It wasn\u2019t a matchday, but security guards were lined up before the wrought iron gates of Villa Park. Behind them loomed the 43,000-seater football stadium, home of a club that is, this week, in the eye of a cultural and political storm. Aston is an Asian-majority area of North Birmingham that has found its constituent parts at the eye of a storm about multicultural Britain. The imminent visit of an Israeli team has exposed sectarian seams of mistrust and fear in the UK \u2014 but the guards had been told to keep their mouths shut.<\/p>\n
Few other observers have kept their counsel in the run-up to Aston Villa\u2019s home tie with Maccabi Tel Aviv. Pundits have drawn attention to the Maccabi fans\u2019 previous misbehaviour, others have raised concerns that the same fans will be unsafe in such a partisan city. Most have agreed that the match would not be untroubled if Maccabi fans turned up. Seeing political opportunity, in September, a local MP, the pro-Gaza independent Ayoub Khan, called for the match to be cancelled. Then, amid rising concern, local policing bureaucrats banned Maccabi fans from attending the game \u2014 citing safety reasons. Amid commentariat fury at perceived antisemitism, Keir Starmer called the ban \u201cthe wrong decision\u201d, and his government said it would find resources with which to get fans to the match safely. Birmingham was suddenly the focus of a furious row about ethnic strongholds and ancient hatreds.<\/p>\n
Small wonder, then, that Villa Park has also become a magnet to provocateurs, with the pro-Gaza former mayoral candidate Akhmed Yakoob, a self-promoting lawyer who faces a trial over money laundering, holding court in a Villa shirt. Inevitably, Tommy Robinson, too, has hinted<\/a> he might pitch up for the game. But while the political class has been trying to play this game to its own advantage, the residents are touchy. It wasn\u2019t just the security guards. \u201cMate, I\u2019m not speaking about that,\u201d said one man on a smoke break near the stadium.<\/p>\n Birmingham Perry Barr<\/a>, Khan\u2019s constituency, is particularly economically vulnerable, with people struggling to put food on the table; the city\u2019s financial woes, meanwhile, have left rats picking over the piled-up bin bags. Yet rather than focus on these quotidian issues, Khan and his ilk have allowed the match to become the platform for their Gaza-sympathetic stance. This does play locally. Aston has a large Muslim population: over 73%<\/a> in 2021. And, according to a recent poll, one in four British Muslims<\/a> rates Israel-Palestine as their most important election issue. Venture down the main Aston High Street and this would seem to be reflected in the sea of anti-Zionist signs and thickets of pro-Palestine heraldry. But Kefentse Dennis, a former local councillor with a pro-Gaza stance, worries that this increased flagging isn\u2019t entirely local or organic. Activists are imposing their politics on the locals, he suggests. \u201cFood on the table is more important here,\u201d he tells me. And the match has become about more than football because Khan, as he sees it, is part of \u201ca political class\u201d.<\/p>\n All told, then, the area is more complex, than some far-off commentators, might assert. Shopkeepers of South Asian heritage run the off-licences, takeaways and shops that service fans. \u201cI love the football guys,\u201d beams one in a Villa-branded takeaway. And though Palestinian flags fluttered by the Witton Arms, the old-school Villa boozer, broadly the fans think politics and football should be separate.<\/p>\n In any case, it\u2019s not just Palestine flags you notice when walking around Aston. There are Union flags and St George\u2019s crosses too \u2014 something that national reporting has overlooked. The whole flagging trend started in the poorer, whiter suburbs of South Birmingham and while it could be a sign of rising sectarianism here, it is also true that flags of any stripe, Palestine or St George, are becoming symbols of disillusionment. \u201cPeople are sick and tired,\u201d Dennis told me. \u201cThey don\u2019t get to feel pride at being British,\u201d he adds. \u201cFlags have given them something to do.\u201d<\/p>\n Dennis also contends that the reputation of the Maccabi fan base complicates the allegations of antisemitism. In fact, many in the local Jewish community supported the ban along with the police. While it is true that, since October 7, Jew hatred has soared<\/a> across the West Midlands, it is unavoidable that the Maccabi fans have previous. Notwithstanding the clashes in Amsterdam, in Israel, police have recently had to intervene in their matches. Not long after the fans were banned from attending the game in Aston, the police called off a Maccabi match<\/a> in Tel Aviv after violent rioting. You might forgive the police for being cautious \u2014 just two years ago, almost 50 officers were injured in clashes with visiting Polish football fans. They\u2019re aware of the potential on-the-ground danger for both locals, themselves and potential visiting Jewish fans.<\/p>\n In the end, though, it was Maccabi themselves who chose not to bring fans. Late last month, the club said it would not accept its allocation of away tickets. In a statement, it said that \u201ca toxic atmosphere has been created which makes the safety of our fans wishing to attend very much in doubt\u201d. Closer to home, Ruth Jacobs, a representative for the Jewish Representative Council for Birmingham and the West Midlands, confirmed that the Jewish community were kept in the loop regarding police thinking on the match but the incident has been \u201cfrustrating, irritating and sad\u201d. \u201cIt should have never come to this,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n With or without Maccabi fans there, the police will have work to do \u2014 \u00a0over 700 officers, will be drafted in. Hours before the match, a pro-Palestine protest is set to take place, with demands for Israeli teams to be banned from international footballing competitions altogether. And local pro-Palestine activists have voiced concern that \u201cbored, masked youths\u201d might decide to cause trouble. \u201cThere are worries that this then confirms the pre-emptive media narrative,\u201d Dennis added.<\/p>\n Perhaps for that reason, this is now a city on the defensive. Ayoub Khan, chatty last month, refused to speak to me. Days before the match, his predecessor, Khalid Mahmood was at first happy to speak, and then simply ghosted me. The police didn\u2019t want to get caught up in politics again.<\/p>\n I understand why locals might have a distaste for probing journalists. Muslims, Jews, and Aston as a whole have all been used to justify grand narratives of some sort. Nuanced safety concerns, the truth of community and grinding economic realism are secondary in angry national debates.<\/p>\n \u201cMuslims, Jews, and Aston as a whole have all been used to justify grand narratives of some sort.\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, poorer North Birmingham suburbs have all proved useful for the type of media criticism we\u2019ve seen building around the Villa match. Robert Jenrick turned up nearby, claiming no white faces could be seen.<\/a> In nearby Erdington, a majority-white area, a Telegraph reporter found a community that didn\u2019t feel like a community because, as she told it, of rising migrant numbers. Damned be the facts of the matter.<\/a><\/p>\n But this national weaponising of local issues has already dealt a powerful blow to a place which will be left reeling long after the final whistle is blown and Westminster loses interest. Politicos in London won\u2019t have to deal with the reverberating tensions, but locals will.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It wasn\u2019t a matchday, but security guards were lined up before the wrought iron gates of Villa Park.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":552586,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7820],"tags":[69259,855,748,393,1811,94,4884,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-552585","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-birmingham","8":"tag-anti-semitism","9":"tag-birmingham","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-england","12":"tag-europa-league","13":"tag-football","14":"tag-great-britain","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115502005986537334","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=552585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552585\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/552586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=552585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=552585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=552585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}