad Charlie into the family profession; he is far too good for This Place. Georgia Gould, daughter of the late New Labour architect Philip, was probably campaigning for more minutes at breaktime at nursery. She’s at Queens Park and Maida Vale (majority: 15,000) and is, quite rightly given her history, Minister for School Standards.
Her mum is the estimable Dame Gail Rebuck, who sits in the Lords as Baroness Penguin Random House (ah no, it says here Baroness Rebuck of Bloomsbury). I’d say she was one of Britain’s most reputable Jewish people, but even she would bow down (if Jews could bow down, because I am told they cannot except for one service on Yom Kippur) to Alf Dubs. John O’Farrell wrote about him in his books on the Labour Party, which are worth a read if only to cry at how much apathy there is in local politics.
I wrote in the 2023/24 diary about Alf, who was ennobled with a peerage and has just published his memoir The Boy with the Knapsack. Lord D’s publishers have done their best to get the book in front of potential readers: he spoke with Janet Ellis, latterly known as the woman who brought us Sophie Ellis Bextor, at a book festival event that Em-Dash went to with a group of her fellow Spads, and he popped up on the BBC and in the Times, those two eminent media institutions.
Alf’s story is summarised in the memoir’s subtitle An Extraordinary Life, from the Kindertransport to the House of Lords. At the age of six, he came to Britain without his parents, then became MP for Battersea during the Thatcher years before losing his seat in 1987. Tony Blair stuck him in the Lords in 1995 and involved him in the Northern Ireland peacekeeping negotiations. O’Farrell dedicated his book Things Can Only Get Worse? ‘to Alf Dubs, who never gives up’; Alf, not Lord.
In fact, he is not halachically Jewish, given that his mum is not of the faith, but he seized upon his faith after his cotton trader dad died after his mum, whom he recalls was called ‘that bloody foreigner’, had joined them in Britain. He lived first in London then in Northern Ireland then in Manchester. He returned to London for university, attending the LSE in the 1950s, and spent his life determined to oppose evil with good; he is definitely a disciple of Sir Nicky Winton, the man who secretly helped over 600 children including Alf escape persecution.
Perhaps those antisemites who make the lives of today’s British Jews so miserable could actually take seven minutes out of their own wretched lives and watch the clip of the TV show That’s Life where an entire room of people sabotage Winton by standing up in his presence. It’s available on the BBC website here, and it is no wonder that they made that 2023 film of him, One Life, with Sir Anthony Hopkins. Winton died in 2015 at the age of 106. Lord Dubs is about to turn 94 and has been married to Ann for 66 years, which would have been the same number my own grandparents would have reached had my grandpa not passed away just before I entered This Place. No Nicky Winton, no Lord Alf Dubs.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/videos/cz9987l2998o
Leeds has a couple of Jewish MPs in its ranks – Alex Sobel in Leeds Central and Headingley (majority: 8400) and Fabian Hamilton in Leeds North East (majority: 16,000) – while in London there’s Sarah Sackman (Finchley and Golders Green, majority 4600), Ben Coleman (MP for Chelsea and Fulham, majority 152) and David Pinto-Duschinsky, whose Hendon constituents elected him in 2024. Had eight people not put an X in the box beside his name, he would not have had a majority of 15 (fifteen!).
Young Damien Egan is doing well in Bristol. He is a convert who married into the faith, which sounds like purgatory if you ask Max Olesker, whose book and one-man show on conversion Making The Cut does make reference to the covenant all male Jews swear to their God, usually at eight days old when they have no say in the matter. Even the market town of Bury St Edmunds has a Jewish MP in Dr Peter Prinsley (majority 1452), who can look at your ear, nose, throat or tricky issue with asylum. His wife Marian is the Sheriff of Norwich, another triumph for the Jewish diaspora.
I often bump into Charlotte Nichols, MP for Warrington North (majority: 9200), who is always hurrying into the chamber to bob up and down, hoping to contribute to a debate. She must be loving seeing her constituency neighbour in Makerfield seven days a week, what with being down here from Monday to Thursday and up in Manchester at weekends; ditto Matthew Patrick, who represents the people of the Wirral Peninsula where he grew up and who has a majority of 9,998.
Apart from Sir Malcolm Rifkind, every single one of the above MPs is affiliated to Labour, so which Tories are of the tribe? Well, many of them have passed on or left the House. Good old Michael Fabricant aka Mickey the Fab, scion of Lichfield, was better known for his wig than for his faith, while John Bercow was the perfect man to shout ordurrrr as Speaker. Julian Lewis did survive the axe in 2024, keeping his New Forest seat with a majority of 8495. Grant Shapps aka Michael Green aka Sebastian Fox did not, although it is a truth that he was active in Jewish youth groups as a teenager. Ditto Robert Halfon, who did not contest his seat in Harlow, Essex in 2024.
Shadow Foreign Secretary Tom Tugendhat, who wanted to lead the party at some point and sounds a lot like Dave Cameron, represents the good people of Tonbridge (majority: 11,000). In the Weald of Kent, which is south of Maidstone and west of Ashford, Katie Lam has a safe majority of over 8000. She is being positioned as a future Tory minister, and is now shadowing Angela Rayner (someone has to), although her grandparents met canvassing for Labour in the postwar years after their respective families settled in Britain after fleeing the Nazis. She also, to Em-Dash’s delight, did Classics at Cambridge.
A few years ago, at one of the Antisemitism APPG meetings, Dame Margaret Hodge was present. She was the woman who held back the tide of far-right effluent in Barking about 20 years ago, and she too has just put out her memoir Battleaxe, timed as far as I can tell to coincide with Jewish New Year. She was born in what was then Alexandria, but came to England after she lost family in the Holocaust; her grandma’s widow was an enemy alien who was interned after he came to Britain, which hardened young Margaret and prepared her for a lifetime of public service.
As detailed in her book Called to Account, Dame Margaret was an especially good chair of the Public Accounts Committee, which let in Rupert Lowe last year for balance and so the rest of the committee can glare at him and wonder just what it is about him that Elon Musk loves so much, and how soon he will go away and shut up. But wait there’s more: Dame M also brought us Sure Start, fought intraparty antisemitism when her old foe Jeremy Corbyn led the Labour Party, and is now enjoying relative retirement in the House of Lords having given up her seat a few months before she turned 80. In fact, she turned 82 this month, and she’s still holding court here, contributing to Lords debates and scrutinising legislation.
At the debate into the safety of the Jewish community, Hendon MP David Pinto-Duschinsky asked Sarah Jones (Croydon West: majority 14,000), the overworked Police and Crime Minister serving under the Home Secretary, to do more for his fellow British Jews than merely ‘building higher walls’. Those walls are metaphorical but also physical, given that they need to prevent intruders from getting into synagogues. In response, Ms Jones noted the government’s ‘journey to tackle antisemitism’. Perhaps this is the opposite journey to the one Adolf Hitler and his National Socalist Party took to tackle philosemitism across Europe, which began in 1933 and ended in a bunker in 1945 with six million dead, the vast majority of whom were guilty of being Jewish at the wrong time and in the wrong place.
Ignorance of the Holocaust is no excuse; it’s on film, in books and in the memories of people who are now in their eighties, nineties and beyond. They have passed those memories on, when they were ready to talk, to their children and grandchildren, who have also spread the word. The presence of Lord Dubs and Dame Margaret Hodge in the Other Place, two people who actually did make a journey across foreign borders, shows up how stupid this metaphor is.
Enough with the metaphors already. We must cherish the community of British Jews, just as we must help descendants of the Empire Windrush emigrants, the millions of British Hindus and Muslims from the former empire outposts of India and Pakistan and, indeed, everyone who has come to Britain in the last century to escape persecution or because they wanted to live in the land of the BBC, NHS and HRH.