It’s always difficult to know, as one attempts to understand British politics, when something sinister is going on and when public officials are just being woefully incompetent.
When ’ banned Israeli football fans from a match between Aston Villa and Maccabi Tel Aviv, last November, it was tempting to suspect that this was being done in the name of “community cohesion”. As the great and powerful Joe Hackett wrote for The Critic:
It’s hard not to conclude that the real reason for the ban is fear of how people who literally elected a Gaza independent MP might react to the presence of a small group of Israeli football fans, and whether the cops would be able to control that situation.
No, claimed West Midlands Police. Intelligence had suggested that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were exceptionally dangerous. Of course, they can be dangerous. But when is this untrue of travelling football fans? Legia Warsaw supporters are still allowed to travel to the UK despite a looooong history of misbehaviour.
The “intelligence” soon looked rather questionable. As the Guardian reports, West Midlands Police “spoke to Dutch police about their experience when the Israeli side played in Amsterdam in November 2024”:
The Birmingham-based force said it was told by Dutch police that Maccabi fans were perpetrators of the violence, not victims. This is strongly disputed by Dutch police and other groups.
For example, the Dutch police apparently suggested that a West Midlands Police claim that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans had thrown Muslims into an Amsterdam river was bogus and that it had been a Maccabi Tel Aviv fan who had ended up in the water.
Yet this was not the end of it. It turns out that West Midlands Police had referenced, in their evidence, a football match which had not actually happened. Apparently, this was because they had been plugging questions into Microsoft Copilot and had received an AI hallucination.
Anyone with passing digital literacy should know that AI tools can make things up. (Indeed, as I have written elsewhere, AI tools can make things up and then furiously insist that these things actually happened.) Alas, it seems that even this level of digital literacy was beyond West Midlands Police.
Again, this is dire incompetence. I’m sure there are brave and able officers working for the WMP, but there are also people who take the claims of AI tools at face value. Sometimes, I feel bad poking fun at the authorities, given the magnitude of what they are expected to accomplish — as if I would be able to stabilise an economy, or to catch a master criminal. But even I know not to use chatbots as a sole source of research. Most teenagers manufacturing their homework are probably aware of that.
We have to ask ourselves, though, if incompetence is all that is going on. If the authorities were concerned about intercommunal violence, with aggression coming at as well as from Maccabi fans, it would hardly be unreasonable given that it was in Birmingham that masked Asian men, some carrying Palestinian flags, gathered in response to the 2024 riots and intimidated journalists and attacked a local pub. In more extreme cases, a jihadi terrorist plot was foiled in Birmingham in 2017, while various Muslim residents of the city have been arrested for trying to join ISIS.
But allegedly we don’t have to look at past cases to be aware of the dangers of communitarianism and Islamic extremism in Birmingham. According to The Times, West Midlands Police had intelligence that “individuals in the predominantly Muslim local community were arming themselves and preparing to seek out and attack fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv”. There has been no smoking gun which proves that this affected the West Midlands Police decision to ban Maccabi fans, but it seems reasonable to ask whether it at least biased the decision.
This mix of societal dysfunction and institutional ineptitude is miserable to contemplate
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said yesterday she has lost confidence in West Midlands Police Chief Constable Craig Guildford. But it’s hard to believe that the rot ends with him. This mix of societal dysfunction and institutional ineptitude is miserable to contemplate. An explosive combination of cultural circumstances has been created and left in the hands of incompetent technicians.
It would be nice to think that the authorities know a way out of this mess — but I fear that they will simply consult AI.
