King’s Speech

Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, last week the Home Affairs Committee in the other place held a very important session on the scourge of antisemitism, which has just been described very powerfully by the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes. Among the experts they took evidence from were Dave Rich from the Community Security Trust and Danny Stone from the Antisemitism Policy Trust, both of whom I got to know, respect and was grateful to for their advice when I led the Labour Party’s work on tackling antisemitism in the Labour Party. Danny advised the committee that it is very important that politicians of all political parties and none should address antisemitism within their ranks, very much as the Labour Party did when Sir Keir Starmer became its leader in 2020. I am sure he is right about this, so I would like to use today’s Home Affairs debate to propose to noble Lords across this House that the time is right for a cross-party campaign to tackle antisemitism among politically active people wherever they are.

Two vital ingredients of the work that the Labour Party undertook were training and complaints handling. A comprehensive training programme for all Labour MPs, all my noble friends in this House, the Senedd, Scottish Parliament, and thousands of members across the country was set up, along with an independent complaints process, to ensure that antisemitism, and indeed any discrimination, was fully challenged. This required careful design to get right. The Equality and Human Rights Commission approved the action plan developed in 2021 and gave the party a clean bill of health on this in 2023. This combination of training and complaints handling made a huge difference to the Labour Party, and I commend it to the Green Party, Reform and other political parties too.

It would be helpful to understand what the EHRC is doing now and if it has plans to address the antisemitism seen from a number of candidates in the recent local elections. But why wait until people become politically active before teaching them about antisemitism? By that, I mean starting at school, particularly given the legislation that we will shortly debate on allowing 16 and 17 year-olds roles to vote. None of my nearly 18 year-old daughter’s friends and classmates watches television news or read newspapers. They access any news and current affairs that they may be interested in mainly on their phones, with Instagram, TikTok and YouTube helping them curate content through algorithms pushing content accordingly. Regrettably, an interest in, say, some candidates in the recent local elections, or what began as a perfectly healthy interest in, say, the Israeli-Palestine conflict, all too easily leads to antisemitic content taking over. This makes education an important part of the fight against antisemitism, its history, current context and the repulsive tropes that are rampant on social media—it is absolutely vital.

This would soon filter through to the students of tomorrow on university campuses, where, as we have all too often heard in this Chamber, antisemitic abuse and even attacks are rife. The importance of teaching school children about antisemitism was raised at last week’s Home Affairs Committee, this time by way of my noble friend Lord Mann, who gave evidence as the Government’s Independent Adviser on Antisemitism. My noble friend was clear about the vital importance of training teachers. He said he has been calling on the Government to ensure that all secondary teachers are trained. The good news is that His Majesty’s Government have recently let a contract to train secondary school teachers; but it is a plan to train 650 of them. There are more than 4,000 secondary schools in England and more than 200,000 secondary teachers.

We need, as my noble friend Lord Reid spoke of earlier, civil society, as well as the criminal justice system, to be responding to the scourge of antisemitism, so let us put some rocket boosters under this programme and ensure that it matches the scale of the challenge. This, combined with political parties and their candidates putting their own houses in order, could really make a practical and sustainable difference in tackling the terrible scourge of antisemitism.