The British government is paralysed on the surge of antisemitism because it is afraid of offending one of its key voting blocs, Islamic South Asians, Nigel Farage said on Monday.
Speaking out after yet another London synagogue was the target of an attempted arson attack at the weekend, Brexit pioneer and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage spoke out against both what he called the un-British arrival of antisemitic sentiment to the country, and against the UK government’s failure to tackle the matter.
Addressing a press conference on Monday morning after launching his criticism of the failure of the government to step up in an opinion-piece in the Jewish Chronicle, Mr Farage said Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer was declining to act because any serious attempt to protect the Jewish community would damage his re-election prospects.
Farage said:
…the Prime Minister, time after time, [says] ‘our thoughts and prayers are with the Jewish community’, it just is not good enough. It would appear he’s not prepared to lift a finger… this is a government busy looking at putting into law some definition of Islamophobia which would make even questioning the religion as something akin to Blasphemy, and you can see the numbers.
You can see the size of the Muslim voting population, or more specifically the Pakistani-Kashmiri-Bangladeshi population, and a Prime Minister terrified they’re going to lose that vote, which was a bloc Labour vote, to the Greens. So is it any wonder the Jewish community [feels under threat].
The threat to the jobs of Labour parliamentarians and the future of the party itself from its longstanding migrant community voter blocs is something that it is now known that Labour insiders speak in panicked tones about when they believe the conversations are being held in private. Over the course of the Epstein-Mandelson scandal in recent months, private texts by top Labour Member of Parliament Wes Streeting, a politician frequently spoken of as a potential future party leader, reveals this preoccupation.
In those private texts, Streeting wrote of a recent local election loss in a heavily Muslim area to a “Gaza independent” candidate: “I fear we’re in big trouble here – and I am toast at the next election.”
Labour has already lost big hitters from its own ranks to Gaza independents, as the party’s longstanding organised bloc vote abandons it for their own interests. And several more prominent Labour politicians have already come close to losing their seats, with more to come in forthcoming elections, in England’s most ‘diverse’ cities.
Speaking on Monday, Mr Farage expressed particular concern about social changes he associated with demographic realignment in such places. Speaking of his first-hand experience seeing this, the Reform party leader said:
I’ve seen this all before. 20 years I was in Brussels and I watched as the centre of Brussels became somewhere Jewish people could not safely live, they fled that city and went to Israel, America… the only Jews that felt comfortable staying in Brussels were wealthy ones who lived in gated communities… I’ve seen this play out in other parts of Europe and I fear what we are witnessing — which was in slow-motion but now after the last few weeks appears to be at high speed — is a community that will effectively, unless something really strong and radical is done, be forced out of the areas from which they live, and I think it’s that serious.
Earlier in the day, Mr Farage had said in a newspaper article that is is a “national disgrace” that British Jews are living in “real, physical danger” and said the government is “wilfully ignoring a crisis unfolding in plain sight”.
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