Game Over

Labour Plays the Police, Not the Ball

I didn’t particularly want to write about the upcoming Maccabi Tel Aviv versus Aston Villa Europa League cup tie on Nov 6. On a sporting level, I could care less about it, and in the greater scheme of things, it ought to be nothing more than a minor blip on everyone’s horizon.

I hope it remains that way, but as things currently stand, this match has demonstrated yet again the Labour government’s unerring inability to do the right thing, coupled with an equal ability to make a bad thing worse. And the game has also become the object of a torrent of outraged commentary, much of which is steeped in the bad faith, malicious political opportunism and intellectual dishonesty, that is invariably on display when anything to do with Israel becomes a subject of national political debate.

As many people will now know, this outrage has been directed at the decision by West Midlands Police (WMP) to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from Villa Park in the forthcoming match. In its statement, the police justified the ban on purely operational grounds, following a ‘thorough assessment’ which found the game to be ‘high risk’. The statement also explained:

This decision is based on current intelligence and previous incidents, including violent clashes and hate crime offences that occurred during the 2024 UEFA Europa League match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel-Aviv in Amsterdam.

Based on our professional judgement, we believe this measure will help mitigate risks to public safety.

Contrary to much of what has been said since, this was not the first time that fans have been banned from away matches. In December 2023, UEFA banned Legia Warsaw fans from five away games, following clashes between Legia fans and police at Aston Villa. That same year, UEFA imposed a fine and suspended away game ban on Galatasaray, in response to violent fan behaviour at Old Trafford, and Italian police imposed a blanket ban on Red Star Belgrade fans attending Inter and Milan games in Italy, because of fears of clashes between rival ultras.

This year, Glasgow Rangers fans were given a suspended away game ban by UEFA following excessive ‘pyrotechnics’. In 2024 and again in 2025, Leeds fans were banned by German police from attending friendlies in German on the basis of unspecified security concerns, and Italian authorities ordered Napoli not to sell away tickets for next month’s Champions League clash with Eintracht Frankfurt fans because of local police fears of clashes between rival fans.

I could go on, but you get the drift.

In all these cases, fans were banned or threatened with a ban, not because of their race or nationality, but because of what they had done, or were likely to do. The jury is out as to how effective such bans are - the Legia Warsaw violence at Aston Villa was partly a response to anger from Polish fans that they hadn’t been given enough tickets. It’s also true that blanket bans will affect fans who are not violent, but that is the nature of sanctions (Russia anybody?) and also of bans driven by security concerns.

This has clearly been the case in the police decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from Aston Villa, based in part on last year’sriots in Amsterdam. As most people familiar with this event will know, the 2024 Ajax-Maccabi game become a three-day street brawl in which Maccabi fans were attacked in the streets by mostly young men of Arab, North African and Turkish descent.

What is mentioned less often, is that Maccabi fans chanted ‘death to the Arabs’, burned a Palestinian flag, attacked an Arab taxi driver, mocked dead children in Gaza, and celebrated the IDF before and after these riots erupted. Even the very pro-Israel Jewish Chroncle makes it clear that these provocations took place.

Does this behaviour ‘justify’ what happened afterwards? No. But it does provide a context of provocation -response that was generally missing from media and political coverage which presented the violence as an antisemitic pogrom that recalled ‘Europe’s darkest days.’

This context is clearly behind WMP’s decision to ban Maccabi fans from the Villa match, in a city with a large Muslim population. The decision was apparently known to the Home Secretary, more than a week before it became the object of political and media outrage, and nothing happened. But last Monday, Keir Starmer announced on Twitter:

It was then announced that government ministers, including Lisa Nandy and Alan Holden, were seeking to overturn the West Midlands Police decision. This was even more unusual - highly irregular old chap - than the decision to ban the fans in the first place. Governments do not generally intervene in operational police matters. Yet here was Starmer’s government, without the slightest evidence, choosing to make this a line-in-the-sand moment while portraying the police decision as a concession to, or even as an expression of antisemitism.

As always, a host of bad actors rushed in to express their outrage - clearly sensing Muslims or ‘unintegrated’ dark-skinned foreigners behind the police decision. Israeli government spokesman David Mencer declared it a ‘sad state of affairs’ that Jews and Israelis ‘would feel in some way unsafe at a football match.’

The detestable mediocrity Robert Jenrick immediately joined in, and so did Kemi Badenoch, Ian Austin, and - inevitably- Nigel Mosley-Farage. In his salad days, Nigel allegedly tormented Jewish pupils at his school with taunts of ‘gas the Jews’ and ‘Hitler was right’. Now, he was outraged, outraged I tell you:

This is a man who like his racial discrimination served pure, when it suits him. But he isn’t the only one. Here was ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe, declaring: ‘We shouldn’t be banning groups of football fans from Britain because Muslims might get offended.’

This is the crux of the matter for the likes of Lowe and Farage. And the great British press also tumbled out of bed to attend reveille at the first bugle call, and began hitting the keyboards to condemn the ‘shame’ and ‘disgrace’ the police decision had brought on Britain. There was John Rentoul, the Renfield to Tony Blair’s Dracula (‘Master, I’m waiting for you master’) showing more passion than I have seen him express about anything at all:

And elsewhere, less salubrious voices also joined in:

Not since Cable Street have so many brave antifascist fighters rushed to the metaphorical streets. Even Ed Davey, and more thoughtful writers like the Guardian’s Barney Ronay, worked themselves into a lather at the shame of it all, and the rocky road to ruin that it represented.

It should be pointed out, because it is not at all irrelevant, that you will have to look long and hard amongst most of the people in this chorus to find a single voice expressing the same level of indignation at what has been done to Gaza these last two years. And I don’t include handwringing invocations about Gazan ‘suffering’ as a moral position here. None of them had a thing to say about the reports of gross mistreatment of the Sumud convoy activists - even when the thuggish National Security Minister Ben Gvir all but admitted these reports were true.

Yet all of them have accepted, without any scepticism at all, the argument that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans have been banned, not because they are Israelis, but because they are Jews, and that this ban is part of an ongoing attempt to ‘appease’ Muslims and drive Jews from British public spaces.

There is nothing in WMD’s statement to suggest any such intention, but the government and much of the British commentariat have aligned themselves so closely with Israeli depictions of the ‘conflict’ that they now appear willing to believe that even the mighty British police are indirectly succumbing to antisemitism..

As the Manchester synagogue attacks made clear, antisemitism does exist. But it is equally true, that successive Israeli governments- particularly this one - and routinely use antisemitism to smear its opponents.

The horrors of the last two years have made even more essential on all of men and women of good will to maintain the firewall between the Israeli state and Jews as an ethnic/religious category. That does not mean that anyone should be gaslit and browbeaten into accepting the propaganda of an Israeli state that is losing the battle of opinion on the ground.

But at the top, it’s another matter. And the reaction to the Maccabi Tel Aviv ban suggests, once again, that there are powerful supporters of Israel who are more willing to see antisemitism even where it doesn’t exist, than they are to acknowledge their own complicity in the horrors that Israel has perpetrated in Gaza.

The result, again and again, is that Israel gets carte blanche to do whatever it wants, wherever it wants, and sometimes without even asking for anything at all. This is why an attempt to ban Israeli football fans with a history of racism and violence has been transformed into an example of creeping antisemitism. .

It’s worth noting that Starmer’s intervention took place in the same week that Palestine Action won the right to continue its appeal against the Labour government’s decision to categorise it as a terrorist organisation.

Both these events in their own ways, point towards future outcomes that are likely to end in humiliation for the government. If the Palestine Action appeal goes ahead, it is very likely - unless the government really does have the intelligence information that Yvette Cooper claimed it has - to be successful. At which point, more than 2,000 arrests may be overturned and the government will be made to look not only grossly authoritarian, but also stunningly inept in picking a fight it did not need to have.

And if the government succeeds in overturning what appears to have been a decision to ban Maccabi fans which is supported by the Police Federation, and anything happens - fights, riots, deaths - then it will bear the full political responsibility.

I stress ‘political responsibility’. The moral responsibility for acts of violence always belongs to those who perpetrate such acts.

But politically and morally, the sensible thing for the government to have done regarding Palestine Action would have been not to categorise it as a terrorist organisation, but to respond to its actions on a case by case basis, using the criminal laws it already has.

And the sensible thing to do with Maccabi Tel Aviv would have been to say nothing at all, and let the police do what it saw fit.

Instead, we got the opposite of that. Yesterday, Ed Miliband was asked on the Trevor Phillips show whether Villa Park was ‘no go area for Jews.’ A politician with moral backbone might have replied that Villa Park was no such place, and that the police had made its decision to ban a group of Israeli football bans on public safety grounds. Instead he replied:

We cannot have a situation where any area is a no-go area for people of a particular religion or from a particular country, and we’ve got to stamp out all forms of prejudice, antisemitism, Islamophobia, wherever we find them.

Does this mean that the bans imposed on Legia Warsaw and Red Star Belgrade were ‘no go areas’ for all Poles and Serbs? And how does overruling an attempt to prevent possible violence equate with combatting prejudice?

It doesn’t, but these are the kind of self-defeating cycles that a government without a moral compass can find itself swirling round in. And this exchange took place on the same day that police in Tel Aviv banned a derby match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Hapoel Tel Aviv, after fans rioted and fired flares and smoke bombs onto the pitch. Even Labour will not accuse the Israeli police of antisemitism.

But here in the UK, we have the ludicrous situation of a government seeking to overturn its own police in allow Maccabi fans to a match that will be even more volatile and charged with toxic emotions than it already was - with possible support from Tommy Robinson’s ultras.

If this happens, we can only hope that it doesn’t kick off. But if it does, a government that throws dust in the eyes of others can’t be surprised if it blows back in its own face.