The canary is dying and we are discussing food prices.

“Where is racial hatred coming from?” An audience member on Question Time put the question to Rachel Millward, deputy leader of the Green Party. He was persistent. Impressively so, given the usual selection criteria for that studio audience, which tends to favour the sort of metropolitan milque toast mildness that regards robust or right wing opinions as a social disease.

She didn’t know what to say. You could see the cogs turning. She knew precisely what the question meant. She knew what the truthful answer is. But she couldn’t find a way to say it. It was too soon, too dangerous, too likely to crack the precarious Green-Islamist alliance that keeps her party’s activist base intact. And frankly it would require more courage and honesty than she possesses. She looked to Fiona Bruce. Then looked again. You could almost see the mental SOS signals being transmitted silently across the studio. And then, with what one can only describe as breathtaking intellectual gymnastics, she leapfrogged clean over the truth and landed somewhere in the vicinity of the supermarket aisle. Racial hatred, she ventured, is caused by “rip-off Britain.”

I don’t know about Rachel, but when I get my credit card out at the Lidl checkout, I have never once thought about stabbing a Jew in the face.

On Wednesday the 29th of April, two Jewish men — one aged 34, one aged 76 — were stabbed on a north London street outside a synagogue in Golders Green. The attacker, a 45-year-old Somali-born “British national” Essa Suleiman (“British national” is an important detail according to all media coverage), had already been referred to Prevent, the government’s counter-extremism programme, in 2020. That referral was closed the same year.

The thug refused to drop the knife and continued to resist after being tasered by the police. He was eventually disarmed with the assistance of volunteer from a local Jewish community security team.

Of course it was only a matter of time before someone turned on the police officers and implied they’d used excessive force.

And of course it was Owen Jones and Zack Polanski.

Polanski, now leader of the Green Party and apparently unencumbered by basic political judgement, retweeted a post describing the officers as repeatedly kicking “a mentally ill man in the head when he was already incapacitated”. The Metropolitan Police released bodycam footage showing otherwise. The footage shows a man holding a knife, advancing on officers, tasered and still struggling. The Met issued a statement: their officers “confronted a man they believed to be a terrorist, who refused to show his hands, who was violent, and who continued to pose a clear threat. Using only their training, courage and tasers, they detained him while he continued to try to attack and stab them. This took true courage.”

One imagines that most British people would have been quite content had the officers put a bullet in the dangerous stabber’s head rather than a boot. He got off lightly. What would Zack and Owen have preferred? A ticking off over tea and a scone? A referral to a diversity workshop?

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What would you do if someone was actively stabbing people in a Jewish neighbourhood, carrying a blade, pursuing victims down the street, refusing to drop the knife? The answer should be simple: you would use reasonable force to stop him. That is what the police did. Thanks to left-wing agitators — from Lord Hermer to Zack Polanski — who appear to harbour a profound contempt for our country and the institutions that keep it barely functioning, there will come a point where no decent man or woman is willing to serve in the police or the armed forces. And who could blame them.

Then come the platitudes.

Keir Starmer said the attack was “deeply concerning” and “utterly appalling”. He called it “an affront to British values”. He visited Golders Green and was heckled by a crowd chanting “Keir Starmer, Jew harmer.” He promised £25 million for synagogue and community protection — a platitude dressed up as action, that neglects to name and confront the danger.

Platitudes from the likes of Zarah Sultana, Zack Polanski, Mothin Ali — the self-declared anti-Zionists inside progressive politics — were deeply unpalatable because they are part of the problem. Their anti-Zionism smells like anti-semitism to the rest of us.

The Chief Rabbi has said that words of condemnation are no longer sufficient. He is right. The Home Secretary has called antisemitism “an emergency”. The phrase is apt, but we should be shamed it has taken this long to arrive at it.

So what would be enough?

Ban the hate marches. Personally, I care more about the safety of British Jews and the preservation of this country’s historic values than about the right of Islamist sympathisers and useful idiots to parade through London on a regular basis. At the very least, ban antisemitic and violent rhetoric at demonstrations, and enforce it with the same rigour applied to any other hate crime.

Crack down on extremist mosques. Develop a muscular and unapologetic response to those who preach violence in this country.

Stop the boats. And halt the mass, uncontrolled immigration that no British government has been honest with its people about.

And reinvent Prevent, or abolish it. In its current form it might more accurately be called Permit. The very man who stabbed two Jews in Golders Green had been referred to it six years earlier. The file was closed. At some point we might want to ask serious questions about what the programme actually does. Prevent seems more interested in who is reading Lord of the Rings than in stopping violent Islamists in their tracks.

Jews are the canary in the coalmine. They always have been.

Between the 1940s and the 1970s, almost 900,000 Jews were expelled or fled from Arab and Muslim-majority countries — Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Lebanon, Morocco, Iran — communities that had existed for thousands of years. Now it is estimated that only around 15,000 remain.

If current trends continue, we could hypothesise that the same process is underway in Britain. The Jewish community here numbers perhaps 300,000. It is a community now afraid to walk to synagogue, to send children to school, to put a mezuzah on the front door. The victim of the Golders Green attack, speaking from his hospital bed, said he was alive by a miracle. His community, he said, was frightened. That is not the language of free people in a functioning liberal democracy.

And after the Jews? Look to Egypt, where Coptic Christians face kidnapping, forced conversion, and arson on their churches. Or perhaps to Iraq, where the Christian population has collapsed from roughly 1.2 million in 2003 to around 120,000 today. How about Syria, where Christians numbered 1.5 million before 2011 and have since been reduced to perhaps 300,000. The pattern is not subtle although Rachel Millward might have an explanation that involves the price of hummus.

And like Millward, much of the political class send silent SOS signals and talk about food prices or the far right. And so it will continue, until something far worse than what happened in Golders Green makes the platitudes impossible to sustain.

If you cannot name the danger, you cannot face the danger. The canary is dying and we are discussing food prices.