It is quite the timeline. A series of key, confusing, misleading, inaccurate moments, spanning about five months. All to obfuscate the decision by West Midlands Police (WMP) to ban Israeli football fans from their match at Villa Park.
The ban, we were told to begin with, was the result of apparent intelligence showing that Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters have unique form for violent hooliganism. Now – with more and more reporting – it is clear that was nothing more than an embarrassing attempt at an excuse.
The police drew up false evidence to retrospectively justify their Israeli fan ban, yet they will not own up to this.
Today the Chief Constable is being recalled to the Home Affairs Select Committee (HASC) after his evidence fell apart following his first appearance. Hopefully he will be held to account for the mess that has unfurled – and it is a mess.
Lets begin with a meeting on 7th October (timing, right?) where WMP privately told a Safety Advisory Group (SAG) of their “planning assumption” to ban Israeli fans. This was despite – newly released, unredacted minutes reveal – the police representative’s verdict being “in absence of intelligence”. Basing the preference on “conversations with piers [sic]” and their “professional judgment”.
Just two days later, an officer from Birmingham city council wrote to WMP of needing “a more clear rationale” to back the position they had already decided to take. Never mind having evidence inform the decision, they thought it best to do the other way around.
A week went by and apparently “significant intelligence” then existed to justify the ban, according to the police – focusing on the disorder that broke out when Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters attended a game in Amsterdam the year before. WMP in their explanations refer back to a meeting with Dutch police on October 1st… that would be before the meeting on October 7th that pointed to an “absence” of that very intelligence.
And there is another particularly important problem: the Dutch police say what West Midlands Police have claimed is untrue or misleading.
But Chief Constable Craig Guildford stood by the allegations at his first HASC appearance after WMP claimed that Israelis “randomly” threw innocent civilians into canals and that hundreds of fans “linked” to the IDF attacked “Muslim communities” in Amsterdam, requiring the deployment of 5,000 Dutch officers (it was 1,200).
What else has been revealed is that between October 7, when the first safety group meeting took place, and the final meeting on October 23 confirming the decision, police downgraded the threat it said Israeli fans faced (“high” to “medium”) and upgraded the threat to the Muslim community (“medium” to “high”). The city’s 1,600 Jews, initially said to face a “medium threat”, did not appear in their final analysis at all.
West Midlands Police ended up having to apologise to the Jewish community for misrepresenting them at the HASC by saying that local Jews were consulted on the decision and that they backed the ban. No Jewish community members had told police they supported the ban and sources within the local Jewish community say the only formal meeting took place after the decision had already been made.
Instead you had two Birmingham city councillors, who had already campaigned to ban Israeli teams from international sporting competitions, speak at the SAG meetings about how: “The community want it stopped.” They were able to air this ahead of any decision making despite their conflict of interest.
And instead WMP consulted mosques that had hosted anti-Semitic preachers before banning the Israeli fans.
One thing WMP won’t reveal is the details of their conversations with local MP Ayoub Khan who demanded the match be cancelled on the basis that Aston, in Birmingham, is a “predominantly Muslim community”. We know the meeting happened between the police and the ‘Gaza-independent’ but zero details.
If it was just about an international issue in and Israeli fan ban, it would be bad enough: WMP exaggerated international statistics and ignored UEFA’s advice to go ahead with banning the Israeli fans.
But it is bigger than that. It speaks to the relationships between the police and the communities they work within, a backwards decision making that puts evidence last, and the erasure of the Jewish community both in banning Israeli fans and removing the threat level to the Jewish community from their reports, preferring instead to make up claims they supported the ban.
Lord Walney, the Government’s former anti-extremism tsar, said WMP’s actions set “a very dangerous precedent”. Lord Austin, the former Labour MP, said the force has been “repeatedly caught lying”. Tory MP Nick Timothy, a former Home Office advisor, said “police fitted the evidence”. It seems they are all right.
Do we want our policing to take place this way? Retrospectively and at the behest of the ‘right’ community groups that they choose to consult ahead of a decision, erasing another.
And will the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood do the right thing and take strong action when it comes to WMP and the Chief Constable?