Severe - The Government's Own Word for It.
Britain’s terror threat is now at its second-highest level. Two Jewish men were stabbed on a London high street this week. And every politician now claiming to be horrified has spent two and a half years watching this coming.
Severe
That is the official word. Not chosen by a tabloid. Not deployed by an inflammatory commentator. Not hyperbole from a frightened community leader. It is the word the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre — the body within MI5 responsible for assessing threats to the United Kingdom — used in its formal statement this morning to describe the level of terrorist threat now facing this country.
Severe means an attack is “highly likely in the next six months.” It is the second-highest rung on a five-point scale. The last time the threat level sat at severe for any sustained period was between 2014 and February 2022, the years of Islamic State and the Manchester Arena bombing and Borough Market and Westminster Bridge.
We are now back there. Officially. Today.
The government’s own statement, posted to gov.uk this morning, makes plain that the increase is not solely a response to Wednesday’s stabbing in Golders Green. It is, in the carefully worded language of Whitehall, a response to a threat that “has been rising for some time.” Note that phrase. Hold it in your hand and feel the weight of it. For some time.That is not the language of surprise. That is the language of an admission long deferred.
What Happened on a North London High Street
Let us, as ever, begin with what is known. Because what is known is shocking enough without embellishment.
On Wednesday afternoon, in the heart of Golders Green — a north London neighbourhood that has been an epicentre of British Jewish life since before most of us were born — a man ran down the high street with a knife and tried to stab anyone he believed to be Jewish.
He attacked Moshe Shine, a 76-year-old man. He attacked Shloime Rand, who is 34. Both were treated at the scene by Hatzola — the volunteer Jewish ambulance service whose vehicles were torched on this very same patch of London just five weeks ago. Both were taken to hospital. Both, mercifully, survived.
The attacker, a 45-year-old man, was eventually subdued by volunteers from Shomrim, the Jewish community patrol group, before being tasered and arrested by police. He attempted to stab the officers arresting him. He has been charged with attempted murder. The Metropolitan Police declared the incident a terrorist attack at 3:18 in the afternoon.
A group calling itself Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia — the Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right — has claimed responsibility. The same group claimed responsibility for the Hatzola ambulance arsons in March. The Wall Street Journal has reported, citing investigators, that the organisation is most likely a fictitious construct created by Iran to provide its operations with plausible deniability. Israeli intelligence describes it as having suspected links to an Iranian proxy. The same name has surfaced in connection with attacks on Jewish targets in Belgium and the Netherlands.
We are, in other words, looking at what appears to be a coordinated campaign of state-sponsored terrorism against British Jews on British streets. The Iran war began on the 28th of February. The arsons followed in March. The stabbings followed in April. The pattern is not subtle. It does not require being Sherlock Holmes to identify.
And yet, until this morning, the official posture of the British state was that the threat level was substantial. Not severe. Substantial. The same threat level under which we had been operating in February 2022, when the world had not yet seen the Hamas attacks of October 7th, when the Iran war had not begun, and when Britain had not yet endured a fatal antisemitic terrorist atrocity on its own soil for the first time in living memory.
The Manchester Attack They Want You to Have Forgotten
It is worth pausing to remember what happened in Manchester six months ago, because the political class would prefer that you did not.
On the 2nd of October 2025 — Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar — a man named Jihad Al-Shamie drove a car at speed into the main gate of Heaton Park Synagogue. He emerged from the vehicle armed with two knives and wearing what appeared to be a suicide belt. Two men, Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby, were killed. Three others were seriously injured.
It was the first fatal antisemitic terrorist attack on British soil since the Community Security Trust began keeping records in 1984. Take that in. Forty-two years of recorded data. The first murder of a Jew on these streets, for being a Jew, in all of that time.
It happened six months ago.
The threat level, after Manchester, was not raised. Six months passed. Four ambulances burned in March. Synagogues were targeted. The threat level was not raised. A man went hunting Jews in Golders Green on Wednesday afternoon. The threat level, finally, was raised.
This is the timeline. It is not in dispute. It is sitting on the gov.uk website as you read this.
The Numbers the Government Has Had on Its Desk
The Community Security Trust — which, it bears emphasising, is not a partisan organisation but the principal charity charged with the security of British Jewish life — published its annual report in February. The figures it contains have been available to ministers, civil servants, and any journalist who could be bothered to read a press release.
There were 3,700 antisemitic incidents recorded in the United Kingdom in 2025. That is the second-highest annual total ever recorded. It is a 4% increase on 2024. The monthly average — 308 incidents — is exactly twice the monthly average that prevailed in the year before the Hamas attacks of October 7th, 2023. For the first time in the CST’s existence, every single calendar month in 2025 saw more than 200 anti-Jewish hate incidents reported.
In the London Borough of Barnet — within which Golders Green sits — 325 antisemitic incidents were recorded in just the first six months of 2025. That is roughly 1.8 incidents every single day, in a single London borough, against a community of perhaps 60,000 people.
These are not figures from a campaign group. These are figures from the body the British state itself relies on to monitor and protect Jewish communal life in this country. And they have been on the desks of the Home Office for months. Ms Mahmood, the Home Secretary, today described antisemitism as “an emergency” and “the top pressing issue in relation to security.” One is forced to wonder when, precisely, it stopped being the second-most pressing issue and became the first. The data has been screaming at this government since the day it took office.
The Visit That Was Not Welcome
The Prime Minister travelled to Golders Green on Thursday morning. He was met by a crowd of approximately one hundred residents holding signs that read: “Keir Starmer, Jew Harmer.”
Take a moment to process that. The Jewish community of north London, having endured arson against their ambulances, the murder of two of their own in Manchester, and now a knife attack in their own neighbourhood, did not greet the Prime Minister with gratitude. They greeted him with placards branding him a harmer of Jews. Whatever one makes of that characterisation — and there will be those who consider it harsh — the political reality is that a community in fear has reached the point of openly declaring that it does not believe its own Prime Minister to be on its side.
A British Jewish woman named Sophia Ziff, who told the BBC she leans politically to the left, said this: “I don’t know if I should be reconsidering where in the world I should go, because I don’t feel safe as a British Jew. I don’t feel safe. I do not feel supported.” She added, of the Prime Minister’s response: “I just feel like all the platitudes are like ‘thoughts and prayers’ and ‘so sorry’ and ‘horrific’ but what are you actually doing?”
That is a British citizen, in 2026, on national broadcast television, openly contemplating leaving her country because her religion has become a hazard. There is no spin that can soften that.
The Prevent File That Was Closed
There is one detail in this story that, in any properly functioning democracy, would be the lead item on every news bulletin tonight, and which is instead drifting somewhere in the middle of the coverage.
The man arrested in connection with Wednesday’s attack was referred to the Prevent counter-terrorism programme in 2020. His file was closed later that year. The Metropolitan Police have declined to explain why.
Prevent is the system. It is the architecture the British state has built — at considerable cost, over more than a decade — to identify individuals on a path toward radicalisation and steer them off it before they harm anybody. The man on Golders Green Road on Wednesday was not someone who slipped through the net. He was someone the net caught, looked at, and let go.
When the Prime Minister was asked, directly, whether the Prevent system needed to be reformed in light of this catastrophic failure, he said the government needed to be “open to learning any further lessons.” Further lessons. As though the lessons of Manchester, of the Reading park murders, of Sir David Amess, of the Liverpool Women’s Hospital bomber, of the Parsons Green attacker — all of whom had passed through Prevent in some fashion — had somehow already been digested and acted upon.
They had not. They have not. They will not be — not by this government, and probably not by the next.
The Marches That Will Continue
Kemi Badenoch, the Leader of the Opposition, called this week for a temporary suspension of the pro-Palestinian marches that have rolled through central London with metronomic regularity since October 2023. She is not the first to suggest it. Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s own former Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, said the marches had helped “incubate” antisemitism in this country. That is an extraordinary statement from a man who held one of the most senior advisory roles in the British counter-terrorism establishment.
The Prime Minister has refused to ban the marches. He has said instead that those who chant “Globalise the intifada” should be prosecuted. The slogan has been chanted in central London for two and a half years. The prosecutions have not, on any scale that matters, been forthcoming. There is a question — a perfectly polite, perfectly democratic question — about why a phrase that the Prime Minister himself describes as a call to terrorism against Jews has been permitted to ring across Whitehall on a near-weekly basis without legal consequence, while ordinary Britons have been arrested for tweets.
That question is not being put to the government with anything like the persistence it deserves. It will, of course, not be answered.
£25 Million
The government’s substantive policy response, announced this morning, is £25 million in additional funding for police patrols around synagogues, schools and Jewish community centres.
It is something. It is not, in the scheme of things, very much. £25 million is roughly what the Foreign Office spends on overseas hospitality and entertainment in an average year. It is a fraction of what is spent on protecting Members of Parliament. It works out at perhaps £80 per British Jew, before a single police officer has been deployed.
The figure tells you everything about the seriousness with which this government takes the emergency it has just declared. If the threat were genuinely as severe as the JTAC has now formally assessed it to be — and there is no good reason to doubt the JTAC — £25 million is not a response. It is a press release with a number attached.
There is an honest version of this morning’s announcement that no minister was prepared to give.
It would acknowledge that British Jews are now, by the assessment of the British government’s own intelligence agencies, living under a threat level that the rest of us were last asked to tolerate during the height of the Islamic State campaign in Europe. It would acknowledge that this threat has been building for years, that the warning signs were obvious, and that successive governments — including this one — have been more concerned with the political optics of confronting it than with the substance of doing so. It would acknowledge that the relationship between mass weekly demonstrations, the rhetorical climate they have produced, and the violent acts now being committed in their wake, is not a question that can be perpetually deferred.
That honest version was not on offer today. What was on offer was £25 million, a press conference, and a Prime Minister visibly surprised that the community he came to comfort did not, in fact, want to be comforted by him.
The threat level is severe. The government has admitted as much. Whether anything that follows from that admission will look remotely commensurate with the word itself remains, on the evidence of this morning, very much to be seen.
Sources include: GOV.UK — Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre Statement Community Security Trust.
