Banned for Being Jewish? How Political Pressure and Council Failures Derailed Policing in the West Midlands
Political pressure, public authority, and why clarity is now required in the West Midlands
What began as a decision to ban supporters of an Israeli football team from travelling to an Aston Villa fixture has evolved into a far more serious question of public governance. The issue is no longer crowd behaviour in isolation, but how public bodies respond when political pressure, civic process and policing judgement intersect. With parliamentarians from both the House of Commons and the House of Lords now having written to the Independent Office for Police Conduct, national attention has fixed on West Midlands Police and Birmingham City Council, and on how a Safety Advisory Group process came to be relied upon despite evident procedural weaknesses. Set against a wider backdrop of normalised football disorder across Europe and a renewed global focus on antisemitism, the episode now tests something more fundamental: whether public authorities can withstand political pressure, apply risk proportionately, and state clearly, without ambiguity, where they stand on equality, neutrality and the rule of law.
Parliament steps in, Commons and Lords together
The decisive shift came when parliamentarians from both Houses formally wrote to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC).
This matters. A letter signed only by MPs can be dismissed as partisan or constituency-driven. A letter co-signed by peers, many of them former ministers, senior lawyers and long-standing public servants, signals something different: institutional concern, not political theatre.
At that point, the focus moved decisively away from the match itself and onto the conduct of West Midlands Police and the civic processes it relied upon.
Why antisemitism context now matters
Recent events beyond the UK underline why this moment cannot be treated as merely procedural. The violent attack on Jewish people in Australia, reportedly carried out by individuals driven by extremist ideology, is a reminder that antisemitism is contemporary, not historical, and that it remains capable of lethal consequence.
Against that backdrop, ambiguity by public authorities becomes dangerous.
This is not because silence implies antisemitic intent. There is no evidence that West Midlands Police or Birmingham City Council hold such views, and no serious argument is being made to that effect. The issue is different and more serious: public authorities are custodians of moral as well as legal authority. When they act, or fail to act, in ways that appear to exceptionalise Jewish people, Jewish events, or Jewish presence, they risk allowing doubt to creep in where certainty should exist.
That doubt should never arise. Yet at present, it has.
Football disorder, properly benchmarked
At the time of the ban, public justification leaned heavily on the idea that Israeli supporters posed an exceptional and unmanageable risk.
Rolling weekly scans of global football reporting make that claim difficult to sustain. Across world football, one to three matches per week are typically abandoned or seriously disrupted due to supporter behaviour, excluding technical failures such as weather or infrastructure issues.
The causes are well established:
pyrotechnics,
objects thrown,
pitch invasions,
crowd violence,
police safety interventions.
These incidents occur across top-flight European leagues, high-risk derbies and lower-league fixtures, and across Western and Eastern Europe and Latin America. Football disorder is structurally normalised. Policing models exist precisely to manage this reality through mitigation, containment and enforcement.
Parliament’s interest now turns on why normal football risk benchmarking appears to have been sidelined, and why escalation moved so quickly from management to prohibition.
From routine risk to symbolic crisis
Rather than being treated as a difficult but manageable football fixture, the match was reframed as a symbolically exceptional public order crisis, shaped by heightened political and community sensitivity.
Once that reframing took hold, proportionate mitigation gave way to over-correction.
This does not require bad faith. Institutions under reputational pressure often respond defensively. But defensive escalation is itself a governance failure, particularly when it departs from established operational norms.
The SAG failure that exposes City Council governance
This is where Birmingham City Council becomes inseparable from the story.
Two councillors:
Waseem Zaffar (Labour, and a Justice of the Peace), and
Mumtaz Hussain (Liberal Democrat),
had taken public political positions opposing the fixture before participating in, or influencing, the Safety Advisory Group (SAG) process that advised against the match.
Councillors are entitled to political speech. That is not in dispute.
What is in dispute is the failure to separate political advocacy from quasi judicial civic decision making. A SAG is a technical, risk-based body. Its legitimacy depends on neutrality, evidence and the appearance of fairness.
That two councillors from different parties were involved removes any claim of factional bias. It points instead to a systemic breakdown in SAG governance.
Why JP status sharpens the concern
Zaffar’s role as a Justice of the Peace heightens, rather than mitigates, concern.
JPs are trained explicitly in apparent bias and predetermination. The standard is not intent but perception. Where a fair-minded observer could reasonably suspect pre-judgement, stepping aside is expected.
The absence of visible declaration or recusal is therefore not a technicality. It is a governance red flag.
Police reliance, parliamentary scrutiny, and the O’Hara question
West Midlands Police then relied heavily on the SAG decision to justify the ban.
By doing so, the force absorbed any procedural weakness in the SAG process into its own decision-making chain. Parliament is now asking whether senior command applied sufficient independent judgement, or whether it relied on a civic process that was not procedurally clean.
This inevitably brings Assistant Chief Constable Mike O’Hara into focus. Not as a scapegoat, but because senior officers at his level are responsible for governance integrity and for representations made to ministers and Parliament.
Is O’Hara staying or going, and why clarity is now required
At the same time, senior ACC posts within West Midlands Police are being openly advertised.
In isolation, that may be routine workforce planning. In the context of bicameral parliamentary scrutiny, it creates an unavoidable optics problem.
The public has long been sceptical of quiet retirements or redeployments that appear to draw a line under unresolved issues. Whether fair or not, such exits are often seen as a cheap dodge of accountability.
That is why silence is no longer neutral.
West Midlands Police now owes the public clarity. Either O’Hara is remaining in post and will see this process through, or he is leaving, in which case the force must explain how accountability and continuity of oversight will be maintained.
A simple statement would stabilise confidence. Continued ambiguity erodes it.
What the IOPC is, and why Parliament has invoked it
(Explainer)
The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) is the statutory body that oversees serious police conduct matters in England and Wales.
Parliamentarians write to the IOPC when confidence in a force’s explanations has been undermined, when senior leadership decision making is in question, or when there is concern that Parliament itself may have been misled, even unintentionally.
The IOPC can launch independent investigations, examine leadership and governance failures, determine whether there is a case to answer for misconduct, and issue binding recommendations on policy, training and accountability.
Even where no individual sanction follows, IOPC involvement creates a permanent public record and triggers further scrutiny. It is not symbolic. It is structural.
Why moral clarity is now required, not optional
In ordinary circumstances, values are assumed. In extraordinary circumstances, they must be stated.
West Midlands Police and Birmingham City Council now need to make unmistakably clear where they stand.
There is only one acceptable position for publicly funded authorities:
antisemitism is real and dangerous,
Jewish people are entitled to full and equal participation in civic life,
and Jewish presence must never be framed as exceptional or problematic.
This is not about being pro-Jewish at the expense of others. It is about equal treatment, proportional policing and respect for all.
Declarations alone are insufficient. They must be followed by action: transparent review of the SAG process, reinforced separation of political advocacy from quasi judicial duty, and visible accountability where governance standards have failed.
What must now happen at the City Council
For Birmingham City Council, this moment demands leadership.
Regardless of individual outcomes, the council must:
formally review SAG governance,
reinforce councillors’ legal and ethical duties when acting in technical decision-making roles,
and make clear that political advocacy and civic adjudication are not interchangeable.
Councillors are routinely reminded of solemn responsibilities at the opening of meetings, often briefly and formally. This issue merits the same seriousness.
To do nothing would be to accept that such failures are tolerable.
Why this will not go away, and what must now happen
This issue will not fade because it is no longer about football, nor even about a single policing decision.
It is about whether public institutions, when placed under intense political, reputational and moral pressure, remained anchored to principle, proportion and process. It is about whether political advocacy was allowed to bleed into civic adjudication, whether police judgement leaned too heavily on a compromised advisory process, and whether senior leadership responded to scrutiny with clarity or silence.
It is also about something more fundamental. At a moment when antisemitism is again manifesting violently in the world, public authorities cannot afford ambiguity. Jewish people must never be treated as an exception, a problem to be managed, or a risk to be mitigated away. Equal citizenship is not conditional, and participation in civic life is not negotiable.
That is why Parliament, across both Houses, has intervened. That is why the IOPC has been invoked. And that is why leadership, both within West Midlands Police and Birmingham City Council, must now speak plainly.
If Assistant Chief Constable Mike O’Hara is remaining in post, the public deserves assurance that accountability will be seen through. If he is departing, the force must explain how continuity, scrutiny and confidence will be maintained. Likewise, the City Council must move beyond procedural defensiveness and reaffirm, in words and in action, the separation between political advocacy and quasi-judicial duty.
None of this requires theatrical blame. It requires standards to be upheld and confidence to be restored.
Institutions exist to serve the public who fund them. When doubt arises about how power has been exercised, silence is not neutrality, it is erosion. That is why this matter endures, and why it will continue to do so until clarity, accountability and moral certainty are re-established.