In the weeks before the Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters ban was announced, Conservative party leader-in-waiting Robert Jenrick declared that "a lack of integration leads us into a very dark place as a country". He was commenting on leaked remarks he had made earlier about not seeing any white faces in the Handsworth area of Birmingham that was also the worst slum he had ever seen, and how this showed a failure to integrate immigrants. His remarks were defended by the actual leader of what was until very recently called the UK’s natural party of government.
The reality about Handsworth is very different, but nowadays reality doesn’t matter to our populist right. What matters is the competition to win the racist vote, and making racist statements is a good way of winning that competition. Handsworth in Birmingham is fair game because it is predominantly Muslim, and a key part of the right’s populist rhetoric is Islamophobic. This extends into foreign policy, so it is a factor behind support for Israel and denial of Israel’s Gaza genocide. This is all copied of course from Republicans in the US, and an increasingly islamophobic United States (including significant parts of the Democratic party), but it is probably an insult to both Reform and the Conservatives to suggest that they couldn’t have dreamt up this strategy all by themselves. Unfortunately Islamophobic views are held by around a fifth of the UK population according to Luke Tryl of More In Common (roughly double the number who hold antisemetic views), and both Reform and the Conservatives want to capture those votes.
When Aston Villa put out a statement at just after 5pm on 16th October confirming a police decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from its Europa cup tie, by 10pm the leaders of the UK’s four main political parties had put out statements condemning the ban. In the minds of these political leaders and the mainstream media, this ban must have been put in place because of worries that Jewish Israeli fans would be attacked by British Muslims. “We will not tolerate antisemitism on our streets.” said the UK Prime Minister, calling it the wrong decision.
Now perhaps this very swift denunciation of the ban, and the assumption that the ban was made because of fears about attacks on rather than by Maccabi fans, was because politicians had the terrible antisemitic attack on a synagogue two weeks earlier in Manchester fresh in their memories. But such a rush to judgement on such a serious matter must also reflect the Islamophobic narratives described above that have become so pervasive among UK politicians and the UK media in recent years.
In contrast, those with any knowledge would remember recent violence in Amsterdam caused, at least in part, by a section of the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans who were looking for trouble, and that some of those fans had randomly attacked Muslims in that city. (There was also subsequent violence from Ajax fans.) Shortly after the UK ban was announced, a domestic game in Israel had to be postponed because of violence between Maccabi fans and those of another club. The police assessment that led to the ban concluded that Maccabi fans were likely to be the perpetrators of trouble. In other words the ban was issued primarily to protect UK citizens from violence coming from some overseas football fans with a history of violence.
The UK politicians who framed this ban as an example of antisemitism, and the UK media that followed this line, were therefore just wrong. Now that will not bother the populist right, because the populist right is not that interested in facts. That, unfortunately, includes the leadership of the Conservative party, which at the moment is trying to show that Enoch Powell was too much of a moderate on immigration. But it really should matter to Keir Starmer and Labour ministers (and to Ed. Davey). It should matter to Lisa Nandy when she said in the House that this kind of ban was unprecedented when it isn’t.
For a start, ministers cannot claim on the one hand that public safety is an absolute priority at sporting events and then suggest that maybe in some circumstances other factors are more important. The police statement said that following a thorough assessment “we have classified the upcoming Aston Villa vs Maccabi Tel-Aviv fixture as high risk.” and “While the Safety Certificate is issued by Birmingham City Council, West Midlands Police supports the decision to prohibit away supporters from attending.” Their statement also explicitly referred to the problems in Amsterdam. At the very least, this should have given the Prime Minister and his advisors pause for thought that maybe they needed to be a bit more thorough before concluding that the police and council had made the wrong decision. They might have looked up reports of what happened in Amsterdam, for example.
But the Prime Minister’s reaction was far worse than just claiming the police and local council had got it wrong. It framed the decision as involving antisemitism. This is problematic for two reasons. First, it presumed that all Maccabi supporters were the victims in this case, and that the only aggression would be from locals. As I have noted, just a few minutes on the internet would have shown that to be false.
More seriously, let’s take the government’s presumption and see what it implies. Just suppose the safety threat arose from demonstrations against Israeli actions in Gaza. The Prime Minister’s statement implies such demonstrations reflect antisemitism, rather than an understandable dislike of genocide and a view that the UK should not maintain sporting contacts with countries whose government’s are involved in genocide. You may disagree with calling Israel’s actions in Palestine genocide, or you may think that such things should not interfere with sport, but saying that such beliefs reflect antisemitism is equivalent to saying that those demonstrating during sporting events involving South Africa when it was an apartheid state reflected prejudice against white people. We should also note that all Russian clubs have been banned by Fifa and Uefa following the invasion of Ukraine.
Of course, labelling any criticisms of the actions of the Israeli government as reflecting antisemitism is a standard tactic of the current Israeli government and the political right in the United States. Unfortunately this shows, yet again, that Labour has become so embedded in the right wing misinformation machine that they have become an integral part of it. Needless to say, Badenoch’s reaction was much worse, talking about Jewish people not being allowed to watch football.
However the media also has very serious questions to answer. Why wasn’t the history of violence among some Maccabi fans not introduced immediately into any reporting or discussion in the media? Why did the media allow the uninformed opinion of the main political parties to obscure facts which any news organisation worth its salt should have known? In particular, why did Sky News initially suggest that the decision to ban Maccabi fans was only in order to protect those fans, and later had to apologise for their error? Not to mention their interview with a ‘Jewish’ Aston Villa fan.
The answer may be that our media and politicians are increasingly about perpetuating right wing opinion rather than reporting facts. This is not the media following majority public opinion, but rather the media attempting to change public opinion. Despite all the one-sided reporting of the Maccabi ban, 42% of voters polled by YouGov thought the police had made the right decision, with only 28% thinking it was the wrong decision. The media/political complex in the UK is extremely self-referential, and given that right wing propaganda outlets are a key part of that complex it can easily lose touch with what the majority of the public think and believe.
As for the government, the episode adds weight to my argument that Starmer’s conference speech was not the major change of course some had suggested. Starmer’s statements about the banning of Maccabi fans is perfectly in line with his awful speech on immigration that sought to use almost every piece of misinformation peddled by the right. Whoever advised him to label the ban wrong and describe it as an example of antisemitism should consider their position, and if they don’t then Starmer should consider it for them. I am sure Starmer is serious about wanting to stop the advance of Reform, but to do that he needs to start confronting rather than copying right wing populist narratives.


