King’s Speech

Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury (Con)]

My Lords, like many other speakers, I want to focus today on a sentence that would have been unimaginable in a Queen’s Speech of 40, 30 or even 20 years ago. It is the sentence that begins:

“My Government will take urgent action to tackle antisemitism”.


I want to make three points. First, I have a confession to make. Many years ago I wrote to the then Israeli ambassador in London because I disagreed with the view, which he had expressed, that it was not safe for British citizens who were Jewish to live in Britain. He urged them to go and live in Israel. I wrote to him to say that I thought he was being alarmist and exaggerating, and was tarnishing Britain’s international reputation. Well, today, I am afraid I have been proved wrong.

Last year the Community Security Trust recorded 3,700 anti-Jewish incidents. “Incidents”, by the way, completely understates what it was describing. These so-called incidents involved discrimination on campuses and in the world of the arts. They involved verbal assaults on the streets of our towns and cities, attacks on Jewish cemeteries and synagogues and, worse still, as we have seen recently, attacks and firebombings leading to the deaths of Jewish people as they worshipped. These things were not happening in a foreign country a long way away. We are not talking about Germany in the 1930s and Europe. This is happening in Britain, something that none of us could have imagined when we were growing up—unimaginable.

My second point is this. I welcome the Prime Minister’s very clear denunciation of antisemitism and the fact that it has been echoed very strongly by the leaders of other parties, including my right honourable friend Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Lib Dems and the leader of Reform UK, because words do matter. That is why I was less than happy with what the leader of the Green Party said very recently: that he did not believe Israel had the right to exist. When challenged, he went on to say that he did not believe any country, including the United Kingdom, had any right to exist. I regard that as stark raving bonkers, to be honest, but what really worried me was how his remarks might be perceived, because they carry sinister undertones. They have a sinister subtext which, however unintended, could well feed further anti-Jewish prejudice or hatred. Everyone should reject the preposterous and dangerous view that British citizens who are Jewish are somehow responsible for the actions of a foreign Government, in this case the Israeli Government. They are not.

This morning, and this is my third point, we heard about the arrest by the FBI in the United States of al-Saadi, a commander of an Iranian-backed militia group responsible for firebombings across Europe and, almost certainly, in the UK. The gracious Speech talked about urgent action. I hope that the Minister will tell us in his speech what action is being planned and when, and in particular when the Government will take action to proscribe the IRGC.