The Uncuts: 2024 political awards Part III – Disappointment of the year: Mayor Sadiq Khan’s lack of solidarity with London’s Jewish community

Sadiq Khan – or Sir Sadiq, as we will soon be calling him – has suffered a lot of brickbats during his two-and-a-bit terms in office. Some, like Trump’s criticism, have been playing to the worst, prejudiced instincts of their own bases and should be immediately dismissed.

Others are more justified. For example, what are the great achievements he can point to, after eight years in charge of Britain’s capital? Activists, we can be sure, shuffle awkwardly when asked this on the doorstep. “Not being Boris Johnson” is not that much of an accolade for a politician who has now been hovering at or near the top of politics in Westminster and London for nearly two decades.

For example, in this election year, knife and gun crime was up 20% year on year in his beat, but he got elected anyway. In his role as Greater London’s Police and Crime Commissioner, he has political oversight of the Met. One imagines that that means achieving some key policy goals that matter to Londoners, but these days it all seems to be more about providing officers to support the “LGBTQ+ Community”– an increasingly fractious and disunited “group” these days, in any event – and having police officers dancing at Pride, than tackling actual crime on the streets.

But the biggest oversight in Khan’s oversight is surely the fact that, for the last year and a quarter, there have been pretty much weekly demonstrations, coordinated by the dreadful Palestine Solidarity Campaign: a far-left grouping, often mentioned in dispatches at Uncut over the years for their anti-Jewish sentiment, rather than their standing up for the rights of non-aligned Palestinians.

As a result, London’s small Jewish community has felt unsafe going into central London every Saturday since 7th October, 2023, and certainly would not contemplate the idea wearing any kind of garment (a kippah, for example) that would mark them out as Jewish. This is the reality for Jews in London right now, many of whom are pretty fed up with the Met and with Khan. A particular low point was the threatened arrest of a kippah-wearing Jewish man, who chose to brave a “pro-Palestine” march, being described by an officer as “openly Jewish”, as if that were somehow a provocation to the assembled demonstrators.

Ah, you say, but they are mainly legitimate demonstrations by peace-loving Londoners, aghast at the civilian death-toll in Gaza. Let’s take that apart, one piece at a time.

If you were genuinely wanting to demonstrate against the actions of the Israeli government and have no problem with Jews, I put it to you that you would:

1. Avoid rallies organised by organisations long known to contain antisemites;
2. Be put off by directly antisemitic chants, such as “from the river to the sea”;
3. Equally be demonstrating for the violent oppression of Yemeni, Uygur or Sudanese people, whose conflicts are far more bloody but do not involve Israel;
4. Equally be asking on said demo for the safe return of hostages, a number of whom are teenage girls undergoing the most horrific sexual abuse on a daily basis.
5. Give some thought to the fact that most British Jews are not big fans of Netanyahu either, but, with a few exceptions, choose not to demonstrate this in a crowd where they are unlikely to feel welcome and where the suffering of Israeli hostages or the murder of whole communities, which may include your own family members in more than a few cases, seem to be all but forgotten.

Thanks to the repercussions of the Gaza conflict, Khan has gone full solidarity, from saying Labour needed to “rebuild its relationship” with the Jewish community at the nadir of Corbynism in 2018, to having to lock down Twitter replies after wishing it a happy Chanukah in 2024.

It is important to note that Khan’s lack of solidarity with London’s Jewish population does not appear to be because of his faith or ethnicity; indeed, a number of other Labour politicians have taken a similar line. But one would hope for better than mere handwashing, in a capital city regularly trumpeted as a triumph of communities living happily side by side. London’s Jews deserve more than this.