Police have decided to ban Tel Aviv football fans from a match in Birmingham on the grounds they cannot guarantee anyone’s safety. Fleet Street Fox wonders what the point of policing is
Once upon a time, every football fan was a mindless hooligan just begging to have his head cracked open with a police baton.
Then we grew up. There were tragedies of policing failures like Hillsborough, club neglect and abdication of responsibility. Stadia were rebuilt, training improved, laws tightened.
Forty years after the beautiful game was so regularly violent that families stayed away, it is now commonplace again for people to take their kids to the match. There are travel bans, club bans, facial recognition cameras. There’s still racism, still people who seem to want to go for a fight rather than the sport, but it is better policed, in Britain at least.
Until now. West Midlands Police has decided that next month Maccabi Tel Aviv fans will be banned from attending a Europa League match against Aston Villa, on the grounds that it cannot guarantee anyone’s safety if they’re allowed in.
It is not entirely unexpected, after Maccabi and Ajax fans clashed in riots in Amsterdam last year. That was fuelled, as so much seems to be since October 7, by pro-Palestinian flags and chants, and street battles with Israeli ultras who make the terrifying hooligans of my youth look like labrador puppies.
But it is also just another failure of policing, and a decision taken not because officers are perfectly capable of keeping fans apart, and plucking the rotters from the crowd, but because someone with a lot of pips on their shoulder decided public relations was more important than crime.
The decision-making process went like this: these fans are a problem. Policing it properly will be expensive, and if we hit any of them, we will be called anti-Semitic. Let’s ban them instead. We’ll still be called anti-Semitic, but at least there won’t be photos of one of our lads batoning a Jew.
This has led to the predictable uproar that the police have given in to the pro-Palestinian mob, that perfectly reasonable Maccabi fans are being treated the same as the less reasonable ones, and that it’s multi-racial Birmingham that’s the problem.
If the decision were now to be reversed, the ultras would somehow contrive to be even worse. People who want to scrap with them, or protest, or march, or walk around dressed as a paraglider and try to claim October 7 was a hoax, will converge on Villa Park like ants on an egg sandwich. And the policing would become 1,000 times more hairy: they would be batoning Muslims AND Jews, horses would get injured, property damaged. And everyone would pick a side, making all the division and stupidity even worse. So now the police are petrified: frozen, immobile, stuck, and scared.
But stop a moment. Celtic and Rangers fans get banned. European nations – which have a bigger problem with the Far Right than we do – deny tickets regularly. This is not just about being pro-Israel or pro-Palestine, nor even that idiots frequently confuse both of those things with being pro-Hamas or pro-Netanyahu. There is something else happening here: the police are giving up.
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There are two things which define a civilisation: taxation, and policing. If you stop doing either, the state collapses and it’s everyone for themselves. The reason that dictators always fail in the end is that they fiddle with the balance, which means a state spins wildly for a decade and then collapses anyway.
Police numbers have declined in line with both a drop in crime and a drop in funding, while at the same time the amount of work for those left has increased and become more complex. Hard drives, body cameras and paperwork involve more faff than walking the beat, yet catch more bad guys. But it’s come at the same time successive governments of all parties have wanted to cut taxes for political reasons, so there aren’t the right resources even for streamlined, high-tech policing which we already don’t really have.
In that atmosphere, senior officers look at a particularly lairy football match in the same way as a vole looks at a great white shark. It’s very scary, and it shouldn’t be here. So things get banned rather than policed, and as any parent or copper knows it just gets hidden better. Criminals and teenagers both have a surprisingly robust work ethic, when provoked.
By not locating, identifying, and nicking the Maccabi ultras, West Midlands has decided they can go around unarrested, as though they are only criminals at football matches, and not in any other aspect of their lives. By not cracking down on the anti-Semitism which seems to be as socially acceptable these days as an electric SUV, West Midlands has failed to dissuade the next idiot, the next racist, the next attack on a synagogue or mosque.
And by making it all about public relations, they’ve made their public relations worse. The rolling row about Israel – much of it stoked by people who neither remember the reason for its existence or who are the product of upbringings which taught them a Jewish state was a threat rather than a promise – has been puffed up with more what-aboutery and stupidity when, frankly, there is plenty of both already.
Any police officer will tell you that 90% of the job is about calming everyone down. They’re not just there to nick people. Modern policing of football matches shows a decent mix of crowd control, intelligence-gathering, and letting everyone know you’ve got a big stick. Increasingly it seems that the forces of the state – from the China spy case, to the Far Right, to hate in general – have decided to abandon all three. And if that continues, we’re all in trouble, whatever side you’re on.