The Maccabi ban is a warning to Britain about mob rule

The hearing the West Midlands Police chief no doubt hoped would silence calls for his resignation instead made the case for his exit even more compelling. It revealed not merely a bungled decision over a football match, but something far more corrosive: a police force appearing to bend before intimidation rather than uphold the law.

The Home Affairs Committee session managed the rare feat of being both predictable and jaw-dropping. Predictable, because West Midlands Police were finally forced to admit the obvious: their intelligence report cited a clash between West Ham and Maccabi that never happened. Jaw-dropping, because the chief constable explained this fiction emerged from “social media scraping” – in other words, elevating whatever happened to be trending online into supposed intelligence. For a force already suspected of capitulating to whoever shouted loudest, the admission was devastating.

This is precisely why the affair matters far beyond the Jewish community – already reeling from the decision itself, and from the sight of the few Jewish fans who did attend being penned into a cage for their own protection from anti-Zionist thugs. If West Midlands Police can be swayed by agitation around Israel–Palestine without consequence, the message sent across the country is unmistakable: mobilise sectarian anger, threaten disorder, and institutions will fold. Every extremist group, every Islamist faction, every anti-Western or anti-Zionist agitator will treat this as precedent – one proving that menace is more effective than argument.

That corrodes the very foundations of a liberal society. It empowers those who seek to bully their way to outcomes the ballot box would never deliver. It teaches minorities that the law may not protect them, while signalling to radicals that intimidation works. We already have in Britain pockets of parallel societies – insulated, hostile, and in some cases openly contemptuous of democratic norms. Instead of breaking them up, this episode risks encouraging their growth and the thuggery that sustains them.