LONDON: Britain's failure to swiftly ban large-scale pro-Palestinian demonstrations following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel contributed to rising antisemitism in the country, former Home Secretary Suella Braverman has said.
In an interview with The Times of Israel, Braverman, who defected earlier this year to Nigel Farage's right-wing Reform UK party, also branded then-prime minister Rishi Sunak a "coward" for not backing her hardline position on the weekly marches that repeatedly brought central London to a standstill. "The marches now have been going on for three years. There's no sign of them really abating .. because they know that they've beaten the authorities," she said, adding that antisemitism had become "normalized and acceptable, almost fashionable."
The demonstrations have at times featured antisemitic chants, expressions of support for Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, and comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany. The Community Security Trust, which monitors antisemitism and protects Jewish institutions, recorded 1,926 antisemitic incidents in the first half of 2026, the second-highest six-month total it has ever reported. Braverman linked the failure to act in 2023 to the Islamist terror attack at Manchester's Heaton Park synagogue in October that killed two congregants, saying: "The two are connected."
In her newly published memoir, "Patriot: Empire, Betrayal and Hope," Braverman describes her clashes with Metropolitan Police chief Sir Mark Rowley, whom she accuses of "implacable resistance" to cracking down on the marches. She writes that after failing to persuade Rowley to request a ban, which only the police can initiate, she appealed to Sunak, believing prime ministerial intervention could have been "determinative." Sunak, who she says appeared "tired" and "irritated" by the issue, refused. He was "a coward" who "wanted to sit on the fence," she said. Sunak fired her in November 2023 after she publicly attacked the police's handling of the protests.
Braverman said she was alarmed by the tone of the protests from the start, noting the first took place on October 8, before all the victims had been identified and before Israel had considered military action. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign submitted its first protest application to police in the early afternoon of the day of the Hamas-led invasion itself. While insisting she supports freedom of expression and assembly, she said the right "is not an absolute right. It needs to be peaceful," and cited chants of "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," which she called "racist, hateful and violent," along with chants of "jihad," the scaling of war memorials and the glorification of Hamas. In November 2023, polling found 90 percent of British Jews would avoid a city center during a major anti-Israel demonstration.
Her disputes with Sunak extended beyond the marches. Braverman said she extracted a commitment to proscribe Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps when she endorsed his leadership bid, but he ultimately sided with a Foreign Office she described as "implacably opposed," and the IRGC was never banned. Action only came in June 2026, when Keir Starmer's Labour government amended the National Security Act to designate the IRGC under new powers against state actors.
Braverman described Starmer, who was ousted by his own MPs this summer, as a "moderating force" against Labour's "antisemitic elements," but accused him of imposing a partial arms embargo on Israel in September 2024 and recognizing a Palestinian state a year later to shore up his position. His successor as prime minister, Andy Burnham, has "chosen a side" with "a stronger position of opposition to Israel," she said. She also branded the government's new visa route for Palestinians "a disaster" and accused Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband of "shaking hands with people who are our enemies," referring to his meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi at the United Nations last month.
Braverman said Reform UK, despite its own high-profile racism scandals, is "steadfastly a friend of Israel," pointing to the launch of Reform Friends of Israel and the Reform Jewish Alliance. She pledged that a Reform government would take a "tougher approach to the policing of protests," ban the Muslim Brotherhood, and arrest and where possible deport extremist preachers. Antisemitism, she said, would be treated "in the same way other forms of racism are treated."
Braverman, whose husband Rael is Jewish and has family in Israel, said her support for the country dates to a childhood in northwest London among Jewish friends. Her book recounts waking on October 7 to the unfolding Hamas onslaught and thinking of Kfir Bibas, the nine-month-old hostage later murdered in captivity, who was about the same age as her own son. Visiting Israel after leaving government, she said, changed her: "For the first time, I really appreciated the heroism of the Israeli people .. It was quite a big lesson in what patriotism looks like."
