Met Chief: British Jews Not Safe in London Amid Antisemitism Crisis

The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, told MPs on the Commons home affairs select committee on Wednesday that "British Jews are not currently safe in their capital city", framing the past six weeks as a "sustained period of attack" on Jewish Londoners. The Met's counter-terrorism command is running 11 investigations off the back of the assaults; 35 people have been arrested, 10 have been charged and one has been convicted. The cases span an arson attack on a Hatzola ambulance on March 23, nine further arson or attempted-arson incidents, the April 29 Golders Green terror stabbing in which two British Jews were attacked on the street, and a separate inquiry into discarded items found in Kensington Gardens. The disclosure lands alongside a May 10 arrest by counter-terror officers of a 45-year-old man and a 52-year-old woman on suspicion of conspiracy to commit arson at the former East London Central Synagogue, and a Sunday rally outside Downing Street that drew thousands under the "Standing Strong: Extinguish Antisemitism" banner.

The Government has now raised the UK's national terror threat level from substantial to severe. The Met has stood up a Community Protection Team of about 100 officers initially focused on antisemitic threats, funded from an £18-million slice of a £25-million Whitehall package that has already paid for 1,000 additional officer shifts a week. London recorded 140 antisemitic offences in April — the highest monthly total since Met recording rules changed in March 2024 — and the force has made around 50 arrests across linked hate-crime probes, with eight people charged.

King Charles travelled to Golders Green on Thursday and met two of the men stabbed on April 29: Shloime Rand, 34, and Moshe Ben Baila, 76, also known as Norman Shine, at the Jewish Care charity centre. Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis and Rowley joined the meeting. Shine, stabbed in the neck outside a bus stop, said the King "didn't let go of my hand … he is the king but I felt a genuine warmth and concern". Charles told well-wishers, "it's a dangerous world isn't it?", and met members of Shomrim, the volunteer Jewish community police force that helped respond on April 29; he was presented with a traditional loaf of challah outside Grodz bakery on Golders Green Road and spoke briefly with children from a local primary school. Prince Harry separately published an essay in the New Statesman calling the rise in antisemitism "deeply troubling", explicitly distinguishing legitimate protest against Israeli state action from hostility toward Jewish communities, and calling for unity against both antisemitism and anti-Muslim hate.

The alleged Golders Green attacker, Essa Suleiman, 45, remains in custody on three counts of attempted murder. Police allege he tried to kill a friend of 20 years, Ishmail Hussein, at Hussein's Southwark home before stabbing the two men in the street the same day. Suleiman was born in Somalia and came to the UK legally as a child in the 1990s; he was referred to the Prevent counter-extremism programme in 2020, but the case was closed in the same year.

The economic story moved in a different direction. The Office for National Statistics put first-quarter 2026 GDP growth at 0.6 percent — the fastest in the G7 — with March output up 0.3 percent against an economist consensus expecting a 0.2 percent contraction. Chancellor Rachel Reeves used the figures to argue Labour has "the right economic plan" and warned against "plunging the country into chaos" amid party leadership tensions. City economists cautioned that the war's full hit is yet to land: the consumption-and-supply-side shock from the Iran conflict and the resulting energy spike are expected to bite in Q2, with several houses now penciling in a mild technical recession before year-end.

The leadership tensions broke into the open on Thursday. Angela Rayner — the former deputy prime minister who resigned the deputy leadership last autumn after the launch of an HMRC investigation into unpaid property tax — told the Guardian and ITV News that HMRC had cleared her of wrongdoing. The clearance removes the only formal obstacle to her returning to frontline politics; Health Secretary Wes Streeting is widely expected to launch a leadership challenge against Prime Minister Keir Starmer as soon as Thursday, and Reeves's "chaos" line is being read in Westminster as a pre-emptive shot at any pre-conference move.

Two separate court rulings filled out the day. At Belfast Crown Court, a non-jury trial convicted Charlie Love, 31, of attempted murder of two police officers in a dissident republican bomb attack in Strabane in November 2022; the judge found his DNA on the trigger mechanism and command wire and concluded he was intimately involved in planning and executing the roadside IED, with additional convictions for causing an explosion likely to endanger life and possessing explosives. In east London, Abdul Halim Khan, 54, a former imam, was sentenced to life imprisonment with a 20-year minimum for 21 counts of rape, sexual assault and child sexual offences against seven victims between 2005 and 2014; the judge noted his abuse of religious authority and the threats of "black magic" he used to silence women and girls in the Bangladeshi Muslim community.