Laurie Wastell

The real reason Birmingham isn’t safe for Jews

(Photo: Getty)

The decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from attending their Europa League game against Aston Villa next month has led to a major row about two-tier policing. Why exactly is the arrival of several thousand Israelis in Birmingham expected to precipitate a major, violent riot? And shouldn’t West Midlands Police, rather than advising the local council that the ban should go ahead over safety concerns, have simply pledged to come out in force to allow the game to proceed as usual?

The focus on the police and the ‘optics’ here has the whiff of displacement activity

The outrage and apparent shock at this decision has been oddly fulsome. Sir Keir Starmer himself has not only denounced the ban but is so ‘angered’ that he is now working to overturn the move from Westminster. Starmer can’t be surprised though about West Midlands Police’s advice. The ‘community policing’ model – where policing happens with some fear and a great deal of favour, depending on who is being policed – has long been how UK forces have opted to deal with the pressures and frictions of multicultural Britain. Indeed, our demographics being what they are, de facto ‘two-tier’ policing is now baked into how the British state operates.

Birmingham saw this last year during the Southport unrest. First, there was a fierce countrywide crackdown on white working-class disorder, but when gangs of masked, armed Muslim men turned up in Bordesley Green in central Birmingham, they were given the run of the place. Journalists were menaced, with a Sky News broadcast van having its tires slashed. A mob attacked a family pub, forcing the terrified customers to barricade themselves inside. Outside, an innocent punter was attacked by several men and left with a lacerated liver.

Why had they been allowed to run riot? The next day, Emlyn Richards of West Midlands Police explained to Sky News that his force had met with ‘community leaders… to understand the style of policing that we needed to deliver’. That ‘style’ appeared to be remarkably hands off.

This was undoubtedly outrageous, two-tier behaviour by the police. Yet the law enforcement response was downstream of a larger problem: the grim fact that inter-ethnic rioting was taking place in English cities to begin with.

West Midlands Police also bears its share of responsibility for the most shameful example of two-tier policing, the grooming gangs scandal. By 2010, the force had become aware that men were approaching children at school gates to groom victims. But an internal report noted that the predominantly Pakistani-Muslim profile of the offenders and the predominantly white, female profile of the victims had ‘the potential to cause significant community tensions’. So the report was never published, only coming to light following Freedom of Information requests several years later. So-called community cohesion was prioritised over protecting these vulnerable girls.

Such a decision was of course despicable, but the fact is that those public order concerns didn’t arise in a vacuum. They stemmed from the fragile and fractious social environment that had arisen in multicultural towns in the north of England after decades of immigration. And while everyone can agree that the police’s approach to this scandal was wrong, it was not their fault that people in Britain were minded to carry out these appalling racially and religiously motivated crimes in the first place – it was down to politicians’ reckless decisions over decades.

Likewise, while West Midlands Police’s decision to prevent Maccabi fans attending this match undoubtedly puts the UK to shame, one has to recognise how the demographic realities of Birmingham have put public order in Britain’s second city in an extremely precarious position. It was not West Midlands Police that transformed Birmingham from 99.6 per cent white in 1951 to 42.9 per cent white British in 2021; nor is it their fault that Muslims comprise 70 per cent of residents of Aston Park, where Villa Park stadium is situated. The police did not make a Birmingham Imam issue an ‘Islamic Ruling’ that worshippers should ‘not show mercy to Maccabi Tel Aviv fans’. Nor did they sign the local petition to ban the Israelis from coming. It was local residents, concerned more about ‘Gaza’ than the bins, who elected Muslim sectarian MPs now crowing about ‘Israeli hooligans and terrorists’ being denied entry.

The focus on the police and the ‘optics’ here has the whiff of displacement activity. When commentators decry ‘cowardly cops’, it is perhaps worth spelling out what they are effectively calling for. For the police it means overtime and risking getting bottled or worse to maintain the façade that Jews are safe in Britain’s second city. It means ordinary British coppers policing a mini Israel-Gaza conflict on their doorstep to spare the blushes of those who insist we’re a harmonious multi-faith democracy, and that our diversity is our ‘greatest strength’. Surely by now it’s clear that it isn’t. And no amount of riot gear and pepper spray will make it so.

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