The ‘anti-Zionist’ inquisition comes for Matt Lucas

Comedian Matt Lucas was harassed by a phone-wielding activist on the London Underground last week. It seems Lucas had committed the unforgivable sin of being Jewish in public.

Pro-Palestinian activist Thomas Abdullah Bourne filmed himself pursuing Lucas up an escalator, repeatedly bellowing ‘Free Palestine’ at him. Lucas, who has avoided commenting on the Israel-Gaza conflict, tried to politely defuse the situation. It made no difference. Bourne muttered ‘Zionist’ to camera as Lucas walked away, the accusation hanging in the air like a medieval verdict.

Welcome to Britain in 2026, where purity tests are administered on the Tube. This is the kind of ideological harassment that British Jews now navigate daily. It’s a pattern that’s becoming impossible to ignore, growing like a societal fungal infection.

Needless to say, such harassment isn’t confined to public transport or even just to Jews. It’s coming to all of our doorsteps, too. Do you hate Jews enough? Some people want to check, and they could be knocking on your door next.

Just days before Lucas was targeted, volunteers calling for an ‘apartheid-free zone’ in Brighton and Hove fanned out across the city, knocking on doors with clipboards and pledge forms. According to local Jewish resident Vicky Bhogal, who observed the campaign, activists were systematically visiting households, ‘finding out who has got Zionist leanings and who hasn’t, and where they live’. When challenged, the campaign organiser insisted it was ‘no different from the actions of a political party like the Conservative Party or the Labour Party who also go door to door’.

This comparison is, of course, obscene. Political canvassers don’t demand ideological loyalty oaths. They don’t ask you to publicly renounce a foreign nation. They don’t create lists marking who passes the test and who fails.

Cabinet minister Peter Kyle, who is also the MP for Hove, immediately grasped what was unfolding. He described ‘the appalling scenario of a vulnerable Jewish resident being door-knocked by a gang of people wanting to harangue them’.

The door-knocking campaigns and Tube confrontations share the same DNA. Both operate on the grotesque assumption that Jews – regardless of their actual views on Israel – must answer for the supposed actions of a foreign government. And everyone else must publicly declare where they stand, too. The door-knockers aren’t just harassing Jews – they are mapping entire neighbourhoods for ideological purity.

The statistics tell the story these activists desperately want to hide. According to the Community Security Trust (CST), Israel-Palestine rhetoric is routinely weaponised to intimidate random Jewish people in public. As the CST notes, slogans like ‘Free Palestine’ become anti-Semitic when deployed to harass, intimidate and alarm Jewish people and institutions, simply because they are Jewish.

That’s what happened to Matt Lucas. He wasn’t challenged because of anything he had said or done. He was challenged because he had the temerity to exist as a Jew in public space.

The Brighton door-knockers predictably insist they’re ‘not anti-Semitic, but anti-Zionist’, as if the semantic gymnastics provide moral cover. But when your campaign involves compiling lists of residents based on their presumed views about the world’s only Jewish State, you’ve crossed a line that should horrify anyone with even a cursory understanding of 20th-century history. Similar ‘boycott’ campaigns in both Europe and the Middle East were followed by the wiping out of entire Jewish populations. It’s a familiar reality for Jews, so we recognise it when it arrives in British cities carrying clipboards.

It is chilling how institutions bend to these demands. Sussex Police initially saw no problem with activists compiling neighbourhood lists of suspected Zionists. They only reversed course after sustained pressure from Peter Kyle and others. Green MP Sian Berry wrung her hands about the tactic being ‘confrontational’, while rushing to assure everyone the door-knockers were ‘well intentioned’. Her colleague, Carla Denyer, Green MP for Bristol Central, dispensed with even that fig leaf. She joined a similar door-knocking campaign herself in Bristol, and proudly signed its pledge to boycott Israeli goods.

When elected officials participate in campaigns that leave Jewish constituents feeling unsafe in their own neighbourhoods, and police forces need to be arm-twisted into recognising obvious harassment, we’re witnessing the normalisation of something profoundly ugly. This is a worldview that demands public declarations of political allegiance as the price of acceptance. That sees Jews not as individuals but as collectively accountable to a righteous group of activists. When stripped of its ‘progressive’ veneer, it is indistinguishable from age-old anti-Jewish racism.

Matt Lucas kept his dignity on that escalator, but he shouldn’t have had to. No British Jew should have to navigate public transport wondering if they’ll be the next person filmed for an ideological litmus test. No Jewish family should open their door to find activists with clipboards asking them to renounce Israel.

This is what the new inquisition looks like. It comes with clipboards instead of torches, and the show trial now takes place on Instagram. But it’s the same question Jews have been asked for centuries: do you really belong with us? And in Britain in 2026, that question should have no place at all.

Alex Hearn is director of Labour Against Anti-Semitism.