One recent date in particular should be seared into the minds of future historians. That date is 6 November 2025, the moment that the UK completed its slow mutation from a tolerant democracy into an ugly patchwork of sectarian fiefdoms. It was the day that Birmingham hosted a football match from which Jewish Israelis were explicitly banned because the city’s Muslim population demanded it.

Twelve months on, the prohibition of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from attending their team’s Europa League fixture against Aston Villa has only grown in significance. It shattered any lingering faith in the impartiality and competence of the police. It confirmed the supremacy of Islamic mob rule in the UK’s second-biggest city. And it was an admission that Jews cannot be kept safe on the streets of Britain.

The campaign against Maccabi travelling supporters began at least a month before kick-off at Villa Park. Ayoub Khan, a Birmingham MP elected as a ‘Gaza Independent’ in 2024, said that admitting the fans would damage ‘community harmony’ in a ‘predominantly Muslim’ district. Muslim representatives on the Birmingham City Council – led by Mumtaz Hussain and Waseem Zaffar – demanded a boycott or complete cancellation. Israr Rashid, a prominent Islamic cleric in Birmingham, urged worshippers to show ‘no mercy’ to Israeli fans who had the temerity to set foot in Birmingham.

West Midlands Police also seemed particularly eager to prevent the arrival of Maccabi supporters. On 16 October, three weeks before the match, police claimed that a ‘thorough assessment’ found that allowing the supporters to attend was ‘high risk’ for the city’s Muslim population. Maccabi fans, West Midlands Police said, would be banned.

The role of West Midlands Police is the hinge on which events swing from the bleak yet familiar tale of Islamic sectarianism into one of almost unimaginable incompetence and deceit. West Midlands Police’s justification was found in a ‘confidential report’ that it claimed had been made with the help of Dutch police, based on a match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax Amsterdam the previous November. The report claimed that, after the match, Maccabi supporters had thrown ‘innocent members of the public into the river’ and had ‘intentionally targeted Muslim communities’. It alleged that police in Amsterdam had been forced to muster 5,000 officers to deal with the supposedly rabid threat.

More than a few eyebrows were raised when this report was leaked to the press, in late November last year. The scenes in Amsterdam had indeed made international headlines – but for a very different reason. Maccabi supporters were subjected to what members of Amsterdam’s local Arab population called a ‘Jew hunt’ on WhatsApp. It was Maccabi fans – not Amsterdam residents – who were thrown into the river, and it was Maccabi fans who were violently assaulted, in what Amsterdam’s own mayor referred to as an anti-Semitic attack.

The ‘confidential report’, it transpired, was the product of West Midlands Police’s own imagination. Its contents, unsurprisingly, were refuted by Dutch police as soon as it came to light. In January, it was revealed that the police force had consulted eight Muslim organisations in Birmingham prior to banning Maccabi supporters – three of which were mosques that had a history of promoting anti-Semitism. In the same month, West Midlands Police chief Craig Guildford admitted that the force had used AI in compiling its dossier against Maccabi supporters. This had led to a non-existent fixture against West Ham United being offered as ‘proof’ of the supposed violence of the Israeli fans. Guildford ‘retired’ from the force soon after (however, he is currently the subject of a gross-misconduct investigation by the police watchdog). More recently, in October, Conservative MP and shadow justice secretary Nick Timothy claimed that West Midlands Police suppressed intelligence that local Islamists had planned to arm themselves in preparation for Maccabi supporters.

Timothy himself was the subject of one of the most remarkable events of the whole grim affair. An Aston Villa supporter who grew up in Birmingham, he visited Villa Park on the night of the match. A large crowd of Muslim men had gathered outside the stadium. ‘Officer, take this dog away’, one of the men said to a police officer, gesturing at Timothy. The policewoman duly interrogated Timothy before leading him away. It was a chilling sight.

The ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters was a toxic synthesis of the various forces that many people feel are tearing the country apart: the breakdown of policing, an increasingly hostile and powerful Islamic sectarianism, and the official appeasement of anti-Semitism. Britain has never quite been the same since.