It took the stabbing of two Jews in Golders Green to bring Arts Council England’s decade of funding hate to a close. On Tuesday, Keir Starmer criticised the Arts Council (ACE) for funding organisations that promote the work of ‘anti-Semitic artists’. The Prime Minister also promised to force the body to ‘suspend, withdraw and claw back’ money from organisations that have platformed anti-Semitism. 

It’s nice that Starmer has woken up to the fact Britain’s main arts and culture grant provider is using taxpayer money to fund hate. But one does have to ask where he’s been for the last decade?

British Jews will remember when ACE awarded £14,000 of funding to a Palestinian theatre group in 2015 to put on The Siege, a polemic glorifying the actions of Hamas terrorists during the Second Intifada? ACE did nothing when the play’s co-director, Zoe Lafferty, said that ‘to have to engage in whether Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Brigade are terrorists is the wrong question to ask’? 

One does have to ask where Keir Starmer has been for the last decade?

One does have to ask where Keir Starmer has been for the last decade?

More recently, and during Starmer’s tenure as Prime Minister, ACE funded the Lakes International Comic Arts Festival, which invited Mohammad Sabaaneh to co-curate an exhibition on Palestinian comic-book art. Sabaaneh’s work as a cartoonist includes depictions of Israel as an octopus throttling the world, a Jewish-looking man nailing Christ (wearing a keffiyeh) to the cross, and a Jewish concentration camp internee transforming into an Israeli settler. ACE told journalists at the time that the onus was not on it to do anything about Sabaaneh’s scrawls because it is ‘not a regulator’. The government did nothing to intervene.

While activist artists have been churning out anti-Semitic bilge with ACE funding, Jews have been forced out of England’s culture sector. A report by Freedom in the Arts published this month charts how Jewish artists have been subjected to a wave of boycotts since the 7........

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