Football anyone? Travels in irony

It’s an odd sight, PM Starmer falling over himself to seek additional resources to enable Birmingham police to cope with the high risk that were Maccabi football fans allowed to attend their November Europa League game against Aston Villa, violent disorder emanating from the Maccabi fans was a realistic possibility.

The high risk designation was by the Safety Advisory Group (SAG), a body comprising Officers from various bodies, for example, the police, fire and ambulance services, health and safety Officers and so forth. Politicians are not part of the membership.

SAG advises on public safety in respect of public events. On the basis of their assessment, which incorporated taking account of Maccabi’s recent history of violent, racist behaviour at a game in Amsterdam, they recommended that Maccabi fans should not be allowed to attend the match.

And by coincidence, on Sunday 19 October, Israeli Police announced that a football match between Hapoel Tel Aviv and Maccabi Tel Aviv had to be cancelled due to widespread use of pyrotechnics and riots in the stands.

Israel National News reported that supporters of both teams hurled flares onto the pitch. Even before the match officially began, police reported that rioters launched smoke grenades and fireworks onto the playing area. In total, 48 smoke grenades and 52 pyrotechnic devices were thrown.

The Disreputables

Cue the Disreputables, that gaggle of politicians and sullied advisors ever eager to sink lower than they did the day before. Thus it was, conjuring from nowhere, PM Starmer, Kemi Badenoch (Leader of the Opposition), Ed Davey (Leader of the Liberal Democrats) and Lord Mann, the Government advisor on antisemitism, decided that an essentially technical decision about the potential risk to the public of allowing Maccabi fans to attend the match, provided a sound-bite opportunity to make the issue one about antisemitism, which it is not. It is Israel that would be represented if the match were to proceed, not Jews.

The Disreputables’ are well characterised by that designation - they thought nothing of breaching the wall that (should) separate essentially impersonal, objective decisions about people’s health and safety from political, value-based ones. This is quite worrying, for it calls into question the integrity of due process in this, and by extension, in respect of decisions to be made in the future by a range of purportedly independent bodies.

There’s an irony here worth noting: Starmer’s government committed itself to finding additional resources to support policing of the match, thus implicitly accepting the original SAG judgment that police resources at the time when the assessment was made were insufficient to secure public safety. In other words, not a question of antisemitism driving the ban on Maccabi fans, but a judgment made about the health and safety of those planning to attend the match.

The ironies, they keep coming

Is this irony, or perhaps a fully functioning paradox: on the one hand, the UK government is seeking to enable proven racist, avowedly anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, Israeli bigots to potentially wreak havoc on our streets, whilst, on the other, Government is charting through Parliament a Crime and Policing Bill that will give police powers enabling them to severely restrict the form, location, timings, routes and duration of public demonstrations and protest.

Public protest is being anathematised, seen as a threat to public order, in need of restraint and containment. It’s also clear which forms of public, democratic expression Government has in its sights: the pro-Palestine, anti-genocide, peaceful marches and protests that have been sustained for over two years.

New measures would give police powers in excess of those they have already to restrict demonstrations based on the cumulative impact of protests. We surely know which sort of protests will be captured by this clause: the weekly, entirely peaceful, hour-long demonstrations in Swiss Cottage, London, demanding the expulsion of the overtly racist Israeli ambassador; the large, regular – every four weeks or so – national, London pro-Palestinian marches that attract thousands of participants, Jews included; the regular vigils and protests that take place locally around the country.

Another clause allows restrictions to be put in place around the vicinity of religious buildings. Vicinity is an ill-defined, somewhat elastic, concept that is likely to lead to much contention between the organisers of demonstrations and the police. We have an example of how this clause may be used – actually, misused: Scotland Yard in January banned a pro-Palestine march from gathering outside the BBC’s London headquarters owing to its proximity to a synagogue.

The focus of the march was in fact the BBC‘s alleged pro-Zionist bias in reporting on Palestine/Israel. The march had nothing to do with the synagogue. It is highly unlikely that anyone connected to the march knew of the synagogue; or, if they did, that they would think it had any bearing on the demonstration.

The march was not allowed to proceed as planned, thus undermining its core intent. So far as synagogues are concerned, there has never been any threat to synagogue congregants emanating from these marches and protests. Indeed, there is a substantial Jewish Bloc prominent at every pro-Palestine march. The real intent of those raising issues about the vicinity of the synagogue to the march is to generate fear, and to stifle any pro-Palestine sentiment by setting up the straw man that the marches are anti-Jewish.

They don't give up

Government enthusiasm for repressive, anti-democratic legislation is consistent, persistent, and strategic. Each iteration of repression builds on what has been achieved thus far. If Government is thwarted in its attempt to add provisions limiting freedom of expression, then it tries again. The organisation JUSTICE points this out in respect of the Public Order Bill 2022:

On 15 November 2021, the Government introduced over 18 pages of late-stage amendments to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, for which JUSTICE also prepared briefings. The House of Lords rejected all but one of these amendments, which would have allowed the Government to criminalise a breathtakingly wide range of peaceful behaviour, including that with only the most tangential connection to protests.

These amendments now return in the Public Order Bill, which would enhance an already problematic range of restrictions which can be imposed on individuals who take part in protests to express grievances and raise concerns pursuant to the PCSC [Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 Act].

The Bill is unlikely to be compliant with the European Convention on Human Rights, in particular Article 10 ECHR (freedom of expression) and Article 11 ECHR (freedom of assembly and association).

JUSTICE notes that the Convention serves to protect not only popular ideas and opinions but also those which offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population. Similarly, the European Court of Human Rights has held that the freedom to take part in a peaceful assembly… is of such importance that it cannot be restricted in any way, so long as the person concerned does not himself commit any reprehensible act.

The Convention clause above, along with the judgment of the ECHR, raise questions about the degree to which intimidation or hurt feeling should serve as a bar to protest. There must be a point at which subjective feelings cannot alone be the arbiter of what can be done – e.g. protest marches; wearing a Palestinian flag badge - or said.

These forms of subjectivities have already led to Palestinian flag badges being banned in some workplaces; and, to its shame, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital removed an exhibition of drawings by children from Gaza. The artwork consisted of 21 ceramic plates showing Palestinians carrying water jars, baking bread and milling lentils, beans and chickpeas.

This plate, which hung in the hospital for more than a decade before being removed, shows children playing with marbles in Gaza (Chelsea Community Hospital School). Thanks to Middle East Eye for this image.

Others showed fishermen with their catch, workers harvesting olives and children playing with marbles. Only three showed the Palestinian flag, in settings that signalled a desire for peace, not aggression.

The plates were taken down after Jewish patients secured the help of UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), saying that they feel vulnerable, harassed and victimised by this display. The display was removed a few days later.

Postscript: 10.29 p.m. Monday 20 October 2025

Having just completed this article, I find I’m being stalked by irony: news has just come in that Maccabi fan club management has decided not to seek tickets for the match with Aston Villa. The grounds: concerns about the safety of their fans. A club statement said:

The wellbeing and safety of our fans is paramount, and from hard lessons learned we have taken the decision to decline any allocation offered on behalf of away fans and our decision should be understood in that context.

It will be interesting to see how elegantly Messrs Starmer, Badenoch and Davey, along with their fellow-travellers, can dismount from the donkeys that carried them forth into embarrassment.

The wider issue

Germane as this article is to the current situation, it fails to get to what should be the heart of the matter. That is, Maccabi, because it represents Israel, a state conducting a genocide in Gaza should not be playing in any UK match. Further, any Maccabi fan, if they served in the IDF, should be arrested the moment they set foot on UK soil.

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Note: this article was first published on Bernard Spiegal's blog: https://bernardspiegal.com/