The NHS is the frontline in the attack on Palestine activism

It is now clear that the Government has launched a frontal assault to stifle dissent on Palestine within the NHS. The attack is two-pronged. One is to prevent rank and file health workers from showing their support for Palestine at work, or when wearing their scrubs in public. The other targets British doctors, including those who have first-hand experience of tending for the victims of the carnage in Gaza, to prevent them from communicating this to the public.

The Context

With the enthusiastic assistance of many of the country’s Vice-Chancellors,  university campuses have already been substantially pacified. Repressive legislation, complaisant judges and increasingly aggressive policing is clamping down on street protest and direct action. Health service workers, skilled and self-confident, have been one of the key occupational groups organising for Palestine. Now the government is going after them.

The International Court of Justice has declared Israel’s occupation illegal and considers its assault on Gaza a ‘plausible’ genocide. It did so back in 2024, but it will take years of submissions, deliberations and procedures before it reaches the final, obvious, legal conclusion. Until then, the Genocide Convention requires signatory states to do all they can to prevent genocide. The Court has specifically placed an immediate duty on all states to

• suspend, restrict, or terminate activities including supplying weapons or providing surveillance technology that could contribute to the risk of genocide
• avoid supporting actors who engage in incitement.
• potentially prosecute individuals under universal jurisdiction if incitement occurs.

The UK Government so far has done none of the above and remains complicit in the  ongoing genocide in Gaza. Furthermore it has imposed no meaningful sanctions against the mounting state sponsored violence and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. The current signs are that it will prevent and penalise workers in the NHS who try to show any support for Palestinians or criticism of Israel. This will certainly make clear yet again whose side the British Government is on.

Will a Burnham-led government move to carry out at last the UK’s international responsibilities? Burnham’s statement that the Labour Party got it wrong on Gaza is more than Starmer would ever have conceded.  But Yvette Cooper, who as Home Secretary proscribed Palestine Action, is now Health Secretary. Thus far there is no concrete sign that Burham’s Labour will get it right.

Launching the attack

The choreography of this initiative to curb health workers’ activism on Palestine is instructive. The starting gun was fired by the report published last July of a ‘Commission on Antisemitism’ fronted by (Lord) John Mann and Conservative politician (Dame) Penny Mordaunt. This report had been commissioned by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the notably unrepresentative ‘official’ body that roots for Israel.

For a document that has set swingeing restrictions in motion it is short on words, and neither presents nor discusses the evidence we are told it received. Its 29 pages have large font and wide margins, and there is actual content on only 9 of them. Perhaps the content was never the point? The report’s effectiveness has certainly not been as a generator of information and insights, but as the starting gun for a crackdown on health service activism for Palestine. This despite the fact that the Review’s report had in total just 157 words on the NHS.

 The ‘Rapid Review’

On this flimsy basis Wes Streeting (then Health Minister) and Keir Starmer (then Prime Minster) selected John Mann to spearhead a ‘rapid review’ of racism in the NHS, but with special emphasis on antisemitism. In particular they emphasised what they asserted were ‘multiple cases of intolerable antisemitism’ in the NHS.

Mann has neither expertise in medical matters nor a positive track record on racism. His relevant qualifications are limited to having been an early and determined champion of the disastrous IHRA ‘working definition of antisemitism’. See here for a distinguished lawyer’s demolition of the ‘definition’

Mann’s review was delivered in June this year, and the Government announced its acceptance of all the Review’s recommendations on the day that they were published. A consultation period to 21^st July was only conceded after active protest.

The opening words of the report set the tone: “The levels of anti-Jewish racism in the UK constitute a national emergency”.  This is a clear and deliberate attempt to feed a moral panic.

So what is the evidence? The review claims that the Mann and Mordaunt report found ‘a specific unaddressed issue of antisemitism within the NHS that is making Jewish patients uneasy about accessing care and Jewish NHS staff feeling that discrimination against them is not being addressed.” But neither report nor the Rapid Review offer any evidence for this ‘finding’.

The only specific figures in either document about the prevalence of antisemitism in the NHS is the following: “The latest NHS staff survey (2025) results show that 11% of Jewish staff and 16% of Muslim staff have faced discriminatory behaviour from patients or the public in the last 12 months, and 13% of both Jewish and Muslim staff report experiencing discrimination from managers or colleagues at work over the last 12 months.” That’s it, all the evidence on offer.

Had Lord Mann looked a little further into the NHS staff survey he would have found that the figure for Black/African/Black British–Caribbean staff reporting discrimination at work was 23%, while for staff with an Asian/Asian British-Filipino identity the figure reached 27%, way above the figure for Jewish staff. The survey also analyses its data by religion, and here again Jews are not top of the pile for discrimination, with both Buddhist and Muslim staff reporting more.

So it is hard to take seriously Mann’s claim in his review that it aims at the active promotion of “an anti-racist workplace culture” and the establishment of systems “to tackle incidents of all forms of racism thoroughly, fairly and transparently”.  But in any case this virtue signalling is immediately undermined, actually in the same sentence, by the statement that the NHS should establish “a clear organisation-wide priority to increase trust and confidence in NHS services among Jewish, and other minority ethnic patients and staff”. As we have seen, there is zero evidence to support this prioritisation of racism against Jewish staff and patients, singled out from among the other forms of racism sadly present, and in many cases more prevalent.  How then can the resulting actions and systems operate “fairly and transparently” when bias is built in from the outset?

Mann’s review simply ‘cherry picks’ evidence to support his alarmist narrative about discrimination against Jews. It ignores the shocking evidence of racism based on skin colour. The attempt at statistical justification is so cursory – because it was surely beside the point. The evident priority for Mann and the government is not to protect Jews from discrimination, but to protect Israel..

This bias pervades the most controversial part of the Review which goes under the heading of ‘Freedom of Expression’. To be clear, Lord Mann is against this; indeed this section would be better headed ‘Reducing Freedom of Expression’. The Review’s unsupported argument about protecting Jews is actually deployed for a different purpose – to undermine and if possible close down the activism of health service staff, across boundaries of ethnicity and religion, in support of Palestine.

Consider this passage: “To be clear, individuals in the UK have the right to offend, the right to hold strong political views and the right to express themselves freely within the law, but protecting those rights must not undermine the purpose of the health service and must not infringe on other people’s rights”. So, it is indeed clear: according to the Review the fundamental right to free speech has now become contingent. To put it crudely, NHS staff must not express their views about what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians because it might upset some Jews.

Mann advocates (and the Government agrees) that Hospital Trusts and other health service employers should ban all ‘political identifiers’ from uniforms, from meeting rooms, from digital backgrounds, and from laptops, iPads etc. He dresses this up as even-handed, because it would apply equally to ‘Free Palestine’ and to ‘I love Israel’. There is no equivalence. Thousands of NHS staff would by this ban be prevented from breaching the establishment wall of silence in support of a beleaguered people who are under assault by an ally of the British state.

It is also a concern for Mann that hospital workers in numbers are wearing scrubs at demonstrations in support of Palestine. He wants hospital trusts to ban this for their employees. Of course he does. Because the coordinated wearing of scrubs at marches for Palestine demonstrates graphically the extent of support for the Palestinians among one of the country’s most highly respected occupational groups.

Targeting the doctors

That is not all. The government has also announced its intention to change the disciplinary system for doctors. You might have thought this would be about making sure that those who minister to our health are both competent and ethical in their medical practice. But no, not in 2026. The proposed change is based on yet another recommendation from Lord Mann, which was welcomed in March by then Health Secretary Wes Streeting as “the most significant overhaul of the regulation of medical professionals” in 40 years.

Here’s the rationale: “There have been too many recent examples of doctors using intolerably racist and antisemitic language, particularly on social media, without regulators taking swift enough action to effectively protect patients and NHS staff. It is clear that the current regulatory landscape is outdated and too bureaucratic, hampering GMC’s [General Medical Council’s] ability to act decisively when doctors contravene their code of conduct.”

What it comes down to is that doctors, aware of the slaughter in Gaza, based in some cases on their own experience of tending to the shattered population in Gaza, have been speaking up. They are aware of the targeting by Israel of medical first responders, and of the torture and death in Israeli prisons of their professional colleagues. And they speak forcefully and with authority about what has been happening.

From the Government’s point of view the trouble is that doctors are generally respected in society, certainly far more than MPs and Government ministers. The priority therefor is to shut these people up. The problem is that the disciplinary process for doctors has not resulted in agreement to silence them. The General Medical Council can and does produce a case alleging misconduct by a doctor, but the decision is then taken by a panel set up under the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MTPS) which operates independently of the GMC. And those panels have been failing to find that criticising Israel is a reason for barring doctors from practice.

The GMC currently has the right to appeal tribunal decisions to the High Court. For several years there has been a settled government intention to legislate to remove this power. But following Mann that has now been slammed into reverse. Evidently the expectation is that the GMC, and then the High Court, will be more attuned to Government priorities than the practitioner level tribunals have proved to be.

Professor Ghassan Abu Sitta

This new wave of repression against doctors is already playing out. What is happening to British-Palestinian surgeon Professor Ghassan Abu Sitta, who has played a heroic role in Gaza, is crucial. Abu Sitta reports being the subject of 10 complaints, two of them to the GMC, including by the notorious pro-Israel pressure group UK Lawyers for Israel.

In January this year he was cleared of all allegations of misconduct by an MTPS tribunal. Regulators have generally been expected to respect the outcome of these tribunals, but not any more. The GMC, not having got the result it wanted, is appealing the decision to the High Court and unprecedentedly has been joined in the appeal by the oversight body for all healthcare professional regulators, the Professional Standards Authority.

Oppose this Establishment Attack

The British establishment across the board is showing its determination to use concocted accusations of antisemitism to close down health service dissent on Israel and the UK’s support for it. The changes proposed by Mann which the Government has been eager to accept will have far reaching consequences. Anti-racism is too serious an agenda, in the health service as elsewhere, for it to be used as camouflage fo, indeed, a racist agenda.

Health service workers’ rights for political expression and solidarity with their colleagues must not be swept away because it is claimed that a minority of Jews report feeling ‘uncomfortable’. defeat this deeply cynical move supporters of Palestine will need to stand with our brave, principled medics. Will Andy Burnham stand with them too?