From the Telegraph
Police cited a “fictitious” football match in a report that contributed to Israeli fans being banned from a game against Aston Villa.
Craig Guildford, Chief Constable of West Midlands Police, said he was told a 2023 match between West Ham and Maccabi Tel Aviv was inaccurately included in a report after “some social media scraping was done”.
The police chief’s admission came in a grilling by MPs on the Commons home affairs select committee, which is investigating how fans of the Israeli club were banned from attending a match in Birmingham.
The decision to bar supporters from the Nov 6 match was made after West Midlands Police raised concerns about potential trouble from fans to Birmingham city council’s Safety Advisory Group.
This led to the decision to keep the Maccabi fans out of Villa Park. The decision was condemned at the time by the Prime Minister and Home Secretary.
On Monday, MPs heard the police evaluation of the event was based primarily on information given to the force by Dutch police commanders ahead of the game.
An intelligence report was then compiled by West Midlands Police and submitted to the Safety Advisory Group.
Giving evidence to the committee in an earlier session, Lord Mann, the Government’s independent adviser on anti-Semitism, highlighted an inaccuracy in the report.
Reading an extract from the report, the cross-bench peer said: “The most recent match Maccabi played in the UK was against West Ham in the Europa Conference League on Nov 9 2023. This was part of the 23-24 European campaign. It marked Maccabi Tel Aviv’s last appearance on UK soil to date.”
Addressing the MPs on the extract, he added: “That’s in the intelligence report. That didn’t happen. West Ham have never played Tel Aviv. On that day, West Ham played Olympiacos of Greece and beat them one-nil.”
Answering questions on how the force had cited what MPs described as “a fictitious match off the internet”, Mr Guildford said: ” . . .We did a very comprehensive assessment. Some of that we get from partners, other football clubs, the UK policing unit, our own intelligence collection and we also search through social media to see what’s trending, what are the posts, who’s following the posts etc etc, so it was as a result of that.”
However, he claimed the reference to the match had “no material impact on the document whatsoever” and that just because the citation was inaccurate, did not mean the report was “wrong”.
Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said: “This evidence session revealed a shocking series of admissions from West Midlands Police. It’s now clear the decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from travelling to Birmingham was a capitulation to an extremist mob, backed up by questionable evidence sourced by a single police inspector and dubious social media searches. After such a litany of errors, it’s only right that the Chief Constable resigns.”
Sir Michael Ellis, the former attorney-general, said: “After the appearance before the home affairs committee in Parliament on Monday, it is clear the police have failed to conduct themselves over this decision in a way that maintains public confidence and community cohesion in the UK. In the circumstances, I regret to say that the Chief Constable’s position has become untenable.”
Lord Austin writes Anyone hoping to get adequate answers as to why the West Midlands Police decided to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from attending the Europa League match against Aston Villa last month would not have found them at the home affairs select committee hearing.
What we did learn, however, was that very basics of policing were not followed at any stage of the process. The committee, chaired by Dame Karen Bradley, heard that Chief Constable Guildford made the shameful decision after gathering dubious “intelligence” from unnamed (and unaccountable) Dutch sources, after meeting an anti-Israel independent MP and having used an AI “social media scraping” tool that generated entirely fabricated information about a previous Maccabi match that never happened.
What does that say about the state of policing in Birmingham today? That they are open to political influence. That they are unable to adequately review and evaluate the quality of evidence. And that their evidence gathering would shame even the Keystone Cops.
Before the terrible events of last month, Maccabi Tel Aviv had played across Europe more than 100 times without their fans causing a major incident – so where did these “tensions” suddenly come from? The two senior cops made no mention of pressure from local residents, though they referred somewhat obliquely throughout to “the community”.
Yet we now know a bit more about this community. We know, for instance, that a group founded by a former Hezbollah terrorist had taken credit for the ban. We know, too, from the committee hearing that the police met Ayoub Khan, the so-called pro-Gaza independent MP, after he had contacted Aston Villa demanding a ban. (Mr Khan, unsurprisingly, remained quiet in the run-up to Young Boys, the Switzerland team notorious for hooliganism, playing Aston Villa last Thursday, a game that saw mass unrest and appalling violent scenes.)
Neither Mr Guildford nor Mr O’Hara had an adequate answer when asked why the Dutch authorities dispute their version about what happened in Amsterdam when Maccabi played Ajax earlier this year. Both senior officers claimed, with a nudge and a wink, that Dutch commanders had been placed “under pressure” from politicians in Amsterdam.
This is despite the clear evidence to the contrary. We know that in the aftermath of the match, the Dutch authorities and video recordings showed that it was Israeli fans who were the victims, including one being thrown into a canal.
On Monday, Mr Guildford even repeated the claims made in the West Midlands report, despite denials by the Dutch police themselves. It was seemingly lost on them that five local men were convicted for attacking Jews, that nine out of 10 of those arrested were local and that Dutch court documents detailed a more than 900-person WhatsApp group that called for a “Jew hunt”.
