Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
The spectacle of British Jews being murdered on their way to synagogue has shocked the nation. It has shocked the Government, too. While the security services have foiled dozens of terrorist plots against Jews in recent years, and there have been fears about just this sort of thing happening, the reality has shattered illusions. In the aftermath, Labour politicians are swiftly gathering their thoughts and trying to work out what comes next.
A senior figure from the New Labour years, who is still involved in Government, told the New Statesman: “I now realise I was part of the naivety of thinking that you could create the melting pot and that the huge diversity of culture would be a wholly positive thing and overall add to that sense of Britain as a progressive country.
“I think there are a lot of people like me who have woken up to the fact that you can’t just have that attitude and the reason why was writ large in the synagogue attack, and on our streets actually with the weekly marches.”
There are, of course, those within Labour who would contest this most pessimistic of attitudes. But it speaks to the shock with which this whole as affair has hit the Government.
A Government insider said: “In security circles people have just been waiting for this to happen, but the gravity of it across the wider political leaders is really significant. The cabinet are taking it very seriously and I think they have been seriously impacted by the reaction that David Lammy got when he went up on Friday.”
That “reaction” was the spectre of the Deputy Prime Minister, sheltered beneath a brolly in the pouring rain at a vigil for the victims of the terror attack, being heckled by mourners with who accused him of “empty words” and referred to protests about the war in Gaza that have happened “every weekend”.
A cabinet source told the NS: “Those appalling scenes of Thursday have brought it home to ministers that they must heal the wounds both of Manchester and of the nation.”
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There have been immediate attempts to hear the views of Jewish community leaders about what can be done. This is a usual state response to atrocities against minority groups. But insiders say the process has been tragically staggered, another consequence of the vicious timing which the attacker chose to attack: at the holiest time of year for Jews when a number of holidays are celebrated. A source familiar with process said: “The response is still being formed because you had the attack on Yom Kippur and many didn’t find out about it until the evening. Then you had one day and then it’s shabbat and then its Sukkot [a seven-day long holiday].”
A central demand for months, if not years now, has been for police to have power to assess the “cumulative impact” of protests (i.e. the Gaza protests that have taken place most weekends since November 2023, with some Jewish community leaders arguing these make central London inhospitable for British Jews).
The Government’s former advisor on extremism, Lord Walney, made “cumulative impact” powers one of the key recommendations in a report into protest and policing commissioned by the Conservatives (he wanted the police to be able to block protests entirely on these grounds, though it remains to be seen if the Government will go this far).
It was not taken up by Yvette Cooper when she was Home Secretary, but on Sunday morning her successor Shabana Mahmood changed position in the wake of the Crumpsall attack.
Earlier this year Cooper’s team has privately argued that there wasn’t enough space in their crime and policing bill for “cumulative impact” powers. After Crumpsall, the Home Office position has turned on a sixpence.
It is the first concrete change resulting from the attack, but probably not the last. A proposal to retain an enhanced police presence at synagogues on shabbat has not, as I understand, been ruled out. Additional money for the Community Security Trust (CST), a Jewish safety charity, has also been raised.
But despite attempts by some – including the foreign minister of Israel Gideon Sa’ar – to associate Labour’s approach to the Middle East war with the horrors in Manchester, there is no sign of the Government changing its foreign policy position because of the attack.
The burden of the response will fall on Mahmood, but also on her colleague Steve Reed. He has just moved into the triple-barrelled brief of secretary of state for housing, communities and local government. While he spent Labour conference gallivanting in a “build, baby, build” cap, his allies say he is taking the communities side of the brief just as seriously. Asked about how the attack had changed attitudes, a Government source said: “While Shabana has been working hard on ensuring communities are kept safe, it’s Steve’s job to bring the fractured communities back together.”
In the wake of the Manchester attack, a source close to Reed said that mending “social cohesion” was his main focus. “It’s not something he thinks the Tories took seriously and we are spending a lot of time now thinking about how we bring communities together.”
Since taking over from Angela Rayner in the role he has homed in on the Islamophobia definition which she commissioned (it is currently being thrashed out by a working group led by the former Attorney General Dominic Grieve).
But he is markedly less keen on the definition than his predecessor, amid worries it could put a “protective cordon” around discussions of extreme Islamist views, the like of which might have inspired Thursday’s attack.
A few weeks into the job Reed has already commissioned his civil servants to come up with alternative policy proposals to tackle anti-Muslim hatred. I’m told he “won’t have anything that impinges free speech”.
There are murmurs that he is seriously considering dropping the definition entirely, though allies say this is not a result of the Crumpsall attack.
Mahmood meanwhile is working to win trust and show that she, as a multicultural success story, is well-placed to grapple with the issues thrown up by the horror in Crumpsall.
I’m told: “There is a lively debate within the Jewish community as to whether she is the person you see clips of on social media, Shabana in her first term with the placards at Gaza protests, or the more mature figure we have seen more recently.” She has also won plaudits from Jewish community leaders for seeing off an aggressive independent challenge from an candidate who stood against her on the issue of Gaza at the last general election.
Maurice Glasman, the Labour peer and Blue Labour figure, has written movingly of his own experience of hearing about the Yom Kippur killings. As members of the Jewish community wonder how much hope they should put in the new Home Secretary, I hear he has been going around describing her as a “gift from God”.
[Further reading: Britain isn’t safe for Jews anymore]
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