Everyone is familiar with the old insult that you can tell when a politician is not telling the truth because his lips move. Be that as it may, a variation of this has emerged, but this time when someone from West Midlands Police is giving evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee.
Did West Midlands Police simply make stuff up? It’s difficult to avoid that conclusion
It emerged on Sunday that when the chief constable, Craig Guildford and the assistant chief constable, Mike O’Hara, gave evidence last Monday on why they decided to ban Jews – sorry, Israeli fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv – from last month’s Europa League game at Villa Park in Birmingham, they told an untruth so whopping and so central to their argument that they acted properly and in good faith, that it is difficult to see how they can now remain in their jobs.
O’Hara repeatedly told MPs that Birmingham’s own Jewish community had favoured the ban. This, he suggested, formed a key part of their assessment that it was too ‘high risk’ to allow Israeli fans to attend.
O’Hara said the force had extensive consultation with Jewish representatives who were themselves worried about the presence of the fans, and did not want Maccabi fans to come. But this wasn’t what happened. Far from consulting with Birmingham’s tiny 2,000 strong Jewish community, the police ignored them, speaking to them only after the ban had been imposed. After the truth came out, O’Hara wrote to Jewish community figures in Birmingham to say he ‘apologises’ and that it was ‘not my intention’ to mislead – and confirming that not a single community figure had at any point told police they supported the ban.
Did West Midlands Police simply make stuff up? It’s difficult to avoid that conclusion. I won’t rehash the arguments around the ban which have been extensively discussed. But even as they spoke on Monday, it seemed clear they were offering MPs an account which required one to believe at least six impossible things before breakfast.
The police intelligence report on which they justified their ban included an account of a match between Maccabi and West Ham in 2023 which West Ham won 1-0. No such match has ever been played. It is now clear (thanks to the work of Nick Timothy MP, who has been tireless on this) that for this part of its intelligence report the police appeared to have relied on AI, which has almost as great a penchant for making things up as West Midlands Police.
Guildford told MPs that the reference to the fictitious math was ‘a result of some social media scraping that was done…We also search through social media to see what is trending, what the posts are, who is following the posts and so on. It was a result of that.’ But no one – including West Midlands Police – has ever been able to produce a single social media post about the West Ham match for the obvious reason that it never happened.
Guildford also claimed to MPs that Dutch police had given him a wholly different account of their actions and the supposed threat posed by Maccabi fans than they gave to the Sunday Times, to the Dutch public, to the Dutch courts and indeed to everyone – apart from Guildford. It was the Sunday Times which first reported the contradiction between the claims of West Midlands Police about the match in Amsterdam, which led to fans being banned from Villa Park, and the facts as stated by Dutch police. Strangely, however, despite Guildford’s entire case resting on this Zoom call to his Dutch counterpart, no record of the call having taken place has been produced nor any minute of its contents.
Even if you ignore the rubbish over community engagement, for any of the rest of Guildford and O’Hara’s evidence to be true, the Dutch police must themselves have lied repeatedly to the Dutch courts, which convicted those responsible for the pogrom in Amsterdam which targeted Maccabi fans. Not a single Maccabi fan was charged with any offence in Amsterdam. The Dutch police must also have lied in their official report, to the Dutch media and to the Sunday Times. And then confessed this lie in a Zoom call to Chief Constable Guildford which, for some reason, he decided not to minute, but which he used as the basis of his decision making. Go figure.
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