UK lawmaker says there is now a ‘constituency for hating Jews’ in formerly friendly Britain

LONDON — The Yom Kippur terror attack on Manchester’s Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in which two Jews were killed took place weeks ago, but the emotion in Maurice Glasman’s voice remains raw and palpable.

The Labour member of the House of Lords, and one of Britain’s leading Jewish intellectuals, had just left synagogue himself on that day when he switched on his phone and was greeted by what he terms “a cacophony of grief that was almost incomprehensible.”

“I felt desecrated,” Glasman tells The Times of Israel. “I felt horrified and full of foreboding.”

It wasn’t simply the terrible nature of the attack — in which Jihad al Shamie, a British citizen of Syrian descent, rammed his car into worshipers and stabbed members of the congregation — that shook Glasman. It was its profound historical significance.

Since Jews were readmitted to England more than three centuries ago, only one — a Jewish student murdered by a fascist in 1960 — had been killed simply for being a Jew. It is, Glasman notes, a record unique in the Americas and Europe — which has a particularly bloody 20th-century history.

“No Jew was killed in Britain between 1939 and 1945. That’s cosmic business,” he adds.

That fact lies at the heart of Glasman’s politics and patriotism.

“I really love my country very, very much. I adore it,” Glasman says. “And I adore the working class in my country who beat the Nazis and didn’t hesitate.”

But Glasman’s Britain isn’t just one that has protected Jews, it’s one in which they have flourished and thrived.

“We could live a full Jewish life here. This country is an amazing place for Jews precisely because we can do whatever we wish,” he says. “It’s a fantastically conducive country, particularly for Ashkenazi Jews, because [its] combination of tradition and liberty just suits us really, really well. We don’t like the mob. We don’t like violence at all.”

It’s no wonder, he says, that renditions of the national anthem and toasts to the Royal Family punctuate Jewish weddings, bar mitzvahs and other celebrations.

Glasman’s prominence rests, in part, on his leadership of the “Blue Labour” movement within Britain’s governing party. Founded in 2009, it combines social conservatism with economic populism and seeks to drag the party back to the tough-minded, robust patriotism of its traditional working-class base.

Glasman’s thinking caught the eye of the young JD Vance, who sent him a copy of his 2016 book “Hillbilly Elegy.” In January, Glasman was the only Labour politician to receive an invitation to US President Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington.

“There are many people, both in the Labour party and in the country, who hate me,” Glasman says, only half in jest. “But they don’t hate me for being a Jew. They hate me for my personality and what I think.”

The Manchester attack has changed all that. “It rightfully makes you afraid,” he says, adding that the combination of “progressivism and mass migration, particularly Muslim migration, means there is now a constituency for hating Jews” in the country. Glasman attacks the “wicked stupidity” of those parts of the left that “hate our own country above all” and believe Jews sit at the pinnacle of a pyramid of “white oppressors” with “the ‘colonial’ State of Israel as the living proof.” In Glasman’s view, this thinking welds together a “demographic coalition between Islamists, public sector unions [and] academics.”

‘They don’t hate me for being a Jew. They hate me for my personality and what I think’

Glasman wants to see the construction of a political coalition in response. It would be akin to that which arrested the rise of antisemitism in interwar Britain, and in which many non-Jews played leading roles. Indeed, for Glasman, the cause doesn’t just affect Jews.

“It’s not just Jew-hate; it’s a hatred of beauty, truth, goodness and kindness,” he says. “These are merciless, vengeful people. I am absolutely committed to the future of Jewish life in my country, [but] I recognize that that’s now a political issue. It’s not settled.”

Within the Labour Party, Glasman’s views on immigration have long sparked controversy. For more than a decade, he has forcefully opposed the progressive orthodoxy that mass migration is both an economic necessity and a positive good. Glasman’s refusal to accept this notion has led to him being labeled a racist and an ethno-nationalist — charges that he scorns — but he believes he has been vindicated.

“Mass migration is one of the sources of violence [against Jews] and that’s just true,” he says.

Glasman says there is “a beautiful culture of tolerance in our country,” which is encapsulated by the safety afforded to Jews for over 300 years. The proponents of mass migration showed “no concern” for this “civic peace” and whether Britain’s political culture could easily assimilate large numbers of migrants from Eritrea, Somalia, Iraq and Syria. This thinking, he argues, was “a catastrophe, and it has to be addressed honestly.”

Glasman, who has spent much of his professional life in academia, is equally appalled by the manner in which Britain’s universities have been “captured by progressive thought,” which he holds responsible for the rise of antisemitism on campuses.

“Serious” academics, he says, have told him that no women were raped in the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, and that the copious evidence of the sexual violence perpetrated by the terrorists is “disinformation.”

‘The universities are not a blessing to our country anymore’

“Everything is ‘disinformation and misinformation,’” says Glasman, who calls academics who peddle such arguments “the fundamental carriers of lies.” Resisting them, he believes, is part of the “general battle that’s being fought over the soul of our country.”

Glasman, who has previously called for half of the country’s universities to be turned into vocational colleges, admits that his solution is “hardline.”

“I want a purge of the universities. I want half of them closed down. I want anybody who sat by and accepted the sacking of a colleague for ‘incorrect views’ to be sacked,” he says. “The universities are not a blessing to our country anymore.”

The Labour peer also blames Britain’s human rights laws, passed under Tony Blair’s Labour government in the late 1990s, and its membership of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), for the manner in which anti-Israel protesters have been able to regularly take to the streets of the UK’s cities since the Hamas attacks. Critics, including Jewish communal groups, say the police have allowed the protesters to chant antisemitic slogans, such as “globalize the intifada” and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” with virtual impunity.

Glasman says that the only way to effectively counter this “incitement to violence” is to scrap the Human Rights Act and pull out of the ECHR. “We need to reassert common law with all its common sense,” and return to the days when the Home Secretary could ban protests if they posed a risk to public order, he says.

Glasman denies that his presence at Trump’s inauguration and past praise for the US president’s “multi-ethnic, interfaith, working-class coalition against progressives” indicates any sympathy for the “MAGA” agenda.

Growing up, Glasman jokes, every Jew he knew supported the United Synagogue, Tottenham Hotspur Football Club and the Labour party

“I consider myself and Blue Labour to be the biggest enemies of Trump and Reform-UK,” he says, referring to the British right-wing populist party currently leading the polls.

But, he says, the president and his UK sympathizers have become “tribunes of working-class insurgency,” and it’s time Labour spoke to, and for, what he regards as its natural supporters: “Working-class people [who are] disgusted by the progressive ruling class.”

Glasman says he wants the party to challenge capitalism. “We are not commodities,” he says. “The only meaning in life is not money.”

By contrast, he notes, Trump and those surrounding him are capitalists and property developers.

Growing up, Glasman jokes, every Jew he knew supported the United Synagogue, Tottenham Hotspur Football Club and the Labour Party. His family were no exception: “absolutely Orthodox” and committed socialists. His politics, he says, are shaped by the biblical injunction to show both “kindness and truth.”

He recognizes the Jewish community’s deep anger with the Labour government.

“There’s a sense after the Manchester murder that this was building and we [the government] didn’t do anything, we didn’t address it,” Glasman says. At the same time, his loyalty to the party is deeply rooted.

“I’m just faithful,” he says. “I didn’t choose my parents. I didn’t choose my faith. I didn’t choose my football team, and I didn’t choose my party. So I just work within [that], that’s who I am.”

But Glasman is not without hope. He is an admirer of new Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who shares much of his “Blue Labour” outlook, and he regards her as an ally in the fight against extremism.

‘There’s a sense after the Manchester murder that this was building’

Glasman says Mahmood, a devout Muslim, is “a very serious, conservative politician” dedicated to the values of “moderation, peace [and] order.” She is “religiously committed,” he says, to leading the “Islamic fight against violence and hate because she is a Muslim who thinks that the religion is not about violence and hate.”

At the same time, Glasman continues, the Home Secretary is well aware that there is a “tradition within Islam that is violent [and] that does rule by the sword, and she is opposed to that.” In her constituency in the city of Birmingham, Glasman says, Mahmoud stood her ground in the face of a vicious and bitter fight against Islamists during last July’s election campaign.

The biggest source of Glasman’s optimism, however, comes from his affection for, and trust in, working-class Britons, who he now regards as the “only bulwark against antisemitism.”

“They won’t have it, they just won’t have it,” he says. “It’s because Labour is so weak on this that they’re going [over] to Reform. They want to see proper government and they definitely want to see the protection of Jews.”

In England’s smaller provincial cities, such as Bolton and Preston, he says, older working-class people bemoan the loss of the small Jewish communities that once lived there.

“They still say, ‘It’s never been the same since the Jews left, the shops are boarded up, the council isn’t properly run,’” Glasman recounts. “They really view Jews as a bulwark of… good sense. They trust us.”