Freedom for Humanity

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A local Jewish Conservative Party councillor compared the mural to antisemitic propaganda in pre-war Germany. Lutfur Rahman, the Mayor of Tower Hamlets, sought its removal, stating that the images of the bankers perpetuate antisemitic propaganda about conspiratorial Jewish domination of financial and political institutions. Mear One responded that his mural was about class and privilege, depicting an elite banker cartel known as the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, and Morgans playing Monopoly on the backs of the working class, and that the banker group included both Jewish and white Anglos. He denied being antisemitic, saying he was against class.

Nick Wright, writing in a Morning Star article, argued that although only two of the depicted figures were meant to be Jewish, the piece clearly exaggerates the distinctive features of all six men, and that such exaggerated depictions are understood in a historically defined context of antisemitism. He noted that subterranean narratives around the Illuminati, Freemasonry, and bourgeois conspiracies cannot be disentangled from suspect discourses about alien, semitic, and covert elites. Wright concluded that the mural was bad art and worse politics.

In June 2024, Republican congressman Scott Perry of Pennsylvania shared a meme of the mural on his Facebook page before deleting it. Labour Party MP Jeremy Corbyn responded to a Facebook message from Mear One containing an image of the mural, objecting to its planned effacement on grounds of freedom of expression. Corbyn referenced Nelson Rockefeller's destruction of Diego Rivera's Man at the Crossroads fresco in 1934, writing, 'Why? You are in good company. Rockerfeller destroyed Diego Viera's mural because it includes a picture of Lenin.'