Andrew Roberts: Britain, Amid a Ferocity of Antisemitism Unmatched Since 1930s, Languishes Under ‘Lilliputian’ Leaders

Andrew Roberts — Lord Roberts of Belgravia — is the rare historian for whom, as the novelist William Faulkner observed, the “past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The author of biographies of Winston Churchill, Napoleon Bonaparte, Lord Shaftesbury, and others, he joined the Sun on Zoom on the hottest May day in Britain’s recorded history to discuss the state of the nation of which he is a foremost chronicler.Lord Roberts reckons that his “historian’s hat is not of much use” in decoding the turmoil that has engulfed British politics. He cites the staggering sequence of a Tory landslide in 2019, Labour’s triumph in 2024, and the possibility of Reform UK winning in 2029. “That has never happened before” Lord Roberts notes. Also unprecedented is a surge of antisemitism that has not been seen since Oswald Mosley’s black shirts stalked London in the 1930s.Lord Roberts notes that the podcaster Tucker Carlson has of late promoted Mosley as one of Britain’s “great war heroes.” Mr. Carslon, though, failed to mention Mosley’s party — the British Union of Fascists — and that Mosley was never decorated for bravery. Lord Roberts notes that the level of “street antisemitism” visible “every day” at London would have been beyond Mosley’s imagination — and he supported Mussolini and Hitler. Most concerning to Lord Roberts about this new political fragmentation is the rise of the Greens as a “major party” projected to garner some 15 percent of the vote in the next general election. Lord Roberts calls the party “antisemitic” and likens it to the anti-Dreyfus and antisemitic parties that arose in France in the 19th century. He warns in respect of the Greens that “Islamists have fastened on to a tired old ecological party and taken it over.” Lord Roberts calls the author of the Green’s renaissance, Zack Polanski, a “complete fraud who tells overt lies about his background” and a “classic self-hating Jew” whose own family “doesn’t even speak to him because of his hostility to Zionism.” Lord Roberts, who has analyzed British politics for four decades, marvels at the “spectacle of a Jewish homosexual leading an Islamist Party.” The Greens have endured a stream of antisemitism scandals.Lord Roberts next casts his gaze to the other surging faction — Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which won 1,450 council seats in local elections last month. Mr. Farage, Baron Roberts says, was an antisemite at school — Mr. Farage has denied these accusations as “made up fantasies” — and Lord Roberts acknowledges that he has outgrown that prejudice but worries that some of Mr. Farage’s candidates come from an “ethno-nationalist” strain.While Lord Roberts allows that Reform’s growing strength is no mirage, he wonders if it is something like a “fever dream” given that some of the party’s candidates are “strange and weird.” He cites their views on economics — Mr. Farage has at times campaigned on nationalizing British Steel, a position that Lord Roberts judges would have “horrified” Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Still, he could see Britons giving this “party of misfits” a chance to govern.That amenability is due, Lord Roberts reckons, to the “utter collapse of the Labour Party.” Sir Keir Starmer has, the historian contends, made political “U-turns” on some 16 policy issues and has been bedeviled by the lingering fallout over the influence of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, a deceased figure who nevertheless remains “epicentral” to British politics. Epstein, he notes, “can make or break political careers here.”Sir Keir, Lord Roberts alleges, claims to be “whiter than white” with regards to personal probity but had his “luxury eyewear” paid for — to the tune of £2,485 — by a Labour peer, Lord (Waheed) Alli. Meanwhile, Sir Keir has backed down on efforts to tame what Lord Roberts calls “outlandish welfare benefits” and taken a series of anti-Israel positions which have incensed Jerusalem and have “not been enough to appease the Islamists.”Lord Roberts chaired the UK-Israel All-Party Parliamentary Group, which last year released the “7 October Parliamentary Commission Report,” also known as the “Roberts Report.” He writes in his introduction to the 318-page dossier that “Holocaust denial took a few years to take root in pockets of society, but on 7 October 2023 it took only hours for people to claim that the massacres in southern Israel had not taken place.”The report documents how “nearly 1,200 innocent people were indeed murdered by Hamas and its allies, and very often in scenes of sadistic barbarism not seen in world history since the Rape of Nanjing in 1937.” Lord Roberts tells the Sun that the committee “wanted to memorialize everyone ” who was slain. The World Jewish Congress calls the démarche the “most comprehensive investigation to date.” Lord Roberts next turns his attention to his own Conservatives whose leader, Kemi Badenoch has, he asserts, “managed to lay strong blows on the prime minister” with her virtuosic performances in parliament at Prime Minister’s Questions. Still, the Tories ceded hundreds of seats in last month’s elections, and the British electorate appears little inclined to lift them back up after their 14 years in power ended in 2024’s defeat.Lord Roberts lays a heavy helping of blame for that outcome on the Conservatives’ “moving too far to the left on immigration.” Now, though, Lord Roberts insists that one cannot slide “a piece of paper between” Ms. Badenoch and Mr. Farage when it comes to immigration policy. The conservatives, though, suffer from a credibility deficit on the issue. Britain counts 44,000 irregular arrivals in the past year, a 14 percent increase from the year prior.Still, Lord Roberts contends that the Conservatives are the only party that is both “pro-Jewish and pro-Israel.” He lauds the stance against antisemitism taken by King Charles III, who still keeps in a royal drawer a silver yarmulke emblazoned with the coat of arms of the Prince of Wales that he once was. Lord Roberts argues that the king, who is “great personal friends” with the Jewish historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, is just hitting his stride at the age of 77.Lord Roberts is less sanguine in respect of the British government’s decision, executed last month, to remove the final 92 hereditary peers from the House of Lords. Lord Roberts, who has sat in the Lords since 2022, calls that expungement the “severing of a golden thread” in what Shakespeare called the “sceptered isle.” He laments how peers whose “families have gone back 800 years have been chucked out.”None of the Lords, Lord Roberts explains, is democratically elected, so what makes Sir Keir’s judgment about who should serve more enlightened than, say, that of Queen Elizabeth I, or Victoria, or King Charles II, all of whom appointed hereditary peers? The culling that was completed by Sir Keir was first begun by Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1999. Lord Roberts postulates that Mr. Blair, in the days after 9/11, approached Churchillian stature.The rest of the residents of 10 Downing Street since the Iron Lady have been, Lord Roberts estimates, “Lilliputian.” He cites Britain’s meager spending on defense — now at a little more than two percent of gross domestic product — and insists that it should scrape four percent. Meanwhile, Communist China is “adding more fleets than the entire British Navy every year. We must spend more on our own defense.”When the Sun asks Lord Roberts about how he envisions relations between London and Brussels, he points to President Trump’s lifting of whiskey tariffs with the United Kingdom after King Charles’s visit in April. For that manner of spontaneous bilateral diplomacy, Lord Roberts reasons, you need “a royal family and Brexit.”The Sun followed up with Lord Roberts following the postponement, for “security reasons,” of a lecture at the British Museum intended to cover “Ancient Israel and Judah.” Lord Roberts wrote via email of the importance of asserting the “Jews’ continuous existence in the Holy Land for 35 centuries.” He added that the “museum should have called in the Army to protect the exhibition sooner than bowing to terrorist threats.”

Andrew Roberts: Britain, Amid a Ferocity of Antisemitism Unmatched Since 1930s, Languishes Under ‘Lilliputian’ Leaders

Andrew Roberts: Britain, Amid a Ferocity of Antisemitism Unmatched Since 1930s, Languishes Under ‘Lilliputian’ Leaders

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