07.05.2026

Never let a crisis

No time has been lost in exploiting the Golders Green stabbings. The whole establishment is being mobilised to clamp down on so-called anti-Semitism. Paul Demarty calls for a robust defence of our right to protest and, hand‑in‑hand with that, a new culture of free speech on the left

We should begin, against prevailing fashion, with the facts of the case.

On the morning of April 29, a middle-aged man, living in sheltered accommodation under the watch of South London and Maudsley NHS trust, snapped. He had been trying to reach a friend, presumably in the grip of some kind of crisis, and - having failed to do so - travelled to the friend’s home in Borough. There he assaulted the friend with a knife, but failed to seriously injure him.

He then made his way to Golders Green, where he began assailing visibly Jewish passers-by, stabbing two men. He was apprehended - quite brutally, as videos make clear. He was later charged with three counts of attempted murder.

Stated baldly, it is a frightening story of the social safety net failing to do its job. This man had a history of violence and severe (as yet unspecified) mental health problems. It is another story of the failure of ‘care in the community’ as a model for treating people with such problems, and something that should leave the NHS trust in question with questions to answer.

The political and media narrative around this is, of course, completely unrecognisable from the bare facts. This incident was immediately and ludicrously treated as an act of terrorism, attributed without question to a supposed Iranian-backed terror cell (in reality, a Telegram channel of dubious provenance). The first victim, a Muslim acquaintance of the perpetrator, has all but disappeared from public discussion. The trip to Golders Green and selection of targets makes it clear that anti-Semitic hatred was a motivating factor; but those in the grip of psychotic delusions tend to fill in their persecution stories with materials ready to hand, and the trope of the manipulative Jew is certainly a common element. To treat him almost as if he were a hardened Isis operative is frankly preposterous.

State bans

The political payoff, of course, is further restrictions on the freedom of pro-Palestine protests. We are days into another full-court press against the slogan, ‘Globalise the Intifada’. Is it seriously the belief of Sir Keir Starmer, Met commissioner Mark Rowley or MI5 that this man was driven insane by exposure to a political slogan? Of course not: but a crisis cannot be allowed to go to waste. Any and all anti-Semitic attacks, even those with no visible connection to general politics at all, must be exploited to delegitimise opposition to Israel’s genocide and Britain’s participation in it.

Feeling the full force of the British state’s immune system at the moment is poor old Zack Polanski. In vain might he protest that he is, after all, the only Jewish leader of a significant political party. He has shed his old liberal Zionism in favour of an explicit, if imprecise, identification with the Palestinian cause. Now he gets the full Jeremy Corbyn-style witch-hunt treatment (some justice, you might say, for his active participation in that older witch-hunt; but, of course, in the present context he is a voodoo doll of all of us).

The main line of attack against him was initially that he retweeted without comment a video of London coppers beating the living hell out of the assailant, including several kicks to the head. This was taken to be an enormous insult to the boys in blue, and Rowley, laughing in the face of the conventions of ‘purdah’ in the run-up to elections, wrote a rather petulant public letter of protest. This gave Starmer the opportunity to put the boot in, saying that Polanski was not fit to lead a political party (a bit rich …).

Polanski’s response to this onslaught has been Janus-faced. He has avoided total capitulation, but made conciliatory noises towards Rowley and promised to ‘kiss and make up’ (Polanski is, of course, a member of the London assembly, so to some extent his job is to oversee the activities of the Met). He also said he would “discourage” use of the ‘Globalise the intifada’ slogan, though clearly opposed it being banned.

While he could have collapsed more despicably than he did - certainly Corbyn put up much less of a fight when it was his Labour leadership in the crosshairs - I cannot help but return to a theme from a recent article of mine.¹ Polanski is supposed to be some kind of ‘populist’ firebrand, yet his response is just a load of politician’s equivocation. When racism and anti-Semitism accusations piled up against Nigel Farage not long ago, he had the gumption to kick back hard, denouncing his accusers and producing the impression of a dastardly plot against him. Say what you like about Farage, he is better at this game than Polanski, or at least more committed to playing it properly. Polanski’s ‘populism’, on the other hand, is entirely fraudulent: for all the leftist hype, he is a Lib Dem to his bootstraps.

There is, of course, a narrowly electoral aspect to Labour’s exploitation of this crime in particular. You may be reading this on May 7, a date on which Starmer’s merry men and women are expecting an almighty thrashing in local and devolved-parliament elections. With Reform still apparently marginalising the Tory vote, and the Greens with their tails up, the municipal political landscape is perhaps set to change considerably. Painting Polanski as a ‘terrorist sympathiser’ may not be any more successful than it was when Theresa May tried it against Corbyn in 2017, but forcing him into ticky-tacky defensive statements may be marginally demoralising for Green voters.

Readers have the advantage over me on that point. What is certain is a new wave of attacks on freedom of association, more nuisance bans and route changes imposed on pro-Palestine and anti-war demonstrations, more opportunities for outrageous prosecutions like that of Ben Jamal and Chris Nineham recently.

Old and new

It is perfectly valid to argue, as the left often does, that this sort of full-court press to identify British Jewry wholly with support for Israel, and pro-Palestinian sentiment wholly with anti-Semitism, in fact tends to exacerbate it in the large. After all, the classic anti-Semitic canard of our day is ‘ZOG’ - the ‘Zionist-occupied government’ - which is hardly refuted by the impenetrable united front of the British political and media class around the state of Israel. The effect, as days turn into months and years, is to reinforce the sense that Israel enjoys ‘special treatment’, compared even to other morally questionable allies like the Gulf monarchies, and to invite conspiratorial views of this alliance.

These views are, in fact, false: support for Israel in this country’s governing elite is in the end a token of obeisance to our true ‘masters’, the Americans, who prefer to keep Israel around as a rabid attack dog, and seem quite happy for the Middle East to otherwise be reduced to a blasted landscape of failed states. (“They make a desert and they call it peace,” said a British chieftain of the Romans, in the telling of Tacitus: one can easily imagine Pete Hegseth, a few whiskeys deep, enthusiastically embracing that insult for himself.) But this falsity is only established by careful analysis: the absurd logic-chopping required to identify the safety of British Jews with the military success of the state of Israel is all too clangingly obvious.

This is a valid line of argument, as I said, and it is in fact borne out by the unfortunate and increasing vulnerability of sections of the left to Zionist-conspiracy tall tales. Yet it is also off the point. At this juncture, run-of-the-mill leftwing people, who support Palestine and occupy much of their time with anti-racist activism, are working with a completely different definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ altogether from the establishment. For us, it means prejudice against Jews as Jews. If, as seems to be the case, the Golders Green attacker was walking around looking for Jewish people to attack, then he was perfectly straightforwardly engaged in anti-Semitic violence on this definition, which used to be broadly shared in society.

Today’s establishment, however, simply uses ‘anti-Semitism’ to mean opposition to the state of Israel. In former times, this was snuck into the previous definition as an additional element - the ‘new anti-Semitism’, as it was called around the turn of the millennium. Now, however, it has completely supplanted the old definition. Arguably, the establishment was only able to treat this event as anti-Semitic by somehow roping Israel into the matter with wild conjectures about Iranian terror cells. If the spectacle of gentiles lecturing the Jewish Polanski about anti-Semitism seems absurd to a leftwing generation raised on intersectional standpoint theory, it is only so because they have not noticed that the relevant standpoint is no longer Jewishness, but Zionism.

Speech controls

The ease with which this piece of ideological prestidigitation has been accomplished is one more piece of evidence in favour of the position long argued in these pages: that it is in the interests of the left to defend free speech just as such.

It has been all too easy, over the years, for the left to support constraints on ‘hate speech’, or at least enter into diplomatic silence on the matter, so as not to alienate our more censorious allies. Within our own movement, the adoption of ‘no platform for fascists’ as a dogma has always undermined our broader commitment to free expression, such as it is, and indeed the operative domain of ‘no platform’ inevitably expands, as people lazily excuse themselves from answering opposing political positions by casting them into the outer darkness.

We may be surprised - even insulted - to find ourselves cast as racists by those cheering on the vaporisation of Arab children by thermobaric weapons. So we should be, but insult is easily brushed off (imprisonment is not). When we consider the rights and wrongs of laws against hate speech, we should always bear in mind that the definition of ‘hate’ is not in our hands, but in those - to simplify a little - of stupid or malignant cops, like Mark Rowley or Wayne Couzens. If somehow Reform’s poll lead lasts into the next general election and the Farage Reich begins, my bet is not that he repeals ‘woke’ legislation against hate speech, but that people suddenly start getting prosecuted for ‘anti-white racism’ under it.

The left needs to fight new restrictions on protest, yes, but it also needs to build a culture of free speech. We are laughably far from this: the organised left groups censor their own factional minorities, and unorganised left opinion is still too reliant on ‘cancel-culture’ mob justice to get its kicks. I received a Stand Up To Racism leaflet through the door yesterday, warning of a far-right demonstration at a nearby primary school. “We must not let the racists divide us,” I was told. But we - as in the ordinary folk of cities like mine - are already divided. So what now?

The left must get off the fainting couch and have the necessary resilience to convince people. Mark Rowley, Keir Starmer and their ilk will not protect us.

1. ‘Getting the right headlines’ Weekly Worker April 2: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1579/getting-the-right-headlines.↩︎