King’s Speech

Baroness Noakes Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

My Lords, I will focus my brief time on antisemitism. Only around 0.5% of the UK’s population are Jewish. To our very great shame, they are probably the least safe group in our society. Jewish schools and children have to be guarded. Only last week, a group of Jewish children was seen on the London streets guarded by guards in stab vests. Jewish places of worship have extensive security measures but, as we saw with the murderous attack on the Heaton synagogue, even that is not enough. No other religious group in the UK has to go to these lengths to keep itself safe. Symbols such as the Star of David or the kippah carry a clear risk of unprovoked attack, as the vicious stabbings in Golders Green laid bare. Jewish students on campuses suffer routine antisemitism and university authorities have done little to protect them.

Antisemitism is of course not a new phenomenon, but it has been intensifying and threats to Jewish people have now reached truly dreadful proportions. It is ironic that they got much worse after the 7 October assault by Hamas terrorists on the people of Israel. The whole world should have rallied around Israel and the need to defend its people. Instead, many countries, including the UK, tolerated anti-Israel protests and lies about genocide, which have allowed antisemitism to flourish under the guise of anti-Zionist or anti-Israel sentiment. It is shocking that it took the recent attacks in north London to make the police and CPS wake up to the plain criminal intent of posters and chants such as “Globalise the intifada”, which can only reasonably be interpreted as a call to kill Jews everywhere.

The gracious Speech promised a Bill to tackle state threats, and so we might—at long last—see the evil IRGC proscribed, but that will not be enough. The Government must do more to counter extremism. Antisemitism hides among extremism of all kinds, including, as other noble Lords have said, the extreme right and the extreme left, as well as Islamic extremism. The Prevent programme is not up to this task; more must be done.

Policing and law enforcement must be clear, unbiased and speedy, in ways that it has not always been in the past. Antisemitism, like all forms of racism, must be stamped upon and all policy areas need to be viewed through the lens of eradicating the hatred of Jews. If the Government cannot make Jewish people be safer and feel safer, that will be a colossal failure.