Somali women giving out samosas to anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis (source: Mukhtar, X).

Imagine that there was a boarding school where children were being abused on a daily basis; where bullying was rife, where staff were casually physically violent and verbally abusive, where the food was routinely contaminated with such things as cigarette ash and insects; a school where petty rules stoked conflict and made life miserable, where staff were seemingly recruited by word of mouth at the pub and were neither vetted nor trained. Many people would say that this place should be shut down fairly swiftly, and that saving children from abuse was the important thing, more so than the concern that they may miss a few weeks of school. The benefits they get from going there do not justify the suffering.

Now consider that there is a police force that deals with a less than vital area of the law: in this case, immigration control and removal of illegal immigrants. Imagine that they act with extreme violence, that they do not distinguish between actual illegal immigrants and legal ones or even citizens but target anyone who “looks foreign”, abducting people to camps thousands of miles away for no valid reason, threaten and attack people who video their behaviour, and shoot people dead when they get in their way. Imagine also that they are deployed by the government against parts of the country which have a history of supporting the opposition, ignoring places that have many times the number of illegal immigrants of the places they terrorise. There would be calls for this entity to be abolished because the lawlessness they perpetrate is considerably worse than what they prevent.

A few weeks ago I saw someone I follow on Twitter, a Democrat who has a clear resentment for “the Left” for causing the loss of the most recent presidential election, poured scorn on the idea that ICE, the American immigration police responsible for an ongoing campaign of terror against immigrant communities in Minnesota, resulting in the deaths of two American citizens and seven others, should be abolished. “We need a sane immigration policy” she proclaims; “it makes no sense to import people into this country that dilute wages for the working class”. The reason working-class people cannot get good jobs anymore is because industry packed up and moved because it did not want to pay decent wages, which is the case both here and in the US, but it’s so much easier to blame immigrants in a country where the creed that you cannot argue with the market is beyond question. In previous tweets she has criticised people calling for ICE to be abolished because she claims they do not appreciate what “real Americans” want and are making it more difficult for Democrats to win elections. She does not actually care whether these things are right or wrong — a gang of thugs, terrorising cities, using extreme violence against non-violent people for nothing more than suspected illegal immigration — only whether it is politically convenient.

She also pours scorn on the notion of ‘defunding’ ICE. She criticises people for saying they are poorly trained, responding that to train them properly would require them to be better resourced. The same arguments are held around defunding police forces that are trigger-happy and have a history of killing innocent people, or at worst people who have committed petty crimes, or people who are in the throes of a mental health crisis; they have resources to buy wholly excessive and inappropriate military hardware to use on civilians, but have no interest in training their officers to use force appropriately. When you remind them of the need to do this, they tell you that they are not “social workers in uniform” (which is exactly what they do need to be when performing welfare checks on people reported to be in mental health crisis) and accuse people who died at the hands of the police of not doing what they were told. In the case of the ICE attack on Minneapolis, the police have become (at least for the time being) heroes, being firmly on the side of the locals under attack and some of their off-duty officers falling victim to ICE’s dragnet as anyone who is not white is assumed to be an illegal immigrant. But when people demand the abolition or defunding of police forces in response to yet another killing of an innocent man or woman by a cop who “didn’t have time for this shit” or whatever, they are called morons or similar by people who have no real solutions themselves.

Policing is actually necessary; the taking off the streets of rapists, murderers, gangsters and so on cannot wait. The removal of illegal immigrants certainly can, until they can find people who can do it without killing them, or innocent members of the public whom they perceive as being in their way, or people who were videoing them to hold them to account, and until they learn to distinguish between an actual illegal immigrant and a mere non-white person. If someone’s sole wrongdoing is being in the country or working illegally, their removal is not worth anyone losing their life over; it should not be up to the immigration service to apprehend and remove illegal immigrants who are violent criminals. They should be escorted to the airport straight from prison. A country that employs an army of undisciplined thugs who terrorise ethnic minorities and cities with a history of opposition to the government on the pretext of controlling immigration is a repressive country that is on the downslide into fascism or banana republic status and when such outfits are abolished when dictatorships are removed, the same people defending ICE would applaud. 

A Maccabi Tel Aviv fan gives a Nazi salute at a match in Stuttgart, Germany

Last week the chief constable of West Midlands Police, Craig Guildford, retired after admitting presenting inaccurate information sourced from an artificial intelligence app, Microsoft CoPilot, in a report on the security situation that would ensue if the away fans of the Israeli football team, Maccabi Tel Aviv (MTA), were to be allowed to travel to Birmingham to see their team play Aston Villa. The information included mention of a fixture between MTA and West Ham, an east London side, which had never taken place. The mainstream media has been full of angry debate about who was a threat to whom in the event of the MTA fans coming; pro-Israel outlets and figures claim that the police, whom they claimed are under the sway of local ‘Islamists’, were underplaying the threat of local “Islamist thugs” to the Israeli fans while local MPs and Palestine supporters point to the club’s actual record of racist violence, both inside and outside Israel. In the event, the club withdrew the fans itself after a riot between their fans and another local team’s fans in Tel Aviv, but the latest revelations have prompted an orchestrated outrage from Zionists, securocrats and racists who claim that the MTA fans were blameless and that the opposition to them attending was motivated by antisemitism, or was antisemitic regardless of motive; this includes sections of the ‘official’ Left, notably including this sickening article by Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian last Friday, who tells us that the affairs “stirs deep-seated fears” of being “obliged to retreat from mainstream spaces to spare everyone else the awkwardness of having to battle for their inclusion”.

How many times do we have to say that this is not about the right of Jews to walk any street they like, but about the ‘right’ of a group of foreign football supporters, most of whom have served in an army whose principal role is oppressing people, supporting violent settlers as they encroach on more and more native Palestinian land, and who have for the past two and a half years been slaughtering Palestinians in Gaza, to travel through the streets of Birmingham or indeed any other city in the UK where there is a large Muslim population? Let’s not forget that Russia has been excluded from international sport since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, so there is no danger of its fans antagonising Polish or Ukrainian communities, and its war crimes, though still dreadful, do not approach genocide. Everyone who has been on a Palestine demonstration will know there are Jewish allies; you would not know who was Jewish and who was not unless they wore Haredi clothing and you do not know which of them supports Israel or not unless you ask or they tell. When it’s Jews who claim to feel threatened, of course, it’s another matter: when anti-genocide demonstrators wanted to demonstrate outside the BBC’s Broadcasting House on a Saturday, the day most people have off work, it was banned because there was a synagogue a few streets away. 

The same people expecting Birmingham’s Muslims to tolerate this complain constantly about “fighting-age males” from Muslim countries being offered asylum, accusing them without any evidence of being a stealth invasion. We have been told that the real threat was to the Israeli fans and came from “Islamist thugs”, a phenomenon unseen in this country and who went unnamed but no doubt referred to the potential for demonstrations: actual peaceful demonstrations against Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza and its ongoing ethnic cleansing of the West Bank are referred to as “hate marches” while the media refers to actual thugs who stop aid reaching Gaza as ‘demonstrators’ or ‘protesters’. There has been outrage that the panel which selected Craig Guildford included an imam; it would, surely, have included other faith leaders as well. It was meant to represent the community and Muslims are a major part of the community in Birmingham. Matthew Goodwin (who until recently was a senior fellow of the UAE-funded Legatum Institute, which now trades as Prosperity Institute) lectures us that “Islamists” are starting to have influence, not bothering to distinguish between Muslims and “Islamists”; it is natural, in a democracy, that sections of the community have influence over decisions that affect their lives.

Jews do not have a right to be cosseted if they choose to throw in their lot with violent football hooligans and a foreign power that is oppressively and murderously racist. They deserve to be held accountable. Over the past several years, we have been lectured endlessly that their feelings are all-important, that they must feel safe and they alone have the right to dictate what constitutes antisemitism (and it must be the right kind of Jews, i.e. not dissenting ones). David Baddiel wrote an entire book called “Jews Don’t Count”, castigating the Left for failing to acknowledge Jews’ feelings of oppression or to count them among the oppressed, regardless of their whiteness in an age when that matters more than anything else, their ample access to media and to power; people who question their status as an oppressed minority stand to lose out, as Diane Abbott did in the years before the 2024 election. Meanwhile, a drumbeat campaign goes on to drive Muslims out of public life, which has now culminated in a senior police officer losing his job for failing to treat Muslims with the contempt they believe we deserve. Yes, he made some stupid mistakes, but none of these are the reason he was forced out. We all remember the quote about Islamophobia “passing the dinner-table test”; we are now entering an age in which it is less risky to be racist than not.

Recently I listened to two BBC podcasts in the Crime Next Door strand. One was about the kidnapping of Lesley Whittle, the teenage daughter of a local bus company boss, in the mid 1970s by a notorious serial armed robber and killer named Donald Neilson and was found hanged in a storm drain under a public park; the other (Death on the Farm) was about a brother and sister, Griff and Patti Thomas (right), murdered in a farmhouse in west Wales around the same time, a death ruled a murder-suicide by the police, the coroner and the chapel pastor who refused them a church funeral, a verdict believed by none of her family and friends. In both cases, a senior detective was in charge who had the reputation for “always getting his man”; in the first, he had solved a number of murders but was new to investigating kidnappings for ransom (as, admittedly, was the whole profession), while in the second, it appears that he did not want to ruin a winning streak by being unable to solve a high-profile murder, so he jumped to the conclusion that it was a murder-suicide because there was no evidence of forced entry. These two stories reminded me of two more recent cases of a killer left to carry on killing or not apprehended as soon as he could have been because of a senior detective sold on a pet theory: the Yorkshire ripper case in the early 1980s, where the lead detective believed the killer was from another part of the country on the basis of a hoax and ignored (and aggressively rebuffed) leads that suggested a local culprit, and the White House Farm murders in which Jeremy Bamber murdered five members of his adoptive family and then tried to frame his adopted sister; the senior detective believed his story, and would only accept that he was wrong when other detectives proved to him that it was physically impossible for the sister to have killed herself with the rifle.

Last week Sue Marsh, a disability activist I came to know while campaigning against the Tory austerity programme of the early 2010s, published an article on her Substack about the culture she found while a patient at Addenbrookes hospital in Cambridge in the 90s and 2000s with Crohn’s disease, an obstructive bowel disorder. While the hospital carried out some pioneering research and some of its doctors were brilliant, there were also consultants who were sold on unscientific and irrational beliefs and treated patients cruelly on the basis of them, and because of the status of Addenbrookes and of Cambridge, what those consultants said and did became common practice. Ultimately the hospital was put in special measures because of botched operations and mistakes known as “never events” (i.e. they should never happen, such as the wrong part of someone’s body being operated on or removed or an instrument left inside them), and the health watchdog Monitor kept them under observation for 18 months, during which surgeries could not go ahead without them present. Even after this, however, doctors trained there at that time were appointed as consultants elsewhere, and good practice was replaced with bad (and cruel) practice learned at Addenbrooke’s. They were spreading like a hospital-acquired infection.

And Sue’s story about how the hierarchies in the health sector undermined good care reminded me of the tragedies and scandals in policing caused by the obsession with hierarchy at the expense of justice, human life or getting the job done (especially when that job was justice or saving lives). People are unable, or face punishment for, raising concerns; they are expected to address a superior officer meekly and always acknowledging their superiority; the superior rank is taken as proof of their being more experienced or better at their job, and though they may have experience, their rank may have had as much to do with impressing the right people at the right time or being in the right social clubs, or discrimination against a competitor because of their race or sex, or something else. Certain people, because of who they are, are assumed to know best, or they are assumed to be right because they were right in the past. In the case of the Pembrokeshire farm murders, the senior detective (DCS Pat Molloy) came from out of area, was a hero from having solved a triple murder in Staffordshire but knew nothing about the local culture and did not speak Welsh, but drew conclusions based on assumptions that anyone familiar with it could have put right, had he listened. All of these situations in policing happened in the 1970s and 80s; no doubt someone will say that this was years ago and the culture of CID has been reformed since and the Ripper disaster could not happen again, though the ongoing scandals about misogyny, domestic abuse by officers going unpunished and sex offences by police officers going unpunished until they kill someone suggests otherwise, at least in some forces.

Hierarchitis affects other institutions as well. For much of the 20th century, co-pilots on civilian airliners could not dissent from their captain, even when the captain was plainly wrong, and planes crashed and whole planeloads of people were lost as a result, because the captain’s mistake could not be challenged. In the book Longitude, Dava Sobel told the story of a naval officer who believed that the ship he was on was a long way from where his superior officer thought, and when he raised his concerns, he was shot for mutiny. The ship then wrecked, as he had said it would, and the surviving crew robbed, and the superior officer murdered. Hierarchies and chains of command are, of course, sometimes necessary and maintaining them in normal times conditions people to act on them when discipline is vital, as during war or a life-and-death situation such as the arrest of a dangerous, wanted criminal or the extinguishing of a big fire. Hierarchitis occurs where they result in bullying, the shouting-down of valid dissenting opinions, the wrong people being promoted and then assumed to be always right because of that promotion, with unjust or lethal consequences for junior staff, patients or the general public.

Last week, the government announced a new initiative to combat misogyny among young men, targeting both schoolchildren and teachers. The £20m programme will include training for teachers to “spot and tackle misogyny in the classroom” and on issues such as consent and the sharing of intimate images, behavioural programmes for “high-risk pupils” and a helpline for teenagers facing abuse in their relationships. £16m of the money is to be funded directly through taxation; the other £4m will, the government proposes, be raised from private philanthropy. There has been some criticism, such as from the Liberal Democrats who said that the effort would fail if it were not accompanied by efforts to “properly moderate online content”; the domestic abuse commissioner for England and Wales, Nicole Jacobs, said the commitments did not go far enough and that the ‘investment’ was too little. Kemi Badenoch, the Tory party leader, accused the government of spending the summer watching the drama Adolescence, about a boy who kills a girl in his class because she rejected him, and of coming up with “silly gimmicks”, calling for more police to be put on the streets (after her government spent 14 years closing police stations and running down the maintenance of those that remained) and for people to be removed who “shouldn’t be here, especially those from cultures where women are treated as third-class citizens” (her whole treatise can be found on Twitter here).

This was quite offensive to me because the type of violence these programmes are intended to prevent has affected my family, and the perpetrator was a white British man, not a member of an ethnic minority, not a Muslim, not a refugee and not an immigrant. Of the 117 women listed in Karen Ingala Smith’s census of women killed by men in 2019, 74 of the named perpetrators had a name consistent with being white British (and many of the others were European, e.g. Polish or Portuguese); in her 2024 list, the ratio was 72 out of 106. Some Muslim names do feature but the overwhelming majority were names consistent with a western or Christian background. (The perpetrator’s ethnicity is recorded only in a minority of cases.) So even if people who are Muslims, immigrants or both are overrepresented in statistics of certain types of sexual violence or of violence against women and girls, the majority of lethal violence against women is still carried out by the majority of the male population, i.e. white men. There has been much research showing that young boys are accessing pornography in their early teens or earlier as a result of gaining access to internet-enabled mobile phones, and that young men develop unhealthy attitudes to sex, believing that women enjoy things they really do not as a result of seeing them pretend to in these films. While it is true that the violence mostly comes from grown men or older teenagers, teaching young boys about the importance of respecting women and girls, of how to treat them properly in relationships and so on, is important, especially if they are going to remain our problem even if they offend because they are our people and cannot be deported. Even among Muslims, there is evidence that they are exposed to many of the same bad influences as boys from western backgrounds: pornography and the aggressive misogyny touted by the likes of Andrew Tate rather than old-fashioned attitudes imported from “back home”.

Femicide Census, the organisation founded by Karen Ingala-Smith to carry on the work started in “Counting Dead Women”, gave a partial welcome to the new initiative, though is critical of the stance that ‘femicide’ excludes partner or family-perpetrated killings. However, the group of feminists who have been loudly opposing transgender rights and self-indentification (Self ID) and have welcomed the Supreme Court ruling on the subject from earlier this year have been noticeably silent on Kemi Badenoch’s ridiculous remarks. I did a search of the Twitter accounts of some of the feminists known for this stance; only Karen Ingala Smith has tweeted anything critical of it (linking to an interview with the MP Jess Phillips). I did a search of the accounts @AjaTheEmpress, @JeanHatchet, @ForWomenScot (the organisation whose litigation led to the aforementioned Supreme Court ruling), @LilyLilyMaynard, @cwknews (Stephanie Davies-Arai), @HelenSaxby11, @HelenStaniland, @bindelj (Julie Bindel), @ripx4nutmeg, @jo_bartosch, @lascapigliata8 (Maja Bowen/Isidora Sanger) and @BluskyeAllison (Allison Bailey) for mention of Badenoch’s last name in the past week or so and I found none. In a couple of cases there was a link to an article by JK Rowling (who founded her own rape support centre in Edinburgh but whose last mention of Badenoch on Twitter was in April), distracting the discussion onto the trans issue. Many of these women have been using arguments about women’s safety in the trans debate and some have other histories of campaigning or at least opinionating about women’s safety, male violence and so on, so one would think they would be critical of a politician trying to slap down a serious effort to challenge violence against women with a stupid deflection onto race. Probably they would have been more than a couple of years ago.

Heartless and bigoted Tories are, of course, nothing new but by and large they were not stupid. This is. In 1975, the former editor of the New Statesman, Paul Johnson, wrote a piece for the magazine castigating what he called the “know-nothing Left” and the way the Labour party had abandoned the Left’s intellectual traditions and embraced the trade union movement: “the arrogant bosses of the TUC, with their faith in the big battalions and the zombie-weight of collective numbers, their contempt for the individual conscience, their invincible materialism, their blind and exclusive class-consciousness, their rejection of theory for pragmatism, their intolerance and their envious loathing of outstanding intellects” (my response to the piece, republished by the NS in 2013, is here). He noted that ‘elite’ and ‘elitist’ were used as insults, and would have readily have been hurled at major socialist intellectuals of the past including Aneurin Bevan. These days, though, we hear the word used most readily by the likes of Matthew Goodwin, who is regularly on TV accusing “elites” of betraying Britain’s popular will, whether it be on Brexit, immigration or anything else. Not billionaires and the politicians that do their bidding, but intellectuals. Right-wing writers and politicians have been fulminating against expert opposition to their demands for a long while: Michael Gove’s claim that the “public are sick of experts” springs to mind, but even back in the Blair/Brown years there was a piece by Melanie Philips proclaiming that the tabloid she wrote for represented the popular will, and it was quite right that the government listened to them (in this case, on the classification of cannabis) rather than to experts when forming policy. Traditional University arts subjects are run down year on year because of the belief that a college education is only good for building earning potential. As a result, we have an elite of uncultured ignoramuses, some of whom can barely string a sentence together (Suella Braverman springs to mind), who are contemptuous of anyone who knows more than they do.

Right now, the know-nothing Right aren’t in power in this country, but Badenoch’s brainless and bigoted response to a much-needed education programme to fight violence against women and girls should have produced a few critical responses from her own party. Ten or twenty years ago, it absolutely would have done. A Google News search reveals, in fact, no significant critical article bar one in the Guardian which quotes a couple of anti-VAWG charity figures; not that long ago, a chorus of disdain from the blogosphere would have accompanied a fair few mainstream media critiques. Someone ignorant enough to think misogyny and violence against women are imported problems, insignificant among the indigenous population, is just too stupid and ignorant to be in the running to be Prime Minister. I wonder if the party has anyone to replace her who has their head screwed on properly, or if the replacement is going to be just another frothing bigot.

Image source: Lajmmoore, via Wikimedia. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) 4.0 licence.

Last weekend I saw a set of pictures on Instagram with the lead picture containing the headline “The Ten Most Dangerous Logical Fallacies”. The author, Sahil Bloom (author of a book called The Five Types of Wealth), does not explain why they are more dangerous than any other; these are just ten of the best-known or perhaps most common. They include ad hominem, straw man, appeal to authority, false dilemmas, hasty generalisations and the “fallacy fallacy”, i.e. thinking you’ve disproved someone’s argument because you’ve identified a fallacy. He also includes the “sunk cost fallacy”, continuing to expend money or effort on something because of the money or effort already expended, when “smart people” cut their losses; this is a major reason why scam victims continue to engage at their own loss after they start to suspect that they are being scammed, but it’s not relevant to the context in which the other fallacies listed are commonly used. However, the fallacy I want to discuss is “tu quoque” (“and you too”), also known as the “appeal to hypocrisy”, because it is often invoked in contexts in which the argument is in fact quite valid.

Tu quoque is illustrated by a man holding a bottle of beer, telling another man “you are not morally correct because you smoke”. The other man starts to reply “but …”. It’s a trivial example that illustrates how the fallacy works, but it also illustrates why it can sometimes be used validly. Smoking is something people often get addicted to when they are young, because their friends do it and they do it to fit in; tobacco smoke also smells bad to anyone not used to it and both the plant and the smoke contain chemicals which cause a number of diseases, mostly but not exclusively to the smoker. Many smokers nowadays do things to mitigate the effects to others, such as only smoking outside (it is banned in enclosed public spaces in the UK nowadays). Alcohol can also be harmful: it makes people drunk after a glass or two, often too drunk to drive safely, and affects their behaviour, making them uninhibited or violent. Western society considers a moderate drinker to be more “morally correct” than a smoker, but a hard drinker (including someone who might be found drinking at work, as that picture suggests) more of a danger. Someone applying for a sensitive job, such as a teacher, who was a smoker who only smoked outdoors would stand a better chance than a problem drinker, even though the drinker didn’t smell of smoke. (If drinking at all is a sin in your religion, as it is in mine, someone who is known to drink will be excluded from consideration altogether, and may be ostracised.)

And this last point illustrates why this line of argument often is no fallacy. It is a fallacy in a pure, academic moral exercise, but the world is not like that. In the real world, the accuser’s flaws might well be relevant. In an election campaign, for example, a candidate might be making loud criticisms of his opponent’s character but be just as guilty of some of them himself, or of others, and this would directly affect his competence or suitability for the job, so it is entirely valid for the opponent or his supporters to point it out. It might not make the thing he is accused of right, but if the accuser is worse, it might not make him a worse candidate. If a country is gearing up for war, criticisms of their enemy might include that he rigs elections, is corrupt, or is repressive and has people summarily executed or tortured, and the fact that other countries do the same does not make any of those things right either, but if some of those countries are our allies and we are not making any threats towards them, it clearly shows that human rights are not the reason for the war. Whether the war is justified or not, the debate needs to be had, and to be had honestly.

In other contexts, “tu quoque” fails as an argument. When someone is apprehended for a crime, it is no defence to argue that someone else has done the same, or worse, and is not being prosecuted. Sometimes this is fair, sometimes not; if the offence is drug possession, and the person arrested was arrested as a result of a racially-motivated stop and search while people with another skin colour use the same drugs freely, that is obviously unjust and racist, but if the offence is something that causes great harm, like rape, the unfairness is of no importance; taking one rapist off the streets is vital, even if it is in no way preferable to taking off two. It has sometimes been used as a defence in war crimes trials, where officials from the defeated power are tried at the behest of victors who have perpetrated other crimes in other wars, or in their colonial empires, but invariably rejected because the crimes in question were heinous and they were arrested when their attempt to seize their neighbours’ countries failed.

The same set of pictures includes a slide on the “appeal to authority” fallacy and this, too, sometimes has valid uses: 

The person uses an expert’s opinion as proof, without any supporting evidence. Experts can inform your thinking, but they generally shouldn’t replace it. People often hide behind credentials when logic runs out.

The problem here is that expert opinion is all that the average person has to go on when talking about things that are beyond their expertise. The average person might assume that one summer is the direct result of man-climate change, or that a cold winter disproves it; they often do not even know what constitutes ‘evidence’ and what is irrelevant. The fact is that the majority of the world’s climate scientists are of the opinion that man-made climate change, caused by burning too much fossil fuel too quickly while destroying the rainforests for logging and farming, is real; to state that is not a fallacy because the authority is real. What is a fallacy is when people cite dissenting studies to explain away a scientific consensus that is inconvenient to them, because it would require them to change their behaviour or might affect their business or other personal circumstances. They will often say “this scientist says …” or “this expert says …” without considering that he is the wrong type of scientist or expert, and is at variance with sometimes an overwhelming majority of qualified scholarly opinion.

In short, there are sometimes good reasons to use arguments that, in an academic context, are fallacies. Sometimes the character of one’s opponent is relevant, sometimes it matters that the accuser is just as guilty as the accused, sometimes it matters that the ‘offending’ behaviour is normal (though sometimes it does not), and sometimes we need to rely on experts rather than our own perceptions; even when the argument is not valid in itself, it does open a window on another injustice. We use arguments not for their own sake, but to advance a cause or to prevent harm being done. The world is not an academic exercise in moral philosophy, and we cannot and should not always behave as if it is.

Image source: Sahil Bloom, via Instagram.

Tanni Grey-Thompson testing out accessible rail travel in Liverpool

Currently in the UK, Parliament is debating a bill introduced by Kim Leadbeater, the sister of the assassinated Labour MP Jo Cox who was selected for the same seat after Cox’s successor was elected to a mayoralty, to legalise “assisted dying”, by which a doctor can administer or prescribe a lethal dose of a sedative to someone who has requested it because they are terminally ill and in intractable pain or have other chronically unpleasant symptoms. Currently, assisting a suicide is illegal, and while people who have assisted severely disabled relatives who cannot physically get hold of the necessary doses of whatever substance they intend to use are usually given suspended sentences (as with Kay Gilderdale in 2010), this still leaves them with a criminal record. This legislation goes further than simply decriminalising that act, but requires that a doctor be involved. With the House of Commons having waved the legislation through and refused a number of amendments intended to reduce the risk of unintended consequences, the bill has faced a lot of opposition in the House of Lords, an upper chamber nowadays mostly consisting of appointed “Life Peers”; there are also 26 Anglican bishops and archbishops (in the past, the house consisted mostly of hereditary peers, who were the holders of large historic estates — dukes, earls, viscounts, barons etc — who were overwhelmingly men, as well as a group of senior judges who are now part of the Supreme Court and no longer sit in the Lords). Some of the amendments proposed in the Lords are obviously unserious, and has led to a lot of chest-puffing in publications sympathetic to the bill, notably the New Statesman: who are the Lords to frustrate a bill that has been passed by the elected Commons? Don’t they know their place?

The House of Lords is entitled to scrutinise bills and can introduce amendments. Those amendments can, however, be voted down in the Commons and, when the bill was introduced by the government and the governing party opposes the amendments, they usually are voted down. Peers are appointed specifically to have diversity of backgrounds and life experiences, and some — far more than in the Commons — are not party-political (known as cross-benchers). Until the early 20th century, the House of Lords was dominated by the actual lords, wealthy men who were mostly very conservative, and they would vote down vital legislation such as those intended to settle the situation in Ireland. Their power to veto a bill altogether ended with the 1911 Parliament Act; all they are able to do now is to delay a bill becoming law by a year (the Liberal government achieved this by threatening a “mass creation” of Liberal peers after the lords had rejected budgets and Irish Home Rule bills). Convention dictates that the lords do not obstruct bills which were part of a governing party’s manifesto; the Leadbeater bill is a private member’s bill, albeit one tacitly supported by the government. However, the attempt to filibuster this bill has led to disapproval from some peers, including Michael Howard, the former Tory leader, as noted in the New Statesman last week, and outright scorn from the magazine and some of its letter writers; one this week called the debate “the sixth-form debating games in the House of Quangocrats” (referring to heads of arms-length administrative bodies) and another calling it “self-indulgence and sabotage of the popular will” and calling for the House of Lords to be abolished.

Filibusters of private members’ bills (prolonging debate so that it runs out of time) is nothing new; the Tory government in the mid-1990s of which Michael Howard was a part used amendments, the same tactic currently being used in the Lords, to talk out an anti-discrimination bill for disabled people. Also relevant to this is the attitude fostered towards disabled people since the party came to power in 2010: the widespread perception, promoted in the Tory popular press, that many disabled people are ‘scroungers’ and are claiming benefits they do not need and should not really be entitled to; this has continued since Labour returned to power this year, with a recent media storm about people using Motability, a charity that arranges leases of adapted cars using the Personal Independence Payment (PIP), which replaced the Disability Living Allowance during the 2010-15 Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition government, to buy posh German cars at state expense (in fact, the lessee must pay out of pocket if they want a more expensive car), and that many of those using the service have no worse disability than anxiety (in fact, someone with only anxiety would not get the mobility allowance necessary, if indeed any PIP at all). In short, it has come to be widely accepted that disabled people’s dignity and independence is an indulgence not worth the taxpayer’s expense, a phenomenon widely seen across the western world in recent years. It costs a lot less to prescribe a lethal dose of sedative than it does to provide a suitable wheelchair or to adapt someone’s flat so that they can live independently or semi-independently, and in countries where medically assisted suicide has been legalised, there have been many documented cases of people refused surgery or assistance for independent living but offered the lethal dose. In Canada the acronym is MAiD (medical assistance in dying), an old-fashioned word for a personal assistant.

As far as this being the “popular will” is concerned, the mere fact of it being that does not mean it should become law; parliamentarians are expected to exercise their judgement while debating laws that could easily have major consequences for many people; that is the principle of representative rather than direct democracy. The “popular will” in the last ten years resulted in us leaving a major trading bloc with no replacement, giving up rights for our children that we had enjoyed for two generations, and may yet see us give up further invaluable rights by leaving the European Convention on Human Rights. In this case, however, we are talking about a campaign among the political class which has gained the upper hand in the House of Commons which simply refuses to listen to sound arguments, including from much of the medical profession, from the palliative care sector, from disability rights advocates including Tanni Grey-Thompson, one of the peers whose amendment is among those ridiculed in the New Statesman recently, that it will put people’s lives at risk who do not want to die, or who might change their mind in time; it dismisses such objections as irrational, religiously-based, and stuck in the past. This bill has been widely condemned as poorly-drafted and lacking in safeguards, and if MPs had done their jobs properly, the Lords would have had less reason to filibuster it.

And let’s not forget, some of these MPs secured election on the back of quite a small share of their constituents’ votes: in our system, a candidate does not need to win an outright majority, and rarely do; it is possible to win a seat on a vote percentage in the low 30s if one’s opponents are sufficiently divided, and a share in the 40s is very common. Opinion polls currently predict Reform winning the next election, with a large majority, on the basis of around 25-30% of the popular vote. To give an extreme example, the current Labour member for South West Norfolk, Terry Jermy, who voted in favour of the Leadbeater bill, secured only 26.7% of his constituents’ votes, a result made possible by the division of the Tory vote (the seat was formerly held by Liz Truss) between the Tories and Reform. Kevin McKenna, MP for Sittingbourne and Sheppey in north Kent, gained his seat off a 29.1% share for the same reason, and also voted in favour of this bill. The New Statesman’s columnists and correspondents are indignant because, having thought there were enough people in the Commons who agreed with them (along with enough of the “great and the good”, including a Dimbleby in a recent edition), found that the Lords preferred to defend lives rather than defer to the personal views of people elected on minorities of the popular vote. For once, it is not sufficient to be popular; it looks like one might have to be right to get one’s wishes into law.

Painting of Dulwich College by Camille Pissarro, 1871 (from Wikimedia)

Over the past few weeks there has been a series of revelations by people who were at school with Nigel Farage who was a pupil at Dulwich College, the prestigious private school in south London, between 1975 and 1982. The behaviours included persistent racial harassment of both Black and Jewish boys and putting a younger boy in detention while a prefect purely because of the colour of his skin. It had previously been reported that staff differed over whether to make him a prefect because of his clearly expressed racist attitudes, although the objections were overruled. The revelations have been met with contempt by Farage’s supporters, pointing to his young age, calling them pathetic and a sign that his opponents are scared but have nothing on Farage except accusations of childhood misdemeanours. If this were almost any other politician, they might be right, but it isn’t.

Farage was a prefect. Prefects at private schools are powerful; they are allowed to not only tell other pupils what to do, but also dish out punishments, a privilege rightly reserved for teachers in most state schools. At the petty private school I briefly attended in south London in the late 80s, we were told that prefects have “all the power of any of the masters (teachers)”. In not too distant times, prefects were allowed to beat younger children (at my later school, they were a law unto themselves and would punch, kick or beat up younger children in full view of staff). What these revelations show is that the last time Farage, who is tipped to be prime minister in three and a half years’ time, had power over other human beings, he used it to bully and humiliate them. Farage was also 18 at the time of at least some of these incidents. That’s an adult. I’ve written about the bullies at my school, including prefects, on this blog on many occasions in the past, but I’ve not named any of them (with one exception, a convicted sex offender) because they were kids, it was more than 30 years ago, and none of them is on the cusp of attaining any power. If they were, and all the signs showed that they had not changed a bit, I certainly would be naming them.

The other reason this matters is because of the sort of politician Farage is now. I listen to him rarely (never, if I can avoid it) but I did hear his performance on the 2015 general election hustings when he was leader of UKIP. On every single issue, he tried to divert it onto immigration. One issue after another, which after the second or third such incident elicited groans from the audience and finally, when the issue was AIDS, clear disgust and anger. Farage’s supporters also blame ‘immigrants’ (which include non-white British citizens) and immigration for everything, stereotype them as drug pushers and child rapists, call for people they consider to be immigrants or “not really British” to be deported at the drop of a hat, and make excuses for racist violence such as seen on the streets after the Southport murders. Always quick to point to white victims and sympathise with white anger; if it manifests in violence, it must be the victims’ fault, or some immigrant’s fault, never their own. This is the movement that threatens to take power in the UK (on the back of a small plurality of the vote, it must be emphasised) three years next May, if current trends continue.

If this was a politician who was now known for an anti-racist stance, or who at least was not known for racism or scapegoating or any other destructive or bullying behaviour as a teen or adult, I would agree that this was a smear campaign by his opponents, but if it was a Labour politician being ‘exposed’ in this way, the same people defending Farage now would be eagerly repeating the smears. What these revelations show is that Farage’s prejudices are lifelong, and that the likelihood of his becoming prime minister makes them, and him, a real danger.

At the tail end of the last millennium, before blogs and definitely before social media, there was a book published called Web Pages That Suck, a guide to badly-designed web pages aimed at people who want to design good websites. The author, Vincent Flanders, turned the concept into a website which he continued updating until 2015; the site now has clearly been abandoned, with lots of missing image markers and ads in every in-between space. Bad web pages were often full of animations and other material which distracted from the actual content, or the product someone was trying to sell. One website that really did suck was MySpace, an early social media contender, principally aimed at musicians (it allowed people to upload music for download) but used by lots of others as a networking site. It allowed users to make their pages as over-the-top as they liked and pages often had animations that made the text illegible and which took several minutes to load. It was taken over by Microsoft, which didn’t improve those matters until it was too late, and made it unfashionable in the era of the infamous bug-ridden Windows XP and processor-hogging Vista. It was crying out to be replaced and when Facebook came along, it was swiftly abandoned.

Last year a book was published by Cory Doctorow, former co-editor of Boing Boing and long-time advocate for online freedom as part of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Open Rights Group, titled Enshittification (edited extract here; you can order the book from their bookshop). This book was a thesis about how online services that were (or appeared) good to begin with go bad as their owners try to monetise them. In the early days, the owners portray themselves as freedom-loving in contrast to their competitors (like Microsoft and MySpace) and offer exceptionally good deals to consumers by undercutting existing companies using their venture capital, but then betray their users by selling their data to commercial customers, then betray the latter by making it more and more difficult to sell their products and publications, imposing onerous fees, limiting the reach of content and punishing them if they link to their own websites. The good deals end, the prices go up, the customer service and quality go down. Ultimately, you end up with a platform offering little other than garbage, surviving only because it is difficult for people to move as all their friends are on the site, or because they have bought a lot of music, video or literature which is locked to the apps, or because the competitors have been put out of business. He contends that “ultimately, they die”, but the principal enshittified web services have survived a lot longer than the sites, which included a fair few stinkers like MySpace, that they replaced. (Amazon does provide some value; its Prime membership offers include some films and music, and its returns system is better than a lot of the competition, but the deterioration of the goods on offer is undeniable.)

I’ve been online since 1995, when public access to the net was quite new, and I’ve been blogging since 2004, so I’ve seen how the Internet has developed. Search has changed from a number of competing engines like Infoseek, Excite, Yahoo and others to just Google and the privacy-oriented DuckDuckGo, neither of which existed in 1995. Early Google, in the late 90s, was just so good that it rapidly put most of the early contenders out of business; Yahoo survived because it took over a number of other services, although some have since been sold, such as Flickr; in the drive to monetise the services, paid content comes first after a useless AI-based summary. Social networking and interaction were provided by email lists and the Usenet newsgroup system; in the early 2000s, and particularly following 9/11, blogs grew more prominent. Finally, in the late 2000s, social media and what was then called ‘microblogging’ exploded, including Twitter and Facebook. Other sites existed back then; the Twitter protocol was used by rivals StatusNet and Identi.ca, neither of which still exist, while Facebook had competitors like Bebo, which was sold to AOL in a much-derided $850 million deal that cost the latter’s CEO his job and is now defunct, although it has been relaunched and then closed down again since 2013. Google made several attempts to launch microblogging and social media apps, none of which still operate. I wrote about Google Plus when it first launched, but Google strangled it at birth by not including functionality which Facebook had, or which Facebook had removed and which users might like. It had no group functionality, apart from anything else.

The thing is, Facebook was always horrible. It both sucked as a service, and was evil. It grew because of the disadvantages of the existing social media options: it wasn’t MySpace with its slow animations and legibility-destroying backdrops, it made it easy to share personal content without having to set up a blog, and it has mostly been free of spam, which was the bane of anyone who ran a blog which allowed user comments before 2007. The downsides were that features changed all the time, with valued functionality removed (such as the discussion forums within the group system) or senselessly changed (such as merging mail with chat), as I mentioned in that article on G+. Worse, earlier versions of FB had a ‘ticker’ feature which told all your friends if you made a comment on any post or group which was not private. I used to call this feature Snitchbooking. This was a large part of what makes Facebook actually evil rather than just bad: old social media consisted of email groups and forums about specific subjects, and if you posted on one, it didn’t appear on any other. Here, all your friends were on the same platform and you couldn’t keep groups of friends separate anymore. On most of the old sites, you could use a handle or pseudonym; Facebook demands that you use your real name.

Back in 2008 when Facebook was in its infancy and blogs were still popular, I spoke at a Muslim community event called “Wired Warriors” in London and put my view forward that there was going to be a “blog crunch”: that the blogosphere was heavily dependent on corporate off-cuts and long-shot business models, such things as offering the principal service for free while charging for support that a lot of users would not need, and that this situation would not last very long as blog hosts would need to pay bills. In the event, some blogging sites have not succumbed to this; WordPress still offers a functional free version of their hosted blogging platform and Blogger is still going, though TypePad has closed, LiveJournal was sold to a Russian company and Movable Type, a popular choice to run a blog in the 2000s with free and cheap personal plans, is now an expensive corporate product. However, a number of blogs disappeared in the move to social media and microblogging, as did a number of privately-hosted forums, and it’s those sites that have fallen victim to the crunch I predicted back in 2008: Twitter got markedly less useful as first Jack Dorsey and then Elon Musk sought to monetise it, restricting then blocking third-party clients and making ‘curated’ feeds the standard, while Facebook has undergone hyperenshittification — a shitty site getting even shittier — with friend and chosen-content feeds very difficult to find and the home feed being filled with promoted, often auto-generated slop, clickbait and churnalism. Meanwhile, Twitter (now branded X) has a default feed increasingly filled with racist and politically extremist content, driving a number of long-standing users to decamp to new, but underused, competitors such as BlueSky and Mastodon. On both sites, it has become difficult to promote blog articles, while many of the forums and email lists that previously allowed their promotion have closed.

Cory Doctorow gives some ideas as to how to de-enshittify the online world; these include unionising tech workers and strengthening anti-trust (competition regulation) laws so that one company cannot force competitors out of the market with subsidised undercutting or monopolise the supply chain. Sadly, the political climate right now is very much against any such legislative changes in many countries. Another legislative trend that makes resisting enshittification more difficult is the wave of online safety laws, requiring web service operators to impose age verification or police their services to ensure children are not exposed to ‘adult’ content. The motive is quite understandable, but it is precisely the large, established, enshittified service operators which have the resources to access this kind of technology, not those seeking to re-establish private forums or indeed new, open social media platforms, and this has led to some sites run on a shoestring to close, or to block users identifiable as being in the UK, Australia or other countries where such laws exist. One important way of reclaiming the online space is for a fund to be built up to buy out Twitter, either by an offer to its current owner or in the event of a distress sale. This would secure Twitter as a community resource and restore it to what it was before so much of its functionality was stripped away.

Is there a way back to what we had before social media swept it all away? Do we want those days back? Blogging was a lot more fun when people responded and there were lively discussions in the comment sections, but I also remember dealing with floods of spam and with Islamophobic comments; I don’t think I’ve had a single blog comment in a few years and I haven’t seen a lot of my old regulars for years now. For a while the discussion moved onto Facebook and Twitter and then it stopped altogether. Maybe people don’t read blogs anymore, but there are things you can’t say in a Twitter thread and we don’t want our writings to be stored on a social media site that might just choose to exclude us from it. When bloggers started shutting their sites down and moving onto Facebook around 2007, I had a sense that it wouldn’t end well and my fears were largely confirmed.

Sara Sharif

Today an independent review into the murder of an eight-year-old girl of mixed Pakistani and Polish parentage, Sara Sharif, was published. The review (PDF) by the Surrey Safeguarding Children Partnership (SCP), identified five particular failings, mostly by the court system, but also mistakes on the part of the local council which contributed to the failure to prevent the murder. These include the courts giving undue weight to the opinions of court-appointed guardians rather than social workers, a report compiled by an inexperienced social worker which meant a judge subsequently had insufficient information, a rushed response to a report of a bruise on Sara’s cheek which led to no action being taken, and failure to update records such as the Sharifs’ address. However, one section of it mentions that neighbours reported being “afraid of being called racist” and that visiting social workers did not ask why Sara was wearing hijab at home at age 8 when no older females were doing so, when the hijab was being worn to hide bruises and injuries to her head. These last points are, predictably, what racists have seized on.

To clarify, in Islam, hijab becomes compulsory for a girl at puberty. Some women don’t wear it, though, and you are more likely to find a girl wearing it before that time if her mother, aunts or other older female relatives wear it (and not in the family home in the presence of a female visitor, like the occupational therapist mentioned below). In the case of Sara Sharif’s family, they did not, and the type of hijab Sara was shown wearing in a police handout is one you would see on a girl from a more religious family whose relatives wore hijab. Social workers are familiar with make-up, face paints or food being used to cover bruises or injuries, but hijab is probably less common (and all the more so in a small Muslim community in an outer-suburban town like Woking). The visitor, as the report notes on page 20, was a newly-qualified occupational therapist, not a social worker at all. A social work department from an inner London borough or other district with a substantial Asian and/or Muslim population might have had a social worker from that background they could have sent on the visit, but the visit was not about Sara Sharif at all; rather, it was to support her father and stepmother in caring for their other children. It was noted that the OT “has reflected that she may have been reticent to talk about it for fear of causing offence”, but she was inexperienced, unaware that there was any history of Children’s Services involvement with the family and was visiting for reasons unconnected to Sara.

However, the Times’ headline writer puts it all down to the race aspect: “chances to prevent murder ‘lost to racial sensitivities’”, it proclaims, glossing over the fact that the report identifies failings that were nothing to do with “racial sensitivities” but consist of failure to share or act on information. Reform agitator Matt Goodwin goes even further in a Twitter post linking to the Times’ report:

Sara Sharif was murdered after officials failed to ask why she was wearing a hijab because “they didn’t want to offend”.

Exactly what happened with the rape gangs. Our culture is more interested in protecting minorities from “harm” than saving lives 

Again, she was an occupational therapist there to help the family, not an ‘official’, was inexperienced and not there to check on Sara. But more to the point, social workers and other staff not knowing enough about Asian or Muslim culture contributed more to this tragedy than any ‘sensitivity’: they did not realise that her wearing it in these particular circumstances was abnormal, and in some cases did not know about her family’s past, so did not know why it was not just abnormal but suspicious and that the “innocent explanation”, that she had been on a trip to Pakistan and was wearing it out of ‘pride’ in her culture and food, was likely to be spurious. 

The report also mentions that the family’s neighbours were interviewed; they said they had heard worrying things from within the family home but were reticent to share these with the authorities because they “feared being branded as being racist, especially on social media”. In the same paragraph on page 41, it quotes a work by the American academic Robin DiAngelo titled White Fragility, as if this was the reason the neighbours failed to report what they were hearing:

The Child Safeguarding Practice review panel report notes that ‘DiAngelo (2018) suggests that it is ‘white fragility’ – or a defensiveness – that is triggered when white individuals, even those who consider themselves to be progressive, encounter racial stress. This can result in individuals turning away from honest dialogue about racism, focusing instead on their own feelings of victimisation rather than on the person or people of colour who have been interpersonally and/or systemically harmed.’

Is that relevant here? The neighbours might have been looking for an explanation for why they failed to act. They are not held to professional standards; all they had to do was pick up the phone and let the police do the rest. White fragility is more relevant when a white person is accused of racism, or is told that an attitude they express is racist, or hears negative things said about their nation’s past and takes it personally.

One aspect of this report recalls the case of Ellie Butler, who was murdered by her father who had fought the local social services to get her and another child back, having been earlier accused of inflicting a shaking injury; the family courts sidelined the social workers who had tried to protect her, appointing a ‘consultancy’ to carry out any social work activity that involved the family, and sweeping away all the objections to returning a little girl to a plainly unstable and violent household. All the parties involved in that case were white. Much of the rest of this case consists of the usual problems of different official bodies, health, education, social work and courts, failing to share vital information. But the racists’ conclusion, that a girl died because “officials were too busy minding what they say about Muslims”, turns reality on its head: ignorance about Sara’s and her family’s religion and culture is what shielded them from any concerns about why Sara Sharif had started wearing the hijab at an age and in situations where Muslim girls do not. If they are given too much credence, the next tragedy could be because social workers were unwilling to be the ones learning about the cultures of the families and children they help, unwilling to be the goody-goody or even a traitor by defending an unpopular minority.

A thug takes a brick to the groin in last year’s racist riots.

A few years ago I saw someone say on Twitter that people would happily call each other feminazis or grammar Nazis, but would not call a Nazi a Nazi. In the past year or so since the Southport murders and the subsequent riots and since Donald Trump returned to office in the US and launched his war against legal and illegal immigrants, citizens and anyone else who “looks foreign”, racists have got increasingly strident in pretending that they are the ones who are in danger: the likes of Matt Goodwin have issued ‘warnings’ about the ‘dangers’ of calling people racists or “far right”, as it might lead to another politician or commentator being assassinated, as was Charlie Kirk last month (though the actual motives for that are unclear). Meanwhile, Muslims and others who march against the genocide in Gaza are branded as “antisemitic marchers”. I have noticed a climate in which it is considered unwise or dangerous to call people racists, and this has to be opposed.

The other day a video came up on my YouTube feed which was about the ten most unpleasant people in rock music. The eight men and two women were not the actual criminals — no Ian Watkins or Jim Gordon, for example — but mostly people who treated other musicians badly or who walked off stage or had fans ejected, for example. I noticed that one of those listed was a racist and another was known for exploiting young women, but neither of these facts was mentioned in the video as if being a racist was not something worth mentioning in that context. Did he think it would alienate some of his viewers, or does he sympathise with the views in question? I did point out that he’d left those details out, but he didn’t acknowledge or reply to my comment. Another case in point comes from the New Statesman at the end of September: an article instructing Labour activists, in the run-up to the Ellesmere Port by-election, not to call Nigel Farage racist because the “median voter” did not consider him to be; by doing so, Labour activists were scolding the voter and telling them they were wrong. A poll, sourced from “Merlin Strategies”, whoever they are, claims that even among current Labour voters, only 46% of voters considered Farage to be racist and among northerners, it was only 33%, with 47% disagreeing. The word ‘racist’ is generally considered derogatory, and someone who actually is a racist will generally not call themselves that; people “not considering Farage to be racist” thus includes those who agree with him as well as those who somehow, after hearing all he has had to say throughout his political career, continue to believe that he is not.

We are also seeing the racists and far-right in politics in the media increasingly playing the victim. The assassination of Charlie Kirk has given them additional licence to cast themselves as being the ones in danger, when in fact racism is what puts people in danger. Goodwin, two weeks ago, accused “the Left” of “[setting] the stage for the attempted assassination of Donald Trump and the murder of Charlie Kirk”, both of whom had enemies on the neo-Nazi far right as well as the Left and elsewhere; Kirk’s alleged assassin may well have been a ‘groyper’ although his motives have yet to be fully investigated. However, the historical facts are that while anti-racism may produce the odd assassination (often in the midst of intense racist violence, as with the assassinations of Ernst von Rath and Reinhard Heydrich, which provided pretexts for early Nazi atrocities), racism itself results in far greater levels of destruction and death than anti-racism, or false accusations of racism, ever have; even the raft of false accusations of antisemitism during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party did not kill anyone. Goodwin tells us off for calling Nigel Farage an enemy; the same language was used in the Tory press during Theresa May’s premiership for judges and others they saw as trying to frustrate “the will of the people” on Brexit. (They, of course, still happily throw the Antisemitism slur around, as well as calling Black politicians racist for identifying white racism.)

A number of years ago, the Muslim Tory peer Sayeeda Warsi observed that Islamophobia “passed the dinner-table test”: that prejudice towards Muslims could be expressed in respectable circles with no fear of censure. In 2025, many more forms of prejudice not only pass that test — Islamophobia, anti-Black and anti-Asian racism, blind hostility to refugees and other real or perceived immigrants — but rather, opposition to them is what no longer passes that test. If we call people racists or fascists, we are accused of having contempt for what the ordinary person thinks or feels, and of putting politicians’ lives in danger even as actual racist thugs terrorise refugees and asylum seekers housed in hotels and two Asian women have been raped in the last month or so by white men who made their racist intentions clear to them. Even Keir Starmer could not call the goons rampaging around English towns after the Southport murders last year racists; he settled for calling them “far-right thugs” as they attacked people for their skin colour. As both Tory and Reform politicians and media demand the right to offend, the right to “criticise Islam” and to ridicule others’ beliefs (as per a bill currently going through Parliament, presented by Tory MP Nick Timothy), we must also be free to call out and condemn racism and to call racists what they are. They are the ones threatening everyone with violence, not us.

Maccabi Tel Aviv fans singing one of their favourite chants (source: 5Pillars).

The saga over the Aston Villa versus Maccabi Tel Aviv football (soccer) fixture next month revealed a lot about how far our political establishment will go to defend Israel and to spare the feelings of its supporters. There has been a campaign to get the match called off, on the grounds that Israel is a genocidal state which should be treated as a pariah, as is Russia currently, for the past few weeks but last week the local Safety Advisory Group (SAG) recommended that MTA’s fans should not be allowed to travel to the game on the grounds that there was a strong likelihood of violence if the fans’ past record is anything to go by: picking fights with local Muslim minorities and singing offensive and racist songs (albeit in Hebrew, but they are not the only ones who understand Hebrew). They have, in short, a major hooligan problem and there was no guarantee that they would not get into, or start, a fight with Birmingham’s large Muslim community. The advice attracted scorn from the entire political class; it was accused of at best caving into antisemitism and at worst actual antisemitism; my former MP Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, opined that the way to oppose antisemitism was not by banning its victims. Meanwhile, the reaction from many of the Tories and parties further Right was to accuse the SAG of being afraid to offend Muslims, and accused local Muslims of being a threat to the visiting fans rather than the other way round.

Over the course of last weekend, events took several turns until the Israeli club announced that it would not sell tickets for the match to their own fans, which would mean there would be no MTA fans at the match. A man claiming to be the leader of Aston Villa’s own “Jewish supporters’ club” turned out not to be Jewish at all and the fan club turned out not to exist. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon then announced that he (and a bunch of his supporters) would turn out in support of the tourists; a derby match between MTA and another Tel Aviv side, Hapoel, had to be cancelled on advice from local police after riots inside and outside the stadium. The latter left a lot of politicians with egg on their faces; the former prompted the fake Jewish fan to change his position, calling for the match to be held behind closed doors with no fans, as had an earlier MTA fixture with a Turkish side (held behind closed doors in Hungary). Still, politicians continued to link the decision to bar the MTA fans to antisemitism, alleging that they never just banned away fans for this reason (not true), only when the away fans are Israeli, and brushed aside concerns about hooliganism, repeating claims that the violence in Amsterdam last year was a pogrom against them by local Muslims, ignoring reports from local police that the fans were violent and racist as well. Others were wringing their hands over our supposed admission that “Jews aren’t safe in Britain’s second city”, despite the fact that Jews live in Birmingham and travel there every day, and other teams with associations with the Jewish community (e.g. Tottenham Hotspur) have played there many times with no trouble, nor any reason perceived to ban them. The fact that they are Jewish, or that Israel is a Jewish state, has nothing to do with why locals do not want this group of fans in their city.

My solution would have been, instead of a game behind closed doors with no fans at all, to hold the match in a stadium away from Birmingham, fairly close to an airport if possible, where the fans could be bussed from the airport to the match, and then bussed back and flown out as soon as possible after it ends. This way, both sets of fans get to see their team play and antagonism to the local community is kept to a minimum. Two possibilities that spring to mind are the stadiums in Reading and Milton Keynes — both large, both within easy reach of Birmingham for Villa’s fans and within easy reach of Heathrow airport (and in MK’s case also Luton airport) for the Israeli fans, and crucially neither in residential areas where locals could be subjected to major inconvenience or antagonism.

However, I must stand in defence of the Muslim community who objected to holding the match in their area. Who can blame them for feeling uncomfortable with large numbers of Israeli football supporters with a record of violence coming into their area? The political space and media the last few months has been full of talk of the country being ‘invaded’ by asylum seekers described as “fighting-age males”, and any misdeed of one of them is held up as proof that they are all a menace; yet, we expect Birmingham’s Muslim community to tolerate this large group of actual fighters, people (men and women) who six months or a year or two ago were in an army whose main function was terrorising unarmed people, mostly Muslims, in their villages and orchards on the West Bank, protecting lawless,  racist settlers who destroy their homes, crops and livestock, enforcing an occupation that has persisted for more than 50 years, with its regime of arbitrary detention, oppressive checkpoints, and a pseudo-justice system consisting of military tribunals, and who the past two years have been waging a genocidal war against the civilians of Gaza? When people said they didn’t want “Israeli hooligans” around, they were accused of antisemitism for suggesting that Israeli hooligans were worse than other football hooligans, but the fact is that other football hooligans are not war criminals.

According to police intelligence as reported in the Guardian last Tuesday, the fears were precisely about extremists linked to the club and not about danger to the Israeli supporters from locals: that Dutch police had told British police that the MTA fans instigated violence in Amsterdam and that scores of extremist fans with a history of racism and violence were expected to travel. The fans would have had to travel through London as there are no direct flights from Israel to Birmingham, which would have raised the possibility of further violence while they travelled to and from the game, and that specialist riot police would have had to be drafted in from across the country (this could, again, have been solved with charter flights and direct buses to a nearby stadium). The assessments were not made with any consideration of whether they could be interpreted as antisemitic or as ‘pandering’ or a surrender to antisemitism; they did understand that if you had not seen the intelligence, you could conclude that it was because the fans were Jewish; in my opinion, only bigoted Zionists — the sort that would not accept that the deliberate slaughter of tens or hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians after referencing an actual incident of genocide in the Bible was genocide, or that travelling Israeli fans could not possibly have started previous violence, even if local police had said so — would have concluded this.

Our political and media class are so devoted to Israel right now that they are willing to ride roughshod over local people’s feelings to allow some of the worst of them to come to the UK and roam around for several days, something which would not be allowed for a team from anywhere in Europe with such a record (and was not allowed for our fans when British hooligans were a major problem in the late 1980s and their behaviour contributed to a fatal disaster). With all the talk about whether the MTA fans were safe, and whether the police could police the match and the journey to and from it effectively, nobody seemed to be asking whether it was justified to impose any level of inconvenience on local people just so that a group of fans with a history of racist violence, from a country still engaged in an orgy of war crimes, could go to a football match. This would have affected everyone, but it was Muslims and Arabs (or anyone perceived as such) who were at particular risk from their behaviour, and this did not matter to politicians and the media, but all the while we see hand-wringing about how “Jews are not safe” because Israeli thugs are told they are not welcome, and indeed any time a strident criticism of Israel is made in a public forum. Sod everyone else’s feelings, but watch you mind theirs.