How the reaction to a football ban showed how our politicians and media have become trapped in right wing Islamophobic narratives and detached from the majority of voters

 

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.

What the call for fiscal headroom reveals

 

Everyone, including the IFS, is agreed that the Chancellor should in the budget create more fiscal headroom than she did previously. Rather than match forecasts for taxes to expected current spending (plus or minus ten billion, say), she should aim for forecast taxes to be significantly more above expected current spending, to allow for headroom against unforeseen negative shocks. This seems very reasonable, doesn’t it? Well consider some analogies.

I have the thermostat set at 20 degrees centigrade, because I find that a comfortable temperature. But sometimes if there is a cold wind outside the temperature inside can dip below that before the boiler and the radiators can respond to put it back up to 20. I feel cold as a result. So I should set the thermostat to 22 degrees, to provide headroom in case a cold wind blows.

Hopefully you can see the fallacy in that strategy. Or take the Bank of England’s inflation target of 2%. Now, as we have seen, shocks to inflation like wars can happen that will take inflation well above that target. We cannot have that, can we. So the Bank should in practice aim for zero inflation, to provide headroom so that it doesn’t get caught out with above target inflation following inflationary shocks.

Now fortunately those who designed the UK’s inflation targeting regime were sensible enough to emphasise that the 2% target was not short for ‘2% or less’, and that inflation falling short of 2% was just as bad as inflation exceeding the target. So allowing headroom for the 2% target would make no sense. So why does it seem to make sense in achieving a fiscal rule but not an inflation target?

Why does everyone seem to be calling for greater fiscal headroom in the budget? I think it is because the taxes=current spending fiscal rule is not seen as a symmetrical target. If shocks turn out to be positive for the public finances so borrowing is less than expected that is not seen as a problem, but if negative shocks occur such that current spending exceeds taxes then that is seen as a problem that the government has to fix immediately. That is why we had the nonsense of welfare cuts in the Spring.

The analogy that comes straight from the term ‘headroom’ is making sure you design doors such that hardly any people hit their head on when they walk through them. If you make your door too small many people will hit their head, which is bad. If you make your doors too tall then there is no equivalent injury suffered. The costs and benefits are not remotely symmetric.

The financial analogy might be a bank current account. I keep a positive balance in my account because I cannot predict precisely every payment going in and out of the account, and I don’t want the balance to go below zero and incur overdraft charges. But is a bank account an appropriate analogy for a government? Who is going to slap an overdraft charge on the government?

One answer might be the markets, in the form of higher interest rates on government debt. But that should already be in the forecast. Borrowing moderately in excess of the fiscal rules might lead to a small increase in interest rates on government debt, not because of supply and demand for government debt but because it would signal higher aggregate demand and therefore higher interest rates set by the Bank of England. On the other hand higher borrowing caused by weaker aggregate demand (leading to lower tax receipts|) could have the opposite effect, leading to lower interest rates on government debt. All this is quite different from overdraft charges.

In my view fiscal rules should be like the inflation target. They are and should be symmetrical: it is just as bad to miss the rule by borrowing too little as it is by borrowing too much. If you borrow too little you are taxing people too much or not giving people enough public services, or the economy is in a downturn. Those are all bad things that should be rectified. If this is the case, then you don’t need any headroom at all, just as the Bank of England doesn’t allow headroom for its inflation target.

But this is not how the media and the current government see things, and for that we probably have the reaction to Liz Truss's fiscal event partly to thank. In the Spring the government did not take the “grown up” decision (to quote Charlie Bean, ex LSE, Bank of England and OBR) to allow the OBR’s forecast to show the fiscal rule not holding with a promise to fix it in November. Instead it decided it had to act immediately, cutting welfare spending to meet the rule. Presumably it thought being ‘grown up’ and not doing this would cause the markets to panic, or more likely the media would generate lots of bad publicity.

Given this view held by the Chancellor, then it does make sense to create lots of headroom against borrowing more than the fiscal rule allows. But that in turn inevitably means that fiscal policy is going to be tighter than the fiscal rule implies it should be. If in practice you always plan for forecast taxes to be £20 billion or more above expected current spending, then given forecasting errors can go both ways the government is enacting a tighter policy than the fiscal rule on paper suggests. Furthermore in practice how much tighter will depend on the whim of the Chancellor at the time in setting the amount of headroom, which in turn will depend on the circumstances they find themselves in.

Now I admit neither of these problems (moderately tighter policy on an inconsistent basis) is that great in the overall scheme of things, but I think someone should at least recognise these issues. If you think government debt should fall faster than is implied by the golden rule, then it is better to get that rule to target a small surplus than mess around with headroom. But the headroom issue is a symptom of a bigger and more serious problem. 

As a result of a combination of mediamacro’s reading of the Truss debacle, and the constant stories in the press about bond vigilantes and impending doom from the imagined actions of these imaginary people, we are returning to a world where policymakers see deficits and debt as always a problem, rather than as something that allows better fiscal policy making. 

The government’s debt and deficits are meant to go up as well as down, because they allow smoother taxes and spending and can also allow both to support the economy when needed. Government borrowing is therefore a very useful tool, and not some problem that needs to be eliminated as much as possible. If, in contrast, the media and governments start seeing government borrowing as a problem rather than a useful tool, then this can interfere with good fiscal policy making. At its very worst, it can lead governments to start trying to reduce deficits during economic downturns or recessions, as it did from 2010 onwards. As I have noted elsewhere, that is a possibility that is more likely to happen as a result of recent change to fiscal rules.

Exaggerated claims about market reactions to debt and deficits infantilize fiscal policy, and that infantilisation can be very dangerous.  Talking about the UK as part of some impending advanced economy debt crisis is almost as silly as talk about a possible IMF bailout. Such talk is only magnified by a right wing press desperate to replace the memory of a recent crisis that was the result of a fiscal event they lavished ecstatic praise upon. The main reason we have a fiscal problem in the US is not because politicians are being irresponsible about debt but because a populist dictator is denying economic reality at every turn. One pretty foolproof way of encouraging right wing populism in the UK is to pretend the market requires public spending cuts when public spending levels are already weak. 

Populism and Economic Prosperity

 

Mainstream political parties normally claim that populist parties, if they ever got to power, would damage the economy. We have clear evidence that they are right, and right in a big way. A paper in the American Economic Review (one of the top economics journals) published nearly two years ago, looked at the macroeconomic consequences of populist regimes coming to power. The results can be summed up in the chart below (from this working paper version)

The black line is the average difference between GDP under a populist government compared to a counterfactual GDP without the populist government. If the populist government was in power for 15 years, GDP would be over 10% lower as a result of that government. I have used the analysis for right wing populists: for a similar chart for all populists see the paper, or this useful summary by Joel Suss in the FT.

There are obviously countless issues in any analysis of this type, like how a populist government is defined, how you do the counterfactual, how you ensure you are not getting reverse causality (i.e. bad economic times encourage the election of populists etc) and so on. For those interested in those issues the paper is very readable.

The UK is part of this data set, because it rightly labels the Johnson government as populist. We know that the Johnson government reduced UK GDP because of Brexit, by a total of 4% according to the OBR. But the UK’s response to the pandemic was also pretty bad in large part because of the Johnson government. So our own national experience is consistent with the chart above.

Besides GDP, the paper also finds that debt to GDP increases under a populist government, and there is weaker evidence that inflation also increases. The reasons why GDP falls under a populist government are only touched on in the paper, but they are pretty obvious. First, populist governments tend to restrict overseas trade: Brexit, and Trump’s tariffs, are clear examples. Putting barriers up that make overseas trade more difficult reduces GDP. The paper provides average effects for the impact of populism on trade, but it is more useful to look at the specific measures imposed by a particular populist government.

A second reason populist governments reduce GDP is that they make their countries less open to people from overseas, as well as goods from overseas. Populist governments tend to weaken an independent judicial system, and that among other things weakens the confidence of business to invest. Our current vintage of right wing populists appear very hostile to academia, and academia is where innovation starts, and where the expertise to implement innovation often comes from. Populists tend to devalue expertise, which allows them to make unrealistic promises on tax and spending, creating budgetary problems. I could go on with specifics, but more generally, societies where one part is ‘othered’ or declared the enemy within tend to work less well than those that are more unified. Societies where the governing elite is mainly concerned with making money at other people's expense work less well than societies where innovation is the key to becoming wealthy. [1]

One obvious question is why, if the macroeconomic impact of populist governments is so bad, they don’t get voted out of power quite quickly. Unfortunately they generally don’t. The paper estimates that on average populist governments tend to stay in power longer than other governments. There are two reasons for this depressing result. First, populists rig the democratic system to make their re-election more likely, either directly through gerrymandering for example or by restrictions on press freedom. Second, the social and economic reasons for the rise in populism tend to be persistent.

The topic of our time is why today we are seeing such a rise in right wing populism, populism that all too easily morphs into forms of fascism. It is of course important to understand why some groups of people are more receptive to populist messages than others. But in understanding why now is different from previous post-war decades, I don’t think that is where we should focus. In the UK, for example, the BNP has always had support, and racism used to be much more prevalent. What has changed over the last few decades is the attitude of the political and media elites.

When I started this blog, it was the early period of UK austerity and I was obsessed with how a UK government could disregard basic macroeconomics (don’t cut spending in a demand deficient recession where interest rates have hit their floor), but also why that policy was popular despite its disregard for what every first year economics student is taught. I talked a bit about the transmission mechanism between academic knowledge and policy, and how that mechanism can break down or be disrupted. Periods where expertise was ignored or contested could still then be considered undesirable departures from an accepted norm.

Of course since then we have had Brexit, which was another case where this breakdown occurred with devastating consequences for the UK economy. Unfortunately today political parties ignoring academic expertise has become routine. In the US we now have an administration that actively contests expertise not just in economics, but in climate science and medicine. I and many others have written extensively on how the media, owned by self-interested members of the plutocracy or run by their lackies, can not just ignore academic expertise but through propaganda counteract any influence it might have. [2]

For those who still doubt the critical role the media can play in all this just look at what has happened and is happening in the US. The biggest social media company bought up by someone who thinks Farage isn’t right wing enough for the UK, and who has changed that company so that it promotes the far right. US media that isn’t already owned by plutocrats who support Trump is being bought up by them. A media that once could be described as manufacturing consent is being turned into a propaganda machine for the Republicans and Trump. You can see the same processes starting in the UK. As Professor Emily Bell puts it in this fascinating discussion, “the patterns are almost exactly the same” in the UK and US.

The information and knowledge that populism severely damages the economy is there and is in the public domain, but the media increasingly acts to hide that from the public or distort that information so that much of the public never gets to understand it. Reality tends to win out in the end because it’s hard to disguise what is happening to people’s incomes, which is why Brexit is now much less popular than it was, but societies are increasingly losing their ability to avoid these pitfalls in advance. The reason this is happening is because a significant number of the ridiculously rich have decided their interests are served by promoting populism, and by investing in the means to promote populism.

[1] More speculatively, as right wing populists often appeal to a rose coloured view of the past as something to return to, it is not surprising that they enact policies that take society backwards. There also seems to be an aversion against current sacrifice for future gain.

[2] It is sometimes claimed that those voting for populists don’t care about negative economic effects. I think this may be true for a minority, but is not true for most. Those who voted for Brexit were significantly more optimistic about the economy because they believed the lies about ‘project fear’ and more money for the NHS.

The uphill struggle to stop Reform

 

Making political predictions is foolish, but I can only see two political parties that can stop a Reform government in the UK: Labour and Reform themselves. The mistake I made writing a similar post five years ago was to neglect the possibility of populist parties and leaders imploding, as Johnson’s Conservatives did. But we cannot assume that will happen to Reform.

One reason is that Reform and Farage are treated with kid gloves by the mainstream broadcast media. Corruption that might sink other politicians is often ignored for Reform politicians because too many think that is how a populist opposition would be expected to behave, so is it really news? But probably more important is that the broadcast media often takes its lead from the far right press, which is largely pro-Reform.

Could a revival in Conservative party fortunes damage Reform? Undoubtedly yes, but that looks increasingly unlikely to happen. Their policy of trying to ape Reform on Immigration, the ECHR or climate change just loses them votes to other more socially liberal parties, in particular the LibDems. Unless Reform implodes, few Reform voters are likely to be attracted back to the Conservatives because everyone remembers what a mess the Tories made while in power.

One way the Conservatives may become increasingly irrelevant is if more Conservative MPs defect to Reform. There is a danger here, in that Reform begins to look like the old Conservative government under a new name. But Farage is such a prominent figure that risk may be small, compared to the gains to Reform in capturing yet more Conservative voters.

Could an insurgent left stop Reform? While we could get to a French situation where centre parties are squeezed and the main battle is between the left and far right, in the UK it is much more difficult seeing that as any more than one route to Reform taking power. For the left to defeat Reform the Labour vote would have to completely collapse (far more than it has at present), and the remaining parties (LibDems, Greens, Welsh and Scottish Nationalists and maybe a new left party) would have to divide up the winnable seats between them, withdrawing from the others. Both conditions seem pretty unlikely on their own, and together even more unlikely, although not completely impossible.

For those who think a period of Reform in power would not be too bad, and might lay the groundwork for something much better afterwards, I ask you to just look at what is happening in the US. While Farage himself may try to distance himself from Trump before an election, it is pretty clear listening to someone like Tice that Reform are just copying the Republican party. [1]

It is the combination of a hard right populist media and Trump in the US that makes the threat of a Reform government so real, and that makes that prospect so terrifying. As we are currently seeing in the US, the transition to a fascism in which the leader is a virtual dictator, independent media is steadily eliminated, elections are rigged, minorities and any people that resist can be terrorised by a police force that goes around wearing masks and which has almost no accountability, and in which a judicial system is routinely overruled by a captured supreme court, can be frighteningly quick. While Reform may never capture more than 30+% of the vote in the UK, they can still capture power because of our bizarre first past the post system.

This is why it is worth looking at what happened at the Labour party conference, and see where that puts us in terms of Labour either helping or stopping Reform. For political journalists there have been two ways of spinning that conference: signs of hope or evidence of deep weakness. Both are true, because Labour are starting from such a poor position in electoral terms.

The first positive sign was to attack Reform on immigration on grounds other than the nebulous charges of impracticality or seriousness. If you wanted to put a really positive spin on what happened you could argue that because Labour had moved towards Reform’s rhetoric on immigration and asylum, this helped encourage Reform to go further by scrapping Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR). The idea of ILR is popular, so Farage’s policy does allow Labour to draw a clear dividing line between the two parties on this issue without worrying that it is giving them votes. But that spin is far too generous to Labour.

While it’s good that Labour have at last found something to make their immigration and asylum policy distinct from Reform and the Conservatives, overall their stance remains much too illiberal for many. Even with ILR, Labour’s position still leaves a lot to be desired. Every time they bring in some tweak on immigration or asylum that introduces another cruelty that migrants must face, they give credibility to the illusion the populist right has created that these issues are of utmost national importance. [2] To quote Chris Grey

“Yet Labour politicians still don’t seem to grasp that by constantly accepting that there are ‘legitimate concerns’ about “uncontrolled immigration” and “open borders” (when the reality is that immigration is not, and has never been, ‘uncontrolled’ any more than borders have been ‘open’) in general, or, in this case, about existing ILR rules (which, as the polls linked to earlier show, are supported by the overwhelming majority), they cede ground to Farage and invite his inevitable denunciation of their reforms as inadequate.”

In addition the new Home Secretary seems happy to take ever more authoritarian positions on other matters like policing. It is hard to imagine that any liberal voter will take the combination of Labour’s position on ILR and their attempt to ban repeat marches and think that makes them more likely to vote Labour.

Chris Grey also welcomes that Starmer is finally linking the problem of small boats to Brexit, and Brexit to Farage, calling them Farage boats. But for that to work it needs every Labour politician to use the phrase at every opportunity, and take those opportunities to explain why Brexit is a major probable cause of the increase in small boats. I see no signs of that happening yet.

More generally, Starmer’s speech illustrates another problem Labour have, and that is a hopeless communications strategy. For example, calling Reform’s policy racist may be accurate, but is it good politics? The Daily Mail took no time to distort what Starmer had said. This distortion might not matter if Labour had a good communications team that could fight back against this kind of misinformation, but at present they don’t.

Labour should take a leaf out of the right wing playbook, which is to find the most extreme examples on the right and demand that Farage and Jenrich disassociate themselves from them. To quote from Ian Dunt in a very good discussion

“Right now, for instance, several mainstream right-wing commentators are claiming that black people cannot be English. Matthew Goodwin has said it. Isabel Oakshott has said it. This is absolute poison, obviously, but it is also contrary to public opinion. It is unpopular. I would like to see a Labour communication strategy which punches that bruise. Make it the chief issue, focus remorselessly on it. Force everyone on the right to either disassociate themselves from it or be branded a racist for holding it.”

This suggests to me that Labour still have two basic impediments to improving their electoral position that have yet to be removed. The first is to develop a far better communications strategy. It is hard to combat the power of the right wing press and right wing social media, particularly when the BBC shows every sign of being captured by that media. However the one institution that could present a counterweight to that power is a Labour government. Yet the government seems remarkably reluctant to take any steps to combat this media. It still just uses X rather than alternative social media, for example.

The second is to stop thinking Labour has to fight Reform by stealing its clothes, and instead start thinking about preserving its core vote, which is not some bygone working class but is the socially liberal middle class. Pursuing a Blue Labour strategy might work against a fatally unpopular Conservative government, but it does not work when in government. The last year proves that. The longer that party factionalism and ideology blind those running Labour to this basic truth the bigger the crash will be when electoral disaster forces change upon them, and the greater the possibility becomes of a Trump like government in the UK.

[1] Tice even talked about the link between Tylenol and autism on UK TV, even though Tylenol is called Paracetamol in the UK.

{2] Voters might think immigration is very important nationally, but few think it is important in their own area. Which means its perceived importance depends on what voters hear in the media, and we know the media is full of myths that are miles from the truth. In the UK immigration is the ultimate vibe issue.