For weeks we have watched something uncomfortable unfold in real time. A venerable policing institution exposing its hypocrisy and failings to the public.
In October last year, West Midlands Police (WMP) and Birmingham’s Safety Advisory Group announced that Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters would not be allowed to attend a Europa League match at Villa Park. The stated rationale was ‘intelligence’ pointing to serious safety risks, as well as a pattern of violent disorder during other European fixtures. But the official line appears to be covering for the unofficial truth: WMP banned the Jews first and went looking for the evidence later.
WMP’s justification leaned heavily on supposed incidents involving Maccabi supporters in Amsterdam in 2024. Allegedly, there had been violence, chaos, flags torn down and disorder that had left the local police force overwhelmed.
Then the Dutch police checked their own notebooks. Their official statement confirmed that nothing resembling the chaos WMP reported had actually taken place. While WMP claimed that 5,000 Dutch officers had been called to respond to the disorder, only 1,200 were in attendance. Claims that pro-Palestine protesters had been thrown into Amsterdam’s canals were also found to be false. On the contrary, the Dutch police flagged that the main targets of any violence that took place that night had been the Jewish Maccabi supporters themselves.
The mistakes and misinformation spread by WMP continued to stack up. When asked by parliament’s Home Affairs Select Committee who his force consulted before enacting the ban, WMP’s chief constable, Craig Guildford, insisted that local Jewish representatives had been involved. Except in reality, none had been. WMP later submitted a written apology for the ‘unintentional errors’ in the WMP’s summary of events.
Another of these ‘unintentional errors’ included a reference to a non-existent match between Maccabi and West Ham – an episode that had been entirely hallucinated by an artificial-intelligence tool. WMP initially denied using AI to gather intelligence, but later admitted to having consulted Microsoft Copilot when cornered. Needless to say, it is disconcerting to know that British forces are asking online chatbots to carry out investigations.
Hovering over all this, perhaps unsurprisingly, was the ‘Gaza independent‘ MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, Ayoub Khan. He declared that Israeli supporters represented an unacceptable provocation in the Villa Park neighbourhood – an area with a Muslim population of around 70 per cent.
Khan’s comments amount to little more than political sectarianism masquerading as concern for public safety. The scandal here is that he was taken seriously. Though a liberal democracy will always churn out a certain number of crank politicians, one does not expect their bile to translate immediately into policy.
When it boils down to it, West Midlands Police invented a threat that did not exist. They reverse-engineered an outcome. Even more extraordinarily, when the truth emerged, there were very few consequences for all those involved in this scandal.
WMP chief Guildford did eventually ‘retire’ last week, but his resignation statement featured no real apology, let alone a mea culpa. He has since been referred to the police watchdog, the Independent Office for Police Conduct, by West Midlands police and crime commissioner Simon Foster – the very same Simon Foster who also praised Guildford last week for acting ‘with honour’.
For ordinary citizens of the UK, justice looks very different indeed. It is usually dispensed automatically, thanks to a camera on the motorway, via letter through the door, or through a fixed penalty imposed with zero appetite for context. Justice arrives with ruthless efficiency in the morning post, often before you even know you’ve been caught. Yet when the quest for justice travels upwards, something strange happens. Urgency evaporates, rules are contextualised and accountability becomes abstract. Senior figures are excused, with perhaps one or two individuals carrying the can.
The WMP’s Maccabi debacle has only further exacerbated existing tensions between the police and the public, highlighting the ‘rules for thee, none for me’ mentality at play. Viewed alongside the spate of theatrical arrests and early morning raids over social-media posts and private WhatsApp groups – experiences which routinely ruin lives even when the victim is acquitted – it is not difficult to see why trust in the UK authorities is at an all-time low.
Scandals like this one seem to disappear into endless bureaucracy, inquiries change nothing and no one of significance is ever punished properly. Even Guildford has taken retirement on a full police pension.
A state that polices its people instead of policing for its people is failing. So too is one that capitulates to the exclusionary and undemocratic demands of a small, vocal group of people it has grown to fear. The British people are fast growing tired of a police force that seems to be acting against them.
Philip Gross is a New York-born business executive based in London, who writes on politics, culture and geopolitics.
