So You Want To Start A Moral Panic

05 Nov, 2026

"British attitudes relating to Jewish people and Israel show two broad trends. Anti-Jewish attitudes are typically less prevalent and have remained more stable, whereas anti-Israel sentiments are more prevalent and have been increasing"

This is page 30 of Sir David Bell's antisemitism report. You may notice it is shockingly absent from the reporting.

To start I want to clarify that the British Government does not actually care about anti semitism beyond its usefulness as a political tool. Indeed, many members of the current labour party are extremely happy to coddle Helen Joyce and her merry band of TERFs, despite her writing a book claiming that trans people are a plot by jewish billionaire George Soros to mutilate our children for profit.

In fact, the 29 children of the 5000 surveyed who said antisemitism is a problem in british education, and that they had experienced it, is less than the "more than 30" that complained to the Guardian about Farage specifically.

Sir David Bell, who received his knighthood for "services to industry, the arts and charity" has been routinely criticised during his time at OFSTED for singling out muslim faith schooling as a threat to integration, despite only 3% of muslims actually going to a faith school. Interestingly, he has nothing to say about 70% of Jews in the UK going to faith schools.

One can only wonder how he eventually came to the conclusion that banning "free palestine" badges from british education was the solution to the UK's growing antisemitism problem.

It's important to note that antisemitism and islamophobia have both been on the rise, although there is certainly less mainstream attention on the latter (which is why so many on the left bring it up). A mosque being under attack every 5 days does not seem to warrant this kind of panic, the horrors of the oppressed must remain background noise¹.

But why is it that someone like Sir David Bell can get his cause out amongst all the other problems, how do grifters like JK Rowling and Andrew Wakefield manage to garner so much political attention despite being so intellectually dishonest?

Step One: The Aristocracy

Political power in the UK and a sense of trust is intrinsically tied to an idea of class, the aesthetic of respectability. The difference between the way Farage and Tommy Robinson are treated by the press lies not in what they believe (that is more or less identical) but the aesthetic they appeal to. Tommy Robinson as a character is a thug, a product of the far right elements of football hooliganism, and so he is to be pointed and laughed at. Farage on the other hand, is privately educated and well spoken, and so he is to be approached with sincerity and civility.

A figure like Andrew Wakefield or Helen Joyce does not gain credulity through other academics, through the work of the institutions they pretend to operate in, but through a thinly veiled illusion of upper class civility, through the aesthetic of intelligence. Had he been less well spoken, or less willing to speak, his paper would not be read as the "reasonable concerns" that killed innocent children, but the crackpot theories they are seen as today.

Step Two: Connection

Wakefields anti-vax paper might have been debunked by The Lancet on the same issue that it was published, but those that criticised him did not call a press tour.

The British Press, and by extension the British political establishment, is an extremely tight knit bunch, one only needs to observe how common the crossover is, how easy a Spiked Online journalist can end up on question time, how someone with no prior experience of anti-discrimination practices and understanding becomes the lead on a nationwide antisemitism report. Why every time it's the same columnists from the same few broadsheets, as bigoted as the tabloids, only differentiated with a thesaurus and a veneer of politeness.

Helen Joyce once gave the game away here: "We can't say there's 60 million people in this country and we've got to convince all of them or a great majority of them, we've got to get through to the decision makers. In the meantime we've got to limit the harm, and that means keeping down the number of people who transition." She adds, "every one of those people is basically a huge problem to a sane world"

That is, an openly genocidal statement. I trust my audience already knows this, and yet, Joyce is presented as the voice of reasonable moderate concerns throughout her appearances in the British Press. She has succeeded at convincing the decision makers that wanting to end all transitions is normal. She joins as one side of a reasonable discussion with pro trans organisers, as the ofcom "unbiased" policy hopelessly compels LBC to both sides segregationist policy that has and will take lives. Why? Because she convinced the decision makers. Much like Wakefield, the trick isn't to have the correct science, or even to convince the public, but to be well spoken at your press junket. The most effective propaganda spreads top down, not bottom up.

Joyce has worked for The Economist as education correspondent in 2005, and later worked in several senior positions, including finance editor and international editor. By march 2020 she became executive editor for events business, before quitting to join campaign group "Sex Matters". The reason transphobia is so rampant amongst the british establishment, the reason it's been unanimously adopted so quickly, is because it is manufactured from the inside by a respected, well connected member of it. Joyce knows exactly how to manufacture a moral panic, and she's not afraid to tell you about it. I know from my own experience with the british media circuit that connections are effectively the only way in anymore, the vast majority of positions are not even advertised, and nepotism is frankly rampant.

If you are posh and well connected in the UK, You Can Just Kill People

Initially this was supposed to be about the implicit slaughter through the spread of anti vax, islamophobic or anti trans rhetoric but the people at Turning Point UK have proved this rather literally. Despite the former Chief Exec (and former tory activist) being linked to actual contract killers, the story has not stuck to the front pages and the members of Turning Point UK keep appearing on british telly.

Step 3: What Now?

Looking at Wakefield and the anti vax movement as a blueprint doesn't help us here. Wakefield was defeated from within the establishment by investigative journalist Brian Deer, but no one has really taken the place of Deer within the industry. And whilst the anti vax movement is inherently tied to ableism² it was primarily motivated as a scam, to extort the average parent into buying more expensive single vaccines. Transphobia and Islamophobia are not motivated to directly scam the average person, but to target the language and communities of the marginalised, which makes it much harder to break to a British establishment that already cared very little for them.

Instead, one could look to the history of trans rights. Trans people were not added to the equality act 2010 because a Labour government was elected, but because they were sued in the ECHR. This route too is becoming more difficult, with past head of the ECHR Kishwer Falkner and current head Mary-Ann Stephenson being noted transphobes, again the establishment has been captured completely, so there is no way out here.

Protests are often politely ignored no matter what, and the UK has been tightening draconian anti protest measures for the last 6 years, so the only solution left is direct action.

For muslims I would suggest the same, appealing to the good nature of a press that gleefully platformed a man who increased Islamophobic hate crimes by 300% in one weekend until he became PM feels completely fruitless. A british mosque is under attack every five days, and it often feels like such stories barely make it out of the local paper.

I'm going to link a matrix server here, it's a discord like platform that's end to end encrypted, I find this to be a better platform for political organising than the public ones. Feel free to join! I'll link to every article in there, so it's the best place to see them when they drop.

If your story is unheard, you must shout it louder.