Mick Hartley

A powerful piece from Juliet Samuel, in the Times, on the Maccabi Tel Aviv debacle:

What’s odd is that the “evidence” compiled by West Midlands police, which was used to justify making the city an official no-go zone for Israelis, bears so little resemblance to the official Dutch account. It has more in common with the story told by local Islamists. As the Dutch police told The Sunday Times, the British force’s account was simply “not true”.

To explain this discrepancy, MPs summoned the cops, O’Hara and his boss, Craig Guildford, the chief constable. Guildford, a man whose explanatory powers are best understood by imagining that Chief Wiggum was made to undergo some sort of “executive stakeholder management training”, was keen to stress that because he had admitted that at least one factual claim was “completely wrong” (due, incredibly, to being “scraped off social media”) MPs could be very confident that he hadn’t made up the rest.

Unfortunately, shortly after making this dubious case, he and his colleague admitted that their figure for the number of police deployed in Amsterdam, a number they had cited as fact, was in fact made up. Then O’Hara claimed that the decision to ban Israeli fans had been supported by Birmingham’s Jewish community. The next day, he retracted that claim.

Still, they argued, you couldn’t fault them because their process had been “peer-reviewed” by fellow chief constables who make up a body called the UK Football Policing Unit. This is the same unit that they also stated had been intimately involved in gathering the evidence, suggesting a degree of incestuousness not normally associated with the term “peer review”. Asked to explain why the Dutch police had debunked their “evidence”, they suggested that this was all to do with political pressure in the Netherlands and that they knew the real truth because the Dutch had told them on a Zoom call, which unfortunately no one took any minutes of.

As for the government, it was performing its usual trick of waiting until there was failure and then condemning it. The Home Office was naturally aware of the likely impending screw-up but, as the minister Sarah Jones explained: “We did not have a function in that process”. A functionary with no function: that aptly summarises the government.

The implications of this lamentable farce are profound. The authorities are running scared.

This isn’t a one-off. It’s a pattern. If you want to know how the grooming gangs could get away with it, how they still are, why the issue of Palestine was allowed to take over so many city centres for so long, why we see parades of masked Islamist men praying in the road in Whitechapel or groups being permitted to chant about Gaza outside suburban Tube stations in Jewish London, the answer is the same. All too many arms of the British state operate under the influence of fear and corruption, beholden to local interest groups who use intimidation to take over the public square.