‘I was Jewish and crossing the street’: Campaigner criticises ‘outrageous’ reaction to antisemitism row
The campaigner at the centre of an antisemitism row with the Metropolitan Police has criticised “outrageous” comments made by a former senior officer who said he would have considered arresting him for assault.
Gideon Falter, the chief executive of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, spoke to Sky News’s Kay Burley at Breakfast after footage showed a police officer preventing him from crossing a road near a pro-Palestinian march in London because he was “openly Jewish”.
The officer also told Mr Falter, who was wearing a kippah skull cap near the march on Saturday 13 April, that he was “worried about the reaction to your presence”.
Mr Falter has called on Met Police chief Sir Mark Rowley to resign and accused the force of “victim-blaming” after the encounter.
Sky News understands Sir Mark will meet the home secretary today.
He also met a delegation from the Jewish community to discuss their concerns alongside other senior officers.
Following the meeting, the Community Security Trust said the Met representatives repeated their apologies and agreed to “consult more closely” with the Jewish community, including senior Jewish police officers, “to ensure greater cultural sensitivity in future communications”.
The statement said the groups would continue their dialogue with the police regarding the “cumulative impact of the repeated anti-Israel protests”.
“We urge the police and government to work together to find ways to limit this impact through reducing the number of protests, moving them to less disruptive locations and acting firmly and consistently whenever offences are committed by people on the demonstrations,” they added.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said he has confidence in Sir Mark but that he needs to rebuild “confidence and trust” with the Jewish community.
Retired senior officer defends Met’s response
Meanwhile, former Met Chief Superintendent Dal Babu said he has seen the full 13-minute video of the incident on Sky News and saw a “different encounter” to the one Mr Falter had described.
Mr Babu said that if he had been policing the march he would have considered arresting the campaigner for “assault on a police officer and a breach of the peace”.
Mr Falter said in response: “I think it’s a pretty outrageous thing to say, I think it’s a pretty outrageous thing to be giving any credence to.
“I was Jewish. I was crossing the street”.
Mr Falter added: “I did not assault a police officer. How on Earth can anybody say that? I’m quite clearly in the video trying to continue to walk where I was going.”
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New video of ‘openly Jewish’ row
Mr Babu later reaffirmed his view of the encounter and said the video shows Mr Falter pushing policing officers “out of the way” which amounts to “common assault”.
He also defended the police’s handling of the situation and said: “I think the police dealt with it and tried to be as sensitive as possible.
“I think the police officer was offering to take Mr Falter and his group to a place where they could cross more appropriately. Mr Falter was refusing to move and wanted to cross at that particular place against the march.”
Campaigner will walk near march again
The force apologised on Friday for using the term “openly Jewish”, but then had to apologise for their apology after suggesting opponents of pro-Palestinian marches “must know that their presence is provocative”.
The Met said in its initial apology that its aim was to keep people safe.
Mr Falter has said he is planning to go for a walk in the vicinity of a pro-Palestinian march again on Saturday 27 April, adding that he “should be allowed to do that”.
Earlier on the show, black journalist Seyi Rhodes said that although he wouldn’t want to, he would avoid a far-right march if he knew one was being held in a certain place in London.
Mr Falter said in response: “It is outrageous to put to me that the correct response of Jewish people to these marches, where we have seen such brazen antisemitism the whole time is to just stay away from them.”
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‘Time for Mark Rowley to go’
Falter insists he was not there to ‘counter-protest’
Ben Jamal, director of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, has said Mr Falter is wrong to have suggested he was “innocently going for a walk”.
“The reality was he came to the march with an entourage of four to five people and a film crew and sought to break through the stewards.
“He physically pushes himself past the police in order to walk in front of the march… he was trying to provoke a confrontation. That’s what happened.”
Mr Jamal accused the Campaign Against Antisemitism of “using the tactic of coming to the marches to provoke an incident so that they can say there are scenes of disorder and therefore the marches cannot go ahead”.
Mr Falter said he found Mr Jamal’s remarks to be “absolutely astonishing”.
He added: “I was not going to try and provoke something… what exactly does he think I’m trying to provoke by being ‘openly Jewish’?
“I was not there to counter-protest. I was not there with film crews or anything of the sort. I was simply Jewish in the vicinity of these marches.”
After counting more than two million votes cast in the English council elections, a provisional National Share Estimate shows the Conservatives on just 26% of the vote, a 19-point drop compared with the 2019 general election and one of its worst ever performances in any set of local elections.
Labour‘s vote rises from 33% in 2019 to 35% on the current estimate, after more than half the wards have now declared.
The Liberal Democrats are on 16%, an increase of five percentage points on the 2019 election. This follows a familiar pattern where the party does better in council elections than in parliamentary elections.
Local election results: Relief for Sunak in key mayoral race
Other parties, such as the Greens, Reform, and independents, are projected to be on 22%.
This figure assumes also that votes for the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales, places where no local elections took place, are unchanged from the previous election. The same condition applies to the 18 seats in Northern Ireland.
Assuming these changes in vote share occur uniformly across each of the newly drawn parliamentary constituencies in place for the next general election, Labour wins 294 seats and would overtake the Conservatives – but falls 32 seats short of gaining an overall majority.
The Conservatives fall from 372 seats on the new boundaries to just 242 seats, a projected loss of 130 seats. The Liberal Democrats rise from eight to 38 seats.
As is usual in such projections, there are individual constituencies where the count of local votes shows a party “winning” a constituency when the uniform swing suggests otherwise.
Two such examples are Aldershot and Plymouth Moor View, both of which fall to Labour when we aggregate local votes in wards lying within those constituencies.
Employing the same procedure, however, Labour’s seat tally suffers when local votes in constituencies such as Blackburn and Oldham West were “won” by independents when actual votes are counted.
Labour easily retains these constituencies when uniform swing is considered.
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The large vote for others highlights a growing tendency in local elections for some voters to support a range of smaller parties.
This year that tendency is exaggerated still further with the swing away from Labour towards independents in certain parts of the country.
UK
UK plans to ramp up weapons production for Ukraine and Western defence as Lord Cameron reveals envoy will oversee ‘national priority’
The UK will appoint a new envoy to oversee a plan to ramp up the production of weapons and ammunition, which is now a “national priority”, the foreign secretary has revealed.
Lord Cameron, speaking on a visit to Ukraine, also underlined the importance of supporting the Ukrainian war effort against Russia, warning that the world was at an “absolutely critical tipping point” and Kyiv must prevail or else Europe faced a “very dangerous future”.
However, he cautioned against an idea from French President Emmanuel Macron to consider sending NATO troops to Ukraine to join the fight if Russia’s Vladimir Putin achieves a breakthrough, saying that such a move would be a “dangerous escalation”.
“I don’t think it is right to have NATO soldiers killing Russian soldiers,” the foreign secretary said in an interview in the western city of Lviv on Friday, having met President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other top ministers in Kyiv on Thursday.
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Moscow rages over Cameron remarks
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, left, shakes hands with Lord Cameron this week. Pic: Ukrainian Presidential Press Office/AP
Lord Cameron made the two-day trip to reaffirm the UK’s commitment to Ukraine, which most recently includes a promise to transfer more of the British military’s own stockpiles of weapons, including precision-guided bombs and air defence missiles.
The UK has also promised at least £3bn worth of military assistance annually.
But Western nations are failing to deliver munitions to Ukraine’s frontline as quickly as Russia is rearming its military, with Russian troops gaining ground in the east in recent months.
President Putin put his economy on a war footing when he launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 – something NATO allies are only slowly starting to move towards.
Rishi Sunak said last week he would increase UK defence spending to 2.5% of national income by 2030 – claiming this equated to an additional £75bn in investment.
He also said he was putting the UK defence industry on a “war footing” and added £10bn of new funding would be dedicated to domestic munitions production over the next decade.
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‘We need to build up our own stocks’
Asked how Britain could force defence companies like BAE Systems, Thales and Babcock – that have to answer to their shareholders, not the government – to increase production lines at the required rate and scale without some kind of legislation to force them to act, Lord Cameron revealed the plan for a new envoy for defence production.
“There is a specific munitions strategy of £10bn which will do exactly what you are talking about – the ramping up of production,” he said.
“But crucially I think we can go further than that in terms of a specific defence envoy with the ability from the prime minister to go out and make sure we are doing those muti-year deals with the defence suppliers because we need not only to provide more weapons to Ukraine, we need to build up our own stocks.
“So this is very important, it is a national priority.
“The prime minister is giving the lead and I think the industry will respond.”
Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
Pushed on whether the new envoy – whose identity has not yet been revealed – would be the modern-day equivalent of someone like Lord Beaverbrook, who was tasked with expanding aircraft production during the Second World War, Lord Cameron said: “It is the 21st century so there won’t be a Lord Beaverbrook.”
But he signalled that the envoy’s ability to approach industry with a commitment to fund multi-year contracts for munitions would be key – and could also drive down cost.
“It is possible to go to the defence contractors and say to them: ‘You are not going to get the price you might have hoped for year after year after year because we are going to make a contract with you over the coming years to make sure we replenish our ammunition, our artillery, our long rage fires, our missiles’ – those crucial things vital for Ukraine but also vital for our own defence.”
As for why the government needed to appoint a specific envoy to this role, Lord Cameron said: “You need I think to have that direct line to the prime minister to make sure we are making this the national priority it clearly is.”
Cameron warns of ‘dangerous future’
Turning to the war in Ukraine, the foreign secretary said Europe faced “two futures” – one in which Ukrainian forces, backed by Western weapons, are able to push out the Russian invaders and secure what he called a “just peace”.
“That is a footing on which you can see great security and prosperity for us and for Europe,” he said.
But he warned: “A future in which Putin is successful and Ukraine is pushed back is I think a very dangerous future.”
Nations such as Moldova and even the NATO states of the Baltics would be worried that President Putin might turn his attention towards them next, Lord Cameron said.
In addition, the authoritarian regimes in Iran and China would be watching closely.
“I think we are at an absolutely crucial tipping point in global affairs,” Lord Cameron added.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has renewed his demand for Rishi Sunak to go to the polls after the prime minister suffered a by-election drubbing and bruising council losses across England.
But while Mr Sunak said the the grim early results were “disappointing” for the Conservatives, he insisted he was “focused completely on the job at hand” and is certain to seize on the party holding the Tees Valley mayoralty.
Sky News elections analyst Professor Michael Thrasher has warned the Conservatives could be on course for one of their worst-ever performances.
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The results as they come in
Pic: PA
Buoyed by council gains in key battleground areas like Hartlepool, Rushmoor in Hampshire, Redditch in the West Midlands and Thurrock in Essex, Sir Keir declared the “seismic win” for Labour in the Blackpool South by-election “a direct message to the prime minister”.
Highlighting the swing of 26.33% from the Tories in the Lancashire seat, the opposition leader told Sky News: “There’s no denying the mood of the country now is for change. And I think it’s for the prime minister to allow the country to express that change now in a general election.”
But speaking at a military base in North Yorkshire, Mr Sunak said: “Obviously it’s disappointing to lose good, hard-working Conservative councillors and I’m grateful to them for all their service in local government, keeping council tax low and delivering services for local people.”
He also stressed there were “lots of results to come”.
One of those was the Tees Valley mayoral contest, which saw Tory incumbent Ben Houchen re-elected in the face of a concerted Labour challenge.
The Conservative peer held the role with the a majority of 18,789 votes.
Speaking to Sky News earlier, Conservative Party chairman Richard Holden said it had been a “tough night”, but insisted that “when we’re facing those tough challenges we’ve got the right man for the job”.
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On the potential threat of Conservative MPs choosing to oust Mr Sunak, Mr Holden added: “Parliamentary colleagues need to look at this and see… and wait through the weekend as well.”
Mr Holden sought to highlight local issues at play, insisting the Blackpool South by-election took place in “particularly difficult” circumstances following the resignation of former Tory MP Scott Benton after a lobbying scandal.
Key results include:
- Labour won Rushmoor in Hampshire for the first time
- The party also claimed the council in general election bellwether Redditch
- Labour won Hartlepool council, regaining ground after a Westminster by-election disaster there in 2021
- Labour also won Thurrock, one of its top targets
- The Tories clung on by a single seat in Harlow, Essex – a council targeted by Sir Keir on the eve of polling
- Conservatives lost control of North East Lincolnshire
- Labour replace the Tories as the largest party on Peterborough Council
- Labour lost control in Oldham, which has a large Muslim population, amid anger over Labour’s stance on Gaza
- In Cumbria, a Labour police and crime commissioner was elected, at the expense of the Tories
- Labour also beat the Conservatives in the police and crime commissioner race in Avon and Somerset
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