In 2023 I was introduced into the House of Lords. The convention of the swearing-in ceremony is that you are flanked by two “supporters”, existing peers who can vouch for your good name. I chose Lord Godson, the director of Policy Exchange, and Lord Mendoza, provost of Oriel College, Oxford. That they are both Jewish was incidental. This was not some DEI piece of multicultural performance, they just happened to be my best mates in the House of Lords.

However, considering the anniversary of October 7 this week and the Manchester synagogue attack, it has new resonance. I am so proud that these two brothers supported me in one of my proudest achievements. Rituals and tradition shape our institutions and culture and it is the Jewish tradition that has helped to shape who I am.

So it was sad to find after both October 7 and Manchester so few black community leaders coming out to support the Jewish community when they were under siege. In fact, some have indulged in low-level antisemitism as they have joined the left in blaming Jewish people for being part of a South African-style apartheid regime. To them this is simply another part of a white supremacy world and Gaza is the new black.

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It wasn’t surprising, therefore, that the deputy prime minister David Lammy was heckled and booed by those at Friday’s vigil in Manchester. He looked stunned at the anger of the crowd, which targeted him for his arrogance in acknowledging Palestinian statehood and failing to realise the implications this might have for Jews at home.

I know Lammy well and, unlike me, he has lost his Jewish foundations. When I first met him he understood that the Caribbean community was not just a victim of racism but had lost much of its moral foundations, based in its Judeo-Christian tradition.

When I was a member of the Youth Justice Board we visited a young offender institution in the Midlands. Black boys are over-represented: 6 per cent and 5 per cent of those observed in youth custody at ages 16-17, respectively, are black African or black Caribbean relative to 2.8 per cent and 1.4 per cent among other boys.

We were given an interview session with a small group who were locked up for violent offences. None of the boys had a father in their lives and all the boys blamed the victims for their crime. We went back on the train knowing that communities like Lammy’s own in Tottenham were in moral crisis and needed leadership. On that train journey, Lammy vowed to return to Tottenham with a moral crusade that would try to restore the black family.

Instead Lammy became “black Americanised”. He had some kind of Malcolm X revelation and saw the Black Lives Matter scam as an opportunity to wallow in victimhood. What he forgot was his Jewish foundation and those great Old Testament stories of agency, self-responsibility and faith. He became silent about the need for black fathers to step up and this was replaced by an odd mixture of left-wing, black nationalist, anti-Israel student union politics.

There is a real need for the black church and black community leaders to stand with Israel and against antisemitism. I always remember when the official chapter of Black Lives Matter in Chicago released a graphic of a paraglider, which had become a symbol of the Hamas attack, online accompanied by the text: “I stand with Palestine.”

This was retweeted by too many young people in Britain who should have known better. However, in Britain it’s not so much that we have black Christians being openly antisemitic, it’s their silence in the face of injustice against Jews which is most annoying. As Yeats once wrote: “The best lack all the conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

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Those of us from a Caribbean background are steeped in the Jewish narrative. We would never have had the Rastafarian movement and the wonderful music of Bob Marley. The creolised imagination of Caribbean creatives appropriated the Old Testament Jewish story of a people in captivity (interestingly sold out by their own brothers) who would make a journey to the promised land and escape the oppression of Babylon. It was clear to me that the Jewish story was our story, and our story is the Jewish story. Indeed, it is the human narrative.

What is also similar in the black experience is how so-called allies emerge from nowhere. I wasn’t impressed by the way Tommy Robinson popped up after Manchester to say “I told you so”, and then went on to attack Muslims. This kind of “passionate intensity” was not needed. The politics around trying to be pro Jewish has often a foul smell of opportunism. That’s why those Jewish people were so angry with Lammy when he said that he was their “friend” and he had come to stand next to them.

There are many similarities that tie the Jewish British story with the early Caribbean story on our shores. They both managed in the face of racism to integrate into mainstream British society. It worked because in the case of those who were from the Caribbean, they were already culturally British. They emerged from what was really a British outpost. Jewish settlement was achieved through enterprise and integration into mainstream British culture.

In many ways they both loved the English traditions. You couldn’t have told them that Shakespeare and cricket was for the white (or gentile) privileged. It was out of this creole experience that we had the great actor Antony Sher, and the greatest cricketer Gary Sobers. Yes, during the 1970s the National Front did grab the English flag but sadly today the left have also lowered it in shame.

Lord Sewell of Sanderstead is a Conservative peer and author of Black Success: The Surprising Truth