The government's handling of the upcoming Aston Villa Europa League match reeks of a degree of incompetence for which they are now rightly known.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about it all is that he’s alleged to be a genuine football fan. You’d expect that he’d know about the terrible reputation that some of the supporters ofsome Israeli clubs have earned themselves in recent years. Indeed, those years don’t even need to have been that recent. Here are Maccabi Tel Aviv, being called“Israel’s most racist football club” almost a full decade ago. But this is, of course, the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, so you can pretty much guarantee that he’ll back the wrong horse.
The matter of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans not being permitted to get tickets for their forthcoming Europa League match against Aston Villa is a pure comedy of errors from start to finish, which began with the Prime Minister siding with football hooligans over a decision made by Birmingham CIty Council’s Safety Advisory Group on the advice of West Midlands Police, middled with various blowhards talking at great length about this was somehow a great injustice, and which ended with Maccabi Tel Aviv themselves angrily turning down a ticket allocation in a manner which demonstrated the very attitude which sits under the behaviour which got them banned in the first place.
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It may surprise some politicians to know this, but decisions such as that made by Birmingham City Council’s Safety Advisory Group aren’t made on a wing and a prayer. A full evaluation will have been made of the potential risks of the situation, and the likelihood of hundreds or thousands of Israeli supporters from a club with a well-worn reputation for causing trouble descending on Birmingham, a city with a substantial Muslim population, was apparently considered too much of a security risk for them to be able to approve the club getting a ticket allocation, something which isn’t too much of a surprise, considering that their trip to Amsterdam in November 2024 hasgot its own Wikipedia page.
The police themselves will likely have been unconcerned about the geo-political implications of such a match, or even particularly who would be at risk from whom. The information that they’ll have received will have noted that there was a serious risk of public disorder were this to occur and they made their decision accordingly. Public disorder, so far as they’re concerned, is public disorder and it is, frankly, astonishing that the Prime Minister should have sided with a foreign football club whose travelling ‘supporters’ havean absolutely terrible reputation over the advice of one of his own police forces.
And now the Prime Minister has made himself look like a bloody idiot who doesn’t understand a situation but will offer a from-the-hip reactionary reply anyway. Step away from the grandstanding, Mr Starmer. This is a look that doesn’t suit anybody. Over the coming days, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon loudly announced that he would be attending Villa Park on the evening of the match as a show of solidarity from the Israelis, and definitely not in an attempt to provoke the sort of race riot that gave him such a bonk on last summer.
From here on, the story descended into farce. On Sunday, with the government having already essentially promised to browbeat the police into siding with them over the concept of public order, the match between and Maccabi Tel Aviv and their city rivals Hapoelhad to be abandoned before the teams even had the chance to start the match because of, you guessed it, extremely violent scenes in the stands which may have been in part provoked by the police.
Even in the face of this, the Garden Full of Rakes Office saw fit toput out a public statement the following day, in which they described themselves as “deeply saddened” that football hooligans with a terrible reputation supported by far-right grifters would be unable wreak havoc upon Birmingham and which concluded with them saying, “We all want to ensure that all fans can enjoy the Aston Villa game safely early next month and that’s why the Home Office is working closely with West Midlands police to understand what resources may be required for this to be possible” after having spent the previous few days having noisily talked about one of the very things that would have made this substantially less likely.
And then, as if by magic, Maccabi Tel Aviv declined a ticket allocation that there was little indication they’d even been offered, though they couldn’t do so in anything like a conciliatory fashion. “As a result of the hate-filled falsehoods, a toxic atmosphere has been created, which makes the safety of our fans wishing to attend very much in doubt”, they said in their statement”, pulling that extremely familiar stunt of conflating with anything negative said about anything or anybody relating to Israel with antisemitism, which has been in the Israeli far-right playbook for decades, and which still seems to be working as effective as ever.
Meanwhile, Culture Clown Lisa Nandy was also climbing on her high horse,telling parliament as a result of an urgent question - because if there’s one thing that this government is good at, it’s mixing its animal metaphors by making a mountain out of a molehill by climbing onto their high horse while backing the wrong one - that Aston Villa had released a statement saying that fans wouldn’t be allowed to enter without apparently acknowledging that they were doing so on police advice - What was she expecting them to do?Ignorepolice advice? - and then going on to explain exactly how such decisions are made before adding a big, juicy “HOWEVER” to the end of it.
The Israeli state is not the same as Israeli people, and Jewish people are not the same as Israeli people or the Israeli state. This isn’t difficult to understand. Some of the finest people I’ve ever met have been Jewish. It is extremely troubling that antisemitism is on the rise globally, but the assumption that anybody who raises complaints about the behaviour of the Israeli government - or even any particular group of Israelis, if those concerns are well-documented and have been much-reported - is de facto an ‘antisemite’ is facile to the point of being insulting. It feels astonishing that this even needs to be said.
But this government seems so keen to appear hostile towards brown-skinned people that they seem quite at ease in behaving this way, even though repeated opinion polling has shown that they’re successfully alienating practically everybody who voted for them last year while not wooing the provincial racists to whom they’re presumably attempting to appeal at the moment. Were it not for the fact that their incompetence only seems likely to let a far-right party sneak into power at the next general election, it would be pretty funny.
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