Last November, when the Israeli football club Maccabi Tel Aviv travelled to Birmingham to play Aston Villa in the Europa League, no chants could be heard from the away end. Maccabi’s supporters had been banned by local authorities from attending the match, with West Midlands Police (WMP) insisting that the prospect of “significant hooliganism” from the Israeli fans meant their attendance posed a “credible threat to public safety”.
This was a half-truth at best: Macca fans had travelled to most European cities without much issue. The Jewish supporters weren’t welcome in this particular city in the West Midlands for one simple reason: demographics. Birmingham as a whole, Britain’s second city, has been transformed over the past 80 years, its population falling from 99.6 percent white in 1951 to just 42.9 percent white British in 2021. In Aston Park, where the Villa Park stadium is situated, Muslims comprise fully 70 percent of residents. Anyone with even the faintest understanding of the attitudes of this population, whose tribal preening about “Gaza” has become far more organized and vociferous since October 7, 2023, knew immediately exactly what underlay this decision. If Israelis went to Birmingham, local Muslims, viewing them as emanations of a “genocidal” state, would have attacked them. Large-scale riots were likely to ensue. Indeed, the small number of British Jews and their supporters who did end up attending on the night to protest had to be confined by police to a metal cage near the ground for their own safety.
Few have the stomach to seriously engage with the catastrophic failure of immigration policy of which the ban is a symptom. Local sectarian Muslim MPs had launched a petition against the fans attending, Birmingham imams said worshippers should “not show mercy to Maccabi Tel Aviv fans,” as antisemitic mobs prepared to visit violence upon Jews in a British city once hailed as the “workshop of the world.” So instead, the Westminster bubble has found a more comfortable focus of outrage: the police.
After months of recriminations over the real reason for the ban, it recently transpired that as early as September, West Midlands Police (WMP) in fact had intelligence that “elements of the community” were planning to arm themselves and to target the Maccabi fans should they come to the city. Sooner than be candid about this, it seems they relied on spurious data-gathering about the Maccabi fans, following disorder at their match the previous year against Ajax in Amsterdam, to smear them and present them as highly violent hooligans. A WMP report claimed that Israeli fans had thrown innocent locals into canals; yet Dutch police insisted this had never happened—in fact, Amsterdam's Muslims had thrown the visiting Israeli fans into canals. WMP now stands accused of fabricating a narrative to avoid admitting the ban was enforced because of local Islamist pressure. This week, WMP officials were again summoned to Parliament to account for themselves and duly raked over hot coals in front of the media. Leading politicians and commentators are now baying for the chief constable’s resignation.
While it’s undeniable that the police’s behavior has been dishonest and arguably incompetent, there is something more than a little disingenuous, even hypocritical, about this chorus of condemnation from the powers that be.
Yes, the police had taken pains to manufacture an agreeable narrative (that is, to lie) about the realities of multiculturalism in Britain—but in so doing they were only taking the lead of the same political establishment currently barracking them. After all, ever since the “antiracist” cultural revolution of the New Labour years, British policing has been bent aggressively towards the political class’s new diversity gospel. Crime reports have become scrupulously colorblind lest they give succor to negative “stereotypes”; a Metropolitan Police database of London gang crime recently had to be shut down because too many suspects on it were black. Meanwhile, legally mandatory “diversity” drives are pursued with such recklessly lowered standards that forces have ended up recruiting suspected child rapists.
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Part of this is just woke posturing, but it also manifests in how the police actually approach crime itself. British policing’s embrace of state-sanctioned diversity ideology is why it now routinely treats minorities more favorably than whites, meaning it is rapidly losing public trust and increasingly derided as enforcing “two-tier” justice. The most egregious failure has been in the scandal of the grooming gangs. For decades, British police forces ignored, downplayed or covered up the grooming, rape and abuse of thousands of British girls across the country by predominantly Muslim Pakistani gangs, out of a desire to safeguard “community relations”.
To keep the peace in their no-longer-homogeneous country, the British police today operate on what is known as “community policing,” whereby unruly immigrant groups are by and large appeased and left to their own devices. For instance, in 2024, after a second-generation migrant attacked a children’s dance class with a knife, murdering three little girls, the nativist riots which kicked off across the country were met with a fierce crackdown. But when armed Muslim mobs in Birmingham also took to the streets, attacking pubs and white passers-by, police let them have free rein. A WMP officer explained that his force had met with “community leaders…to understand the style of policing that we needed to deliver.” Westminster never batted an eye at either the Muslim mobs or the two-tier policing, with Sir Keir Starmer and his Government reserving all their condemnation for the white “far-right thugs”.
But with football occupying such a large part of the national psyche, and this row having become too big to ignore, there needed to be someone to blame for the uncomfortable events of last autumn, and the lying provincial coppers fit the bill. As the officers tried haplessly to justify their behavior to Parliament this week, one MP hissed that it was “outrageous.” What’s really outrageous is that decades of reckless migration has rendered large parts of Britain’s inner cities ungovernable tribal fiefdoms—but no one is allowed to admit this. Whether it’s grooming gangs, black inner-city gang crime, or sectarian Muslim mobs, the major antisocial elements the British police have to deal with today have generally been imported by the same politicians now castigating the police’s failure to deal with those imported elements. The political class can blame coppers for the Maccabi fan ban all they want, but the police can only play the hand they are dealt.
