Thousands demand action against antisemitism in London as attacks on Jews surge in the UK

About 20,000 people attended a demonstration against antisemitism in London on Sunday, following a surge in attacks on Jews, the Board of Deputies of British Jews said.

Jeers and booing were heard at the rally in Whitehall, opposite the Downing Street residence of the British prime minister, when Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Pat McFadden spoke.

He told the crowd, “I feel your pain,” and assuring that he wanted to “fight against antisemitism.” One woman shouted at McFadden, the senior-most government representative at the rally: “Action, no more words.”

McFadden continued, “I want to see Jewish people have the freedom to wear religious symbols not only at worship, but in daily life, in work, in all parts of daily life. … Friends, I hear you. I am with you. I want to fight antisemitism.”

Organized by the Board and the Jewish Leadership Council, the rally featured speeches by other senior politicians, including the head of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, and Richard Tice, deputy leader of Nigel Farage’s right-of-center Reform UK party.

“We’ve heard all the words for so long from politicians, and it’s counted for nothing,” Tice told GBNews at the rally. “The scourge of antisemitism is getting worse, the violence is getting worse, the threats, the fear, and, you know, I’ve said we need action, not words.”

Tice added: “We’ve got to ban the hate marches, proscribe and ban the IRGC [Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], proscribe and ban the Muslim Brotherhood, and also take on the weak, failing leadership of our universities that haven’t dealt with the scourge.”

This requires “courage and leadership, and that’s been absent for too long, and it’s got to stop,” he said.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer signaled his willingness to initiate legislation to ban the IRGC when parliament resumes in July, according to The Jewish Chronicle.

Jonathan Sacerdoti, a British-Jewish broadcaster and journalist, said the jeering was indicative of the shift in recent years in the attitudes of Jews, who accounted for many or most of those gathered in Whitehall on Sunday, toward the Starmer-led Labour Party.

“It is no surprise that, these days, when Labour ministers come out to address Jews, they’re met with disdain and jeering,” Sacerdoti told JNS after the rally.

Frustration over the authorities’ apparent inability to stop major terrorist attacks against British Jews, such as the April 29 stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green, is fueling Jewish resentment and anger toward Labour, which used to be British Jewry’s political home, Sacerdoti noted.

Justice Secretary David Lammy experienced this hostility after an earlier terrorist attack on a synagogue in Manchester on Oct. 2, in which two people died, Sacerdoti recalled. “Keir Starmer dodged it by avoiding Jews crowded in the street in Golders Green after the stabbings, driving past them to a secured car park instead for his photo opportunity. And it happened again yesterday in the Whitehall rally of Jews and others disgusted by anti-Jewish racism and violence in the U.K,” he said.

It has taken a while for mainstream Jewish opinion to “catch up but, finally, most Jews seem to realize the left, from Labour all the way to the Islamo-extreme-left Greens, are as dangerous for Jews as Islamic anti-Jewish movements,” Sacerdoti said. “ That’s why they’re getting jeered at.”

This reaction, Sacerdoti added, does not come naturally “to a Diaspora Jewish community, which traditionally leaned left on most issues.” Labour, he said, “earned this disdain through years of hard work alienating Jews and appeasing and flattering Islamic anti-Jewish voters and non-Muslim far-leftists.”

The United Kingdom had in 2025 the highest per capita rate of real-life antisemitic assaults of any country with a large Jewish community, according to a report published last month by Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism. It recorded 121 violent antisemitic incidents in a country with a Jewish population estimated between 292,000 and 313,000.

The total number of antisemitic incidents recorded in the U.K. last year—including threats, vandalism, and intimidation—reached 3,700 cases in 2025, constituting a slight increase over the previous year and the second-highest tally on record, the Community Security Trust (CST) watchdog group said earlier this year.

The 2025 tally represents a 4% bump from the 3,556 anti-Jewish hate incidents recorded by CST in 2024. Last year’s total was14% lower than the highest-ever annual total of 4,298 antisemitic incidents reported in 2023.

The latest report indicates a continuation of the elevated levels of Jew-hatred on display in the U.K. since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel and triggered a regional war that set off a wave of antisemitic hatred in Western Europe and beyond. In 2021 and 2022, CST recorded 2,261 and 1,662 antisemitic incidents, respectively.

Last year, 872 Britons made aliyah, immigration to Israel by Jews and their relatives, despite the war with Iran. This was a 40-year high and a significant increase not only compared to the years 2023-2024, but also to pre-war levels (572 and 681 in 2021-2022).