You may recall the cancellation of the Maccabi Tel Aviv-Aston Villa game back in November. What has happened since is that, due to constant scrutiny by Nick Timothy MP, Lord Austin and a small number of journalists, the narrative that West Midlands police spun at the time – that the Israeli fans were too dangerous to host – has slowly been unravelling. The force stands accused of retroactively cobbling together evidence for a ban that was actually rooted in fears about sectarian violence in Birmingham; ‘elements’ of the local community reportedly wished to ‘arm themselves‘ and target visiting fans. So far, so reassuring. Four senior officers were called to the Home Affairs select committee to answer questions about their particular combination of apparent incompetence and deceit – allegations which they deny.
The four representatives from West Midlands police were fascinating creatures. Three of them babbled while one remained completely silent. The Four Horsemen of Incompetence. They communicated like aliens from the heart of a different planetary system. They had become so consumed in their own baffling internal culture, that they had actually ceased to communicate like human beings.
They spoke in a torrent of meaningless jargon. A simple question about whether minutes were taken in a particular meeting was answered with a deluge of completely irrelevant information about silver stars and party conference policing. It was sort of the opposite of lying by omission, a very modern British form of deceit: lying by a surfeit of meaningless word salads. Some of their terms though were very telling. One officer referred to ‘a rising tide of concern locally’. Now to me that’s the sort of language you might use to describe opposition to a housing development or a change in a bus route, what it actually transpired to be was the threat of armed Islamic militias seeking to enact a pogrom.
Asked if AI had been used to assemble the ‘intelligence’ report on Maccabi fans, Chief Constable Craig Guildford smirked. ‘We don’t do that. We don’t use AI,’ he said. A few sentences later he admitted that a police officer had in fact used Google AI to find references to a Maccabi/West Ham match that had never actually taken place.
When they were asked why it was that it was that the committee had only learned about the threat of armed vigilante violence by local ‘community groups’ (presumably the Brownies, members of the United Reform Church, militant Bowls clubs?) through a newspaper report, the Chief Constable claimed it was because nobody had worded a question to them about the topic specifically enough. ‘Totally outrageous’ spat one committee member over him. She was right.
They were at constant pains to emphasise that they weren’t present at certain meetings. Essentially, they couldn’t justify why they had taken the decision to ban fans, un-minuted conversations were constantly contradicting each other, so too were the assorted plods. At one point the chief constable – after a period of pregnant silence – said ‘that’s three or four things at once there’, as if the conceptual possibility of multiple things happening simultaneously was beyond him. Hilariously, a phrase which kept on coming up was ‘an absence of intelligence’. Of the truth of that there could be no doubt. In all the confusion and obfuscation one thing was abundantly clear: under no circumstances get your bag snatched in the West Midlands. These people make Inspector Clouseau look like Poirot, Marple and Holmes rolled into one.
These four stuttering incompetents might have just been one small aspect of the catastrophic rot now afflicting every level of the British state – a bit like interviewing four individual cancer cells – but it was telling nonetheless.
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