Newsletter #58: James Orr joins Reform

PLUS: West Midlands Police seek to avoid race riots in Birmingham, and more financial questions for Farage

Good morning,

It’s been a relatively slow news week, and the headlines have been mostly dominated by the ongoing row over Chinese espionage. We’ll be discussing that issue in more detail in Saturday’s editorial, but today we’ll be looking at some smaller stories from the week.

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This newsletter’s agenda: West Midlands Police seek to prevent an Israel-Palestine themed race riot in Birmingham — all major party leaders outraged (free); James Orr joins Reform leadership (paid); Live from inside the mind of Claire Fox (Paid); Farage’s partner Laure Ferrari investigated by the European Union’s anti-fraud office (paid) — plus, a preview of this week at the Pimlico Journal.

West Midlands Police seek to prevent an Israel-Palestine themed race riot in Birmingham — all major party leaders outraged

On 16 October, West Midlands Police recommended to Birmingham’s Safety Advisory Group (SAG) that supporters of the Israeli football club Maccabi Tel Aviv should not be given an away allocation for their Europa League game against Aston Villa in November, in effect banning them from the match. In making their recommendation, the police highlighted ‘…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.’

This regional policing decision was immediately condemned by every single major party leader with the sort of indignity usually reserved for the aftermath of terror attacks: Kemi Badenoch described it a ‘national disgrace’, Keir Starmer warned against tolerating ‘antisemitism on our streets’, while Nigel Farage claimed the lack of an away allocation took ‘racial discrimination to a whole new level’. The decision has not yet been overturned, but given the strong pressure from the Government over the last three days, it now seems unlikely that the ban will ultimately remain in place. (The ban remains in place as of time of publication.)

But why are West Midlands Police fanning the flames of the Fourth Reich against the wishes of our elected politicians?

Let’s start with the basics. Aston Villa are a Premier League football club based in Aston, Birmingham. A little under one-third of the population of Birmingham are Muslim, and this figure will be higher among young men, which is the demographic most liable to causing trouble. British Muslims aren’t usually especially fond of Israelis (or indeed Jews) at the best of times, but are particularly unhappy with them after the 18,000 dead children over the course of the two-year bombing campaign in Gaza. The concentration of Muslims is even higher around Villa Park, Aston Villa’s stadium, with 70.2% of the residents of the surrounding Aston Park area reporting as Muslim in the latest census.

Nonetheless, geopolitical strife alone is surely insufficient for the entire city to be made unsafe by the mere presence of a relatively small number of Israelis, so why the concern? As the police noted in their statement, Maccabi Tel Aviv have form. I get the impression that when the likes of Robert Jenrick and Michael Gove burst into their ferocious defences of the ‘right’ of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans to travel here, they are (whether deceptively or not) conjuring up the image of a crowd of kippah-wearing, middle-class Ashkenazi professionals.

In reality, while Maccabi Tel Aviv are not quite Beitar Jerusalem (a team so notoriously anti-Arab that no Arab has ever played for them), Maccabi supporters are highly nationalistic, and often sing anti-Arab and anti-Muslim songs; indeed, an Israeli NGO declared Maccabi fans to be the second most racist in Israel, only beaten by the aforementioned Beitar. In 2024, when Maccabi Tel Aviv played Ajax in Amsterdam, chants included such lyrics as ‘Death to Arabs’, ‘Let the IDF fuck the Arabs’, and ‘Why is there no school in Gaza? There are no children left there.’ It should go without saying that these chants are deliberately offensive (and, wrongly, are criminal in almost all Western countries except the United States). They also have nothing at all to do with Ajax (which was historically considered a ‘Jewish’ club, and has relatively good relations with Maccabi). Moreover, in addition to their offensive chants, Maccabi Tel Aviv fans also scaled houses to pull down Palestinian flags and attacked taxis driven by Muslims. This can only be interpreted as seeking confrontation not with Ajax fans per se, but with all of the Muslim residents of the city; in fact, virtually none of the violence that followed was between Ajax fans and Maccabi fans.

While this was going on, Amsterdam’s Muslims plotted attacks against the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans via messaging apps, with one chat referring to it as a ‘Jew hunt’. The hopelessly outnumbered Maccabi fans were chased on scooters by men armed with knives, beaten, chased into canals, and forced to shout ‘Free Palestine’ when captured by mobs. Miraculously, no one died. It is impossible to say how much of this violence was planned prior to the arrival of the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, and how much of it was motivated simply by a desire to respond to their provocative behaviour. But in any case, the precedent has been set, and the question of who was principally to blame for the violence in Amsterdam is not relevant in making this policing decision.

What West Midlands Police quite reasonably inferred from the riots in Amsterdam is that if you have a city with a large Muslim population who hate Israel — and, proportionally, Birmingham has far more Muslims than Amsterdam — it is difficult to ensure the safety of a few thousand free-roaming Israeli nationalists intent on chanting about how much they like seeing dead Muslims. Of course, the British police do know how to deal with two groups of fans intent on chanting about how much they like terrorism and killing each other: Rangers and Celtic play each other at least four times a season. What is somewhat novel, and makes the match potentially unpoliceable, and at a minimum exorbitantly expensive, is the ambient risk of violence from the vast (and highly-dispersed) number of those in the local area who are not football fans, and who the travelling supporters have already shown themselves willing to provoke into confrontations, despite the Israelis being massively outnumbered, with predictable consequences.

Ever the pragmatist when it comes to Israel, Robert Jenrick has demanded an enormous deployment of police from other forces to assist Maccabi Tel Aviv fans in getting to the match safely. Far-left activist Nick Lowles agrees that the Israeli fans should be allowed to travel, but also that they should all be arrested if they ‘sing racist chants or attempt to carry out any racist attacks’. The resulting synthesis is that two thousand Israelis should be released from Birmingham New Street, and police from as far afield as Northern Ireland should run around arresting them for chanting while also arresting Pakistanis on scooters for fighting with them in a sort of grand Benny Hill sketch. Is it really West Midlands Police who are being unreasonable here?

If you are unhappy about the ‘character’ of the ‘locals’ in Birmingham, and in particular are unhappy with the fact that they might respond to mere words with violence, it seems rather strange to specifically start making such an issue of it when a foreign football club travels there. And, for those who have complained about Birmingham before, it is silly to demand that this situation somehow gets undone in the one month before the match takes place: this is obviously impossible. It is perfectly logical that West Midlands Police are making a decision based on the reality of Birmingham — which is, after all, what they’re policing — and not some kind of imagined ‘free speech’ ideal (not that ‘free speech’ ever applies to football fans in any other context, as Pimlico Journal has observed before). It is also perfectly logical that they are unwilling to spend a vast number of resources in order to somehow ‘prove’ to the public that there is nothing wrong with Birmingham, Israelis, or Muslims. If you don’t like Birmingham’s reality, and in particular the effect that this is having on Israeli football fans, then you should have worked to change it long ago, rather than complaining about the police who are having to deal with this reality today.

Obviously, it is totally ridiculous that the policing of a relatively minor football match has become an issue of national importance. I feel genuinely sorry for people who dislike the sport when this minutia takes up days of attention from senior public officials, as if the carrying out of well-ordered football matches is sufficient proof that the British state is still functional.

We should stop demanding special exemptions from our draconian police powers around football just for Israelis. If West Midlands Police have decided that Maccabi Tel Aviv are too expensive (or even outright impossible) to deal with, and we object to that decision, then we should more generally review whether police should actually have the power to decide how many fans are allowed to go to games based on whether they feel up to doing their jobs in the first place. From my perspective, which is obviously very different from that of the police, I am not opposed to allowing an away allocation at this game: it would not bother me at all if the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans travelled, ended up in running battles for two days, and caused an international incident because they got beaten up by the ‘locals’. Why should I care? This is hardly a stain on the character of Aston Villa fans, given that none will be involved (those who do not follow football at all should know that very few Aston Villa fans are Muslim, despite the demographics of the area around the stadium). It would reflect the character of modern Birmingham, not Britain as a whole.

All right-thinking people should oppose demands for special exemptions to be made to policing practices on behalf of a group of Middle Easterners, especially when doing so involves spending a fortune. This demand for a special exemption is, after all, purely so that Keir Starmer (and the rest of the political establishment) can boast, disingenuously, that the British state is still competent enough to police a football match, that Israelis are indeed safe in Britain, and, most importantly from their perspective, that there is nothing at all amiss with the Muslims who live in Birmingham.

Scott Goetz - Deputy Editor, Pimlico Journal