Laurie Wastell
Laurie Wastell is an associate editor of the Daily Sceptic and the host of the Sceptic, our weekly podcast. He is also a regular contributor to the Spectator.
I have written for the Spectator about the row over the decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from attending their Europa League game against Aston Villa next month. I argue that while it’s true that this represents two-tier policing, to focus one’s ire on the police here, as much of the political class has done, including the right, misses the point. The real issue is demographics. Here’s an extract:
While West Midlands Police’s decision to prevent Maccabi fans attending this match undoubtedly puts the UK to shame, one has to recognise how the demographic realities of Birmingham have put public order in Britain’s second city in an extremely precarious position. It was not West Midlands Police that transformed Birmingham from 99.6 per cent white in 1951 to 42.9 per cent white British in 2021; nor is it their fault that Muslims comprise 70 per cent of residents of Aston Park, where Villa Park stadium is situated. The police did not make a Birmingham Imam issue an ‘Islamic Ruling’ that worshippers should “not show mercy to Maccabi Tel Aviv fans”. Nor did they sign the local petition to ban the Israelis from coming. It was local residents, concerned more about ‘Gaza’ than the bins, who elected Muslim sectarian MPs now crowing about “Israeli hooligans and terrorists” being denied entry.
The focus on the police and the “optics” here has the whiff of displacement activity. When commentators decry “cowardly cops”, it is perhaps worth spelling out what they are effectively calling for. For the police it means overtime and risking getting bottled or worse to maintain the façade that Jews are safe in Britain’s second city. It means ordinary British coppers policing a mini Israel-Gaza conflict on their doorstep to spare the blushes of those who insist we’re a harmonious multi-faith democracy, and that our diversity is our ‘greatest strength’. Surely by now it’s clear that it isn’t. And no amount of riot gear and pepper spray will make it so.
So far, all the rumblings from SW1 suggest that the government is going to try its hardest to overturn the ban. This is despite briefings from the Home Office, the UK Football Policing Unit and West Midlands Police that there would be serious safety concerns, which fed into the decision by the local Safety Advisory Group, part of Birmingham City Council, to proceed with the ban. Sir Keir Starmer typically sets much store by institutional independence, so it is highly unusual for him to attempt to override this decision from his perch in central government, and a major political gamble. A No 10 spokesman explained: “While of course this is an operational decision, we are perfectly entitled to speak out on fundamental principles of fairness like this.”
At the weekend, I discussed the row over the ban with Professor David Starkey for his YouTube Channel, David Starkey Talks. We agreed that the stakes were high. After all, he noted, “If [Starmer] pushes it through and there is major disorder, there will be no doubt who is responsible.” Starmer certainly wouldn’t be able to blame the far-right this time, as he did with the Southport unrest. Starkey thought the wisest course of action would instead be for the PM to make “the most tremendous noise” about the ban, before quietly backing down in the face of serious official advice. I agreed, but since Starmer is a “political ass”, in Starkey’s words, and, I noted, quite capable of directing the sharp end of the state when he wants to, my money was on him making this go ahead come what may. This raises the lurid possibility of the November 6th fixture devolving into Keir’s own race riot: a Labour-backed mini-Israel-Gaza on the streets of our second city. Or as Scott Goetz put it in Pimlico Journal, the idea is apparently that “2,000 Israelis should be released from Birmingham New Street, and police from as far afield as Northern Ireland should run around arresting them for chanting while also arresting Pakistanis on scooters for fighting with them in a sort of grand Benny Hill sketch. Is it really West Midlands Police who are being unreasonable here?” he wonders.
One reason for the outsized outrage and attention this decision has attracted is that it is about football, a sport which has come to be invested with tremendous social significance by our right-on elites in recent years. Premier League and England players have continued taking the knee following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests long after the Americans stopped, while as part of endless LGBT campaigns players have sported such an array of rainbow paraphernalia as to make Joseph jealous. Fans, meanwhile, are endlessly admonished by anti-racism campaigns, and of course there is the endless astroturfed concern with women’s football, second perhaps only to drag queens as a BBC hobbyhorse. Pro-immigration activists love to point to the presence of black and mixed-race footballers in the England team as an unassailable argument for all post-war migration, while others hope to neuter the resurgent political meaning attached to the St George’s cross by suggesting it should only be flown during football tournaments – an acceptably anodyne form of patriotism. All of which makes it especially painful for Sir Keir – who still regularly plays five-a-side and for whom ‘cutting the half-time orange’ represents the best of British – for the beautiful game to fall victim to ‘division’ in this way. “We will not tolerate antisemitism on our streets,” he fumed immediately following the decision (perhaps unwisely for a party haemorrhaging Muslim voters), adding: “The role of the police is to ensure all football fans can enjoy the game, without fear of violence or intimidation.”
The irony though is that the flipside of this state-sanctioned crusade to make football ‘inclusive’ has been years of draconian anti-hooligan measures, which have evolved with scarcely a peep of dissent from our political establishment. Fans today are routinely banned from games or even handed prison sentences for an array of aggressively policed offences including ‘tragedy chanting’. Now, hundreds of Israeli nationalist fans, who would undoubtedly be viewed as ‘far-right hooligans’ were they English, are set to be given a police escort through central Birmingham in the name of diversity and tolerance. Truly under Starmer’s “government of service”, the adults are back in the room.
Stop Press: Maccabi Tel Aviv have now said they will decline any tickets offered to their fans for the Europa League match at Villa Park, citing safety concerns.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
