Stephen Pollard

What do Ireland and Spain have in common? This week, the answer is Jews. On Monday, Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, came out with a truly bonkers – bonkers shocking, that is, rather than bonkers amusing – statement while announcing sanctions against Israel. Sánchez was angry that he couldn’t nuke the Jews (sorry, Israel): “Spain, as you know, doesn’t have nuclear bombs, aircraft carriers, or large oil reserves. We alone can’t stop the Israeli offensive. But that doesn’t mean we won’t stop trying. Because there are causes worth fighting for, even if winning them isn’t in our sole power.” Such a shame. If only Spain had nuclear weapons, then it could have done even better than Hitler and wiped out the 7.4 million Israeli Jews.

If you’re a Brit who doesn’t hate Jews – a smaller number than you might think – then you may be surprised by a poll published over the weekend by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, to coincide with its protest march through London. The CAA’s YouGov poll found that the number of people who admitted – perhaps a better word is boasted – they hate Jews has doubled since 2021. The reaction to the Holocaust did not destroy Jew hate. It merely buried it They didn’t put it like that, of course, but it’s what they meant. Respondents were shown a dozen different statements, as prescribed in the ‘Generalised Antisemitism Scale’, half of which were straightforward examples of “Judeophobic antisemitism” and half “anti-Zionist antisemitism”.

It’s a strange feeling finding out that you have been part of a revolutionary group that secretly controls Britain and, er…didn’t realise it. For four years in the 1990s, I was the Research Director of the Fabian Society. It was a wonderful job, at a time when Labour under Tony Blair was open to new ideas and policies. As a Labour-affiliated, mildly left-of-centre organisation, the Fabians were very well placed. Earnest thinkers, networkers and youngsters finding their feet in politics all had a space in which they could come together and think about and discuss politics and ideas in an environment where questioning the received wisdom was the point, rather than a political crime.

The hoo-ha over free speech being trampled on has always seemed exaggerated. I earn my living through voicing my opinions, and not once have I ever felt unable to say exactly what I think – especially when that’s controversial or offends large numbers of people. It is terrible that Linehan should have had to go through this. But if it wakes more of us up, his arrest will have served our country well I am, of course, well aware that some people have had a very different experience – such as the comedy writer Graham Linehan, creator of Father Ted, who has robustly pointed out that biology means that men who identify as women are, nonetheless, still men. For that, his career was effectively ended in an industry that has long been in thrall to trans and other ideologies.

It’s rare that any government – not least Keir Starmer's – does something to which there can be no even vaguely arguable objection. Today’s announcement that the NHS will begin vaccinating all babies against chickenpox next year is a rare exception. The vaccine rollout should be welcomed by everyone. The only serious question that should be asked is why it has taken so long for us to seek to wipe out chickenpox The only serious question that should be asked is why it has taken so long for us to seek to wipe out chickenpox. The vaccine is 98 per cent effective and, if taken up sufficiently, chickenpox will simply no longer happen in Britain.

If, like me, you spend too much time on social media you’ll have noticed a recurring theme in recent days: horror at the phenomenon of flags with the cross of St George starting to appear across much of the country. That’s hardly a surprise; social media has always been awash with left-wing types, for whom patriotism is racism under a different name, and who seem to do nothing but parrot all the usual dull cliches. But today’s version of those cliches turns out to be interesting – because it reveals a double standard so jarring as to be off the scale.

When I learned that the Royal Opera House had booked Russian soprano Anna Netrebko to sing Tosca in the new production which opens its 2025/26 season next month (and, later in the season, Turandot), I felt a surge of anger. How could they be so callous, so blasé, about the boycott of Russian artists with close ties to the Kremlin. How shameful for Britain that our internationally renowned opera company should treat Ukraine with such contempt. And how damning that its decision to hire Netrebko should be subject to an open letter organised by Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s first deputy foreign minister, and signed by hundreds of Ukrainian writers and artists, British MPs and the likes of Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French public intellectual.

According to the National – a worrying phrase, I admit, given the Scottish newspaper’s obsessive adulation of anyone pro-Scottish independence and its obsessive hostility to anyone who opposes it – this weekend saw a Scottish Reform councillor share a platform with a member of a far-right group at a protest outside a Falkirk hotel housing asylum seekers. While Cllr Mackie-Brown may have been out of her depth and blindsided by what she heard, one might expect that Reform itself would have a ready-made response to such issues What is most interesting about this story is not the protest itself, or even the Reform councillor’s presence. It is the response of Reform to one of its councillors sharing a platform with this person and saying or doing nothing about it.

There have been some interesting takes on Saturday’s protest in London by supporters of Palestine Action. The police arrested 522 people for expressing their support for the organisation, which has been proscribed under the Terrorism Act. But shockingly, according to a social media post by German comedian Henning Wehn, those arrests include geography teachers. ‘I can’t believe the police are put in a situation where they have to arrest hundreds of harmless pensioners and geography teachers,’ he wrote. I have never previously encountered the argument that geography teachers should be exempt from terrorism laws.  But Herr Wehn has hit upon one truly absurd aspect to the protest, albeit unwittingly.

We often think of Sir Keir Starmer as the dull bureaucrat, all at sea in politics – a Prime Minister who is elevated from the concerns of so many of his colleagues, and who just can’t relate to them. Starmer is certainly a leader on the defensive: pushed around by his backbenchers, rather than the man who delivered a Labour landslide who has then plotted his government’s direction of travel. If Starmer is judged on his actions, a damning picture emerges of a man incapable of sticking to any one position But in any meaningful sense, the 'worthy but dull' caricature of the PM is plain wrong – and demonstrably so.

Two Jewish comedians have had shows cancelled by venues hosting the Edinburgh Fringe. Whistlebinkies told Rachel Creeger that she and her show Ultimate Jewish Mother were no longer welcome, while Philip Simon’s Jew-O-Rama, a rotating line-up of Jewish comedians, was also barred. Another venue, Banshee Labyrinth, followed suit, cancelling Simon’s solo show, Shall I Compere Thee in a Funny Way? It could hardly be more blatant: two Jews have been cancelled because they are Jewish The reason? 'Safety concerns' for staff. Those of us with the Jewish mothers of Creeger’s title can certainly understand why others might have concerns over our mental safety, but I don’t think that’s quite what the venues had in mind when they banned a Jewish son and a Jewish daughter.

This isn’t a sentiment you’ll have read much in recent weeks, given the BBC’s series of appalling misjudgements and editorial disasters. But here goes: Three cheers for the BBC. Its critics are completely wrong and its decision making is spot on. The BBC is quite right. The party conferences don’t need the broadcast army of hacks they’ve always had To be clear, I’m not referring to its coverage of Bob Vylan at Glastonbury, the Gaza documentary narrated by the son of a Hamas minister or the BBC’s sacking of the two Masterchef presenters. I’m talking about something it has actually got right – but for which it is nonetheless being lambasted: the decision not to decamp its entire political team, and all its political programmes, to this year’s party conferences.

For any Jew – or anyone who is alive to Jew hate – a report from the commission on anti-Semitism to be published tomorrow will make for uneventful reading. That is no slur on the report or its authors. The Board of Deputies of British Jews asked Lord Mann, the Labour peer who is the government’s anti-Semitism adviser (incongruously often described as the ‘anti-Semitism Tsar’) and Penny Mordaunt, the former Conservative cabinet minister, to look at the state of anti-Semitism in the UK today. John Mann and Penny Mordaunt have done Jews and those who care about Jew hate a great service Their findings have already made front page news, even before the report has been officially published.

There could be no more deliciously appropriate start to the new party supposedly co-led by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, than the news that the ex-Labour leader is said to be 'furious and bewildered' that it was launched without him even knowing that he is a member of the party, let alone that he is its leader. Although I’m not sure it is really news that Jeremy Corbyn – who has yet to comment on the new party – is either furious or bewildered, since he has spent his entire career being both.