By David W. Virtue, DD I davidvirtue2.substack.com I September 2, 2026
Britain’s new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham — who replaced Sir Keir Starmer in July after Starmer’s resignation — has left no doubt where his sympathies lie on Ukraine. On his first major trip abroad, standing before St. Sophia’s Cathedral in Kyiv on Ukraine’s Independence Day, Burnham vowed that Britain would go on supporting Kyiv despite what he called Russia’s outrageous threats, and compared Ukraine’s resistance to Britain’s own stand against Nazi Germany.
On the war the United States and Israel are waging against Iran, not a word. His silence was palpable.
England has traveled a long road — from the Balfour Declaration and Winston Churchill’s championing of a Jewish homeland to the present hour, when Jews in Britain’s great cities are harassed on the streets and a growing number are quietly weighing whether to leave for Israel. Like the Church of England, the nation is sliding toward irrelevance. Britain walked away from the European Union and its economy suffered for it. Millions have walked away from the Church of England because it offers them no message of salvation. Apathy reigns.
The sharpest political fault line is illegal immigration. Islamist hatred of Jews and a creeping Islamization now advance in what was once a proud Christian nation. Successive British governments looked away as the threat to British Jews grew, until wearing a yarmulke in public became an act of courage. (Only this week a Jewish orthopedist told me that her own son will not wear a yarmulke on the streets of Philadelphia — a measure of how far the same poison has spread on this side of the Atlantic.)
Migrant crossings dominate the national conversation. Traditional morality long ago dissolved; wokeism is the order of the day. The British public has lost faith in The Faith — presided over by a king who styles himself a defender of all faiths rather than the Faith once delivered to the saints.
The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks would be horrified at the turn his country has taken. That Jews should feel unwelcome in England is the kind of spectacle that would have gratified Joseph Goebbels and seemed to vindicate his propaganda machine. Sacks saw it coming. “The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews,” he warned. Antisemitism, he understood, is the early symptom of a civilization turning on itself — the first sign that a society has lost the capacity to make room for difference.
That hatred reached its apogee on Yom Kippur last year, when a man drove into the gates of the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Crumpsall, Manchester, and set upon worshippers with a knife on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Two men — Melvin Cravitz, 66, and Adrian Daulby, 53 — were murdered. Such an attack would have been unthinkable in Britain only a few years ago.
King Charles gave voice to the nation’s grief. In a message read at a memorial service this week he spoke of his shock and sorrow, said his visit to the synagogue in the aftermath had been heartbreaking, and confessed that the memory of the dead and injured remains “especially vivid in my mind.”
One can only measure how far England has fallen — from empire-builder and world power to a realm whose disgraced prince kept company with a pedophile financier.
Nor has the Mother Church covered herself in glory. The newly installed Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullally, spent five days in June on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where she met and praised Palestinian activists — several accused by Israel of links to terrorism — and cast their cause as “faithful resistance.” She allowed herself to be photographed praying in a Birzeit living room beneath a portrait of a former PLO spokesman implicated in the 1972 Munich massacre of Israeli athletes. The visit was one-sided enough to shock British Jewry.
The rupture deepened when the General Synod voted to “hear” Kairos II, a pro-Palestinian document freighted with hostility to Israel. England’s Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, was compelled to confront the archbishop face to face at Lambeth Palace, telling her plainly of the deep pain the Synod’s decision had inflicted on the Jewish community. Mullally backed down — declaring herself deeply saddened by the hurt caused, and acknowledging the profound bond between the Jewish people and the State of Israel — but the retreat came too late. The damage was done.
Like reparations for a slavery centuries gone, hostility to Israel is now stitched into the psyche of the Church of England, alongside its inevitable embrace of same-sex marriage.
England is no longer a Christian nation. One wonders whether the same must now be said of the Mother Church, whose bishops have become little more than institutional loyalists — moderate men of every opinion and no conviction.
If England loses its Jews, it is England that will be the poorer. They will carry their learning and their genius to Israel, enriching the intellectual reservoir of a nation no larger than New Jersey — a nation that already does business across the globe and will only enlarge its economy and its footprint.
Stupid is as stupid does. Hatred keeps no borders. Jew-hatred has gone global, dressed in the false charges of genocide, baby-killing and deliberate starvation.
There is no timetable for how any of this ends. But history is not silent. Every empire that turned on the Jew — Pharaoh’s Egypt, Babylon, Rome, the Reich that Goebbels served — is dust, while the people it sought to destroy still keep the feasts, bury their dead, and rise again. The Jew has stood at more gravesides than any nation on earth, and outlived them all.
England should take note. A country that cannot protect a man in a yarmulke on his way to synagogue has already lost the thread of its own story. A church that cannot bring itself to stand unequivocally with the people of the Book it claims to preach has forfeited its authority to speak for God at all. The Jews will endure; they always have. The only open question is whether England — and the church that was once its glory — will survive its own contempt.
Britain is not waiting to be judged by history. Britain is writing the verdict itself, in real time, and signing its name at the bottom.