Antisemitism on University Campuses

Lord Cryer Excerpts

Wednesday 7th May 2025 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Cryer]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps are being taken to eliminate antisemitism on university campuses.

[Lord Cryer (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to have secured this important debate. It is important because I think it is beyond dispute that antisemitism has been rocketing in recent years, not just in this country but across many parts of the globe—but, pertinently to this debate, in this country and across certain educational institutions. Sadly, on a personal note, I will say that the situation was made infinitely worse by the former leadership of my own party, which effectively invited racists into the ranks of the Labour Party and then protected them.

Again on a personal note, I am very pleased to be here with my noble friend Lady Berger. She and I were Members of the other House for a long time, and I saw probably just a fraction of the titanic amount of abuse and threats that she received, very often from Labour Party members. I was born into the Labour Party and I will die in it—not just yet, but one day I will. I joined the party when Jim Callaghan was Prime Minister, which gives some idea of how long I have been in it, and the five-year period of escalating antisemitism in our ranks was far and away the worst I experienced as a Labour Party member.

I come from a very anti-racist background, but I grew up in a world, as many of us did, in which there was a general belief—this was in the 1960s and 1970s—that antisemitism had been dealt with when the guns fell silent in 1945. How wrong can you be?

If any noble Lords are not familiar with the work of the Community Security Trust, the CST, I suggest they read its reports and look at its website. It is one of the most important, if not the most important, anti-racist organisations in the country; it has maintained that position—a unique position, really—in anti-racist research for many decades. In December 2024, its latest report on campus antisemitism found that there had been a 117% increase in antisemitic incidents on campuses during the previous two academic years, from 2022 to 2024. The Union of Jewish Students, which also does much good research in this area, recorded a staggering 413% increase in antisemitic incidents from the academic year 2022-23 to 2023-24, with 53 incidents in the first year and 272 in the second. That is a staggering rise and gives some idea of the momentous challenge that we face in this country.

The StandWithUs report, with which my noble friend Lord Turnberg is intimately acquainted, was launched, I think, this morning. It was covered in the press, if anybody wants to read up on it, with various reports in this morning’s newspapers and media outlets. The report looks at individual Jewish student experiences and student voices. Page after page of the report is littered with examples of loud and virulent support for Hamas and Hezbollah. It is worth bearing in mind, because it often gets lost in the debate, that both Hamas and Hezbollah are proscribed terrorist organisations. Expressing support for proscribed terrorist organisations should be met with the full force of the law, because it constitutes a criminal action.

I will give a few examples from the StandWithUs report. At Queen Mary University, which I mention because it happens to be about a mile from the boundary with my old constituency of Leyton and Wanstead, in east London, some students decided, quite reasonably, to hold a silent vigil on 7 October 2024 to mark the year’s anniversary since the massacres, mass rape, torture and abductions in southern Israel. What followed was that the silent vigil, which was quite a small group, was surrounded by hundreds of students—and probably people who were not students—screaming and shouting slogans, and engaging in threatening behaviour. The university security staff then removed not the aggressors but the students engaging in a silent protest to mark the anniversary. At Birmingham University, a similar vigil was planned, but the university authorities would not even give it permission to go ahead. It had to be moved to a local synagogue, where people were followed and, again, threatened in the street and outside the synagogue.

Many Jewish students bear witness in the report. A Jewish student at University College London, reported feeling unable to attend lectures and seminars due to threats and intimidation. That is a fairly extraordinary step in anybody’s university career. There is example after example, across many universities in this country, including threats, intimidation, physical attacks of Jewish students and Jewish students being ostracised by other students, while in many cases university authorities stand idly by or vaguely, tacitly side with the aggressors.

The rise in antisemitism on campuses did not occur out of a clear blue sky. There are certain malign organisations which encourage antisemitism, whipping it up, and prey on perhaps relatively young minds. I will give a couple of examples—just to get one or two things off my chest, I suppose.

The Stop the War Coalition is not called that anymore; I suspect that is because it put the word “coalition” in there as an act of irony and then took it out. Stop the War springs to mind because, on 9 October, within two days of the barbarous attacks on southern Israel on 7 October, it was outside the Israeli embassy in London, taking part in a protest. This is before the IDF was even really fully thinking about its response. It was hours after the massacre had stopped. Why would anybody engage in a protest outside the Israeli embassy after 1,200 Israelis had been murdered and Hamas had engaged in rape, torture and abduction? In my estimation, it was because it was engaging in the incitement of racial hatred against Jewish people. Stop the War, by the way, has strong links to Hezbollah and Hamas, and therefore, I feel fairly sure, Iran and the clerical fascists of Tehran. Stop the War was set up in 2003 in the run-up to the Iraq war. I was a Labour MP at the time, as I was until a short time ago, and I voted against the Iraq war probably seven times, as well as marching against it and speaking against it. I have never had any link with Stop the War and never will.

Not to be outdone, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign applied for a licence to have a march in London on 7 October. The attack on southern Israel started, I think, at about 6.30 am. Within a few hours, the PSC had applied to the Metropolitan Police for a licence so that it could have a march in central London. Again, why would you do that, unless you are intent on whipping up racial hatred against Jewish people?

My personal view is that membership of any democratic party, frankly, is incompatible with membership of Stop the War or the PSC. That may sound like it is largely directed at members of parties in the centre or centre-left, such as my own party, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. However, when I marched in London against the Iraq war, all those years ago in 2003, I saw a banner—I thought at the time I might be imagining it—which honestly said, “Conservatives against the war”. It is not just the left who opposed the Iraq war. Underneath that banner there were some quite nervous looking people, but they were there to express their views, and I congratulate them on having the backbone to do that.

I have a couple of final points I want to make to my noble friend, because I am almost out of time. I have two requests which I hope the Minister can take on board. First, I am certainly convinced that the Government should look at the possibility of holding an inquiry into campus antisemitism. That would be an important step towards combating it. Secondly, perhaps we could examine the possibility of the Department for Education expanding the section of the national curriculum which covers the Holocaust. I say that because the Holocaust and the Second World War are now slipping out of memory and into history, and therefore it is all the more important that we stamp on the collective consciousness of future generations exactly what horror happened.

I finish with that, because I know I am out of time. We are certainly seeing a sharp and widespread increase in antisemitism. My fear is that, unless we take concrete steps to counter this on campuses and in institutions of education, some of those institutions could turn into incubators for virulent antisemitism.