Liberal democracy's radical fallacy
The Birmingham policing scandal illuminates Britain's surrender to cultural emasculation
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This is an expanded version of my column in today’s Times (£)
When the West Midlands chief constable Greg Guildford announced his retirement last week over the Maccabi football fans scandal, there was widespread amazement that he hadn’t been fired.
It had been revealed that his force had produced false “intelligence” to justify a decision to ban away-fans of the Israeli football team Maccabi Tel Aviv from its match against Aston Villa in Birmingham last November. Appallingly, the police suppressed their assessment of a probable threat to the Israeli fans from sections of the city’s Muslim community, and claimed instead falsely that the community was threatened by the fans.
This “intelligence” — including an AI “hallucination”— was fabricated to justify retrospectively the decision to ban the Israelis, behaviour over which Guildford misled parliament. The Tory MP Nick Timothy, who was instrumental in forcing this information into the public domain, called what had happened a “surrender of the criminal justice system to the politics of communalism, Islamist thugs and the mob”.
It’s hard to imagine a more serious and fundamental breakdown in policing ethics — not to mention the despicable inversion of potential Jewish victims and Muslim aggressors. Yet the home secretary, who said she had “lost faith” in Guildford, didn’t have the power to fire him. That power rested with the local police and crime commissioner, Simon Foster.
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