Confirmation bias, toxic incompetence and the ban that should never have been

It’s recently become fashionable, for commentators chronicling the rise of populism on the left and right in UK politics, to quote WB Yeats lament in his Second Coming that “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”. However, the poem’s most consequential lines, for me at least, have always been the couplet that comes shortly afterwards – “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” – something which, as a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee who produced this week’s report into the Maccabi Tel Aviv fan ban, I have witnessed from the first hearing to the final publication.

Our report is a pretty damning indictment of West Midlands Police (WMP) who essentially “reverse-engineered” a security threat using false data to reach a predetermined conclusion. The central failure lay in a collapse of rigorous policing, replaced by confirmation bias, based on an un-minuted phone conversation with Dutch Police concerning a previous match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv, much of which was later disputed, and an unverified AI-generated fiction concerning another match that never took place.

It was on that basis that WMP justified a blanket ban on visiting supporters.

In summary, they relied on false information from Microsoft Copilot, which hallucinated a non-existent match against West Ham to “prove” a pattern of violence and hugely overstated Dutch reports, claiming 5,000 officers were needed in Amsterdam (when the true figure was 1,200) and the extent to which Maccabi fans were the instigators rather than the victims of the violence that did occur.

This wasn’t just a technical glitch or administrative oversight; it was a profound failure to professionally interrogate the evidence available. This was all too clear when I questioned the now ex chief constable, both in December and again in January, where it was plain to everyone that, in the absence of vigorous research, the WMP leadership had fallen back on intuition and lazy assumptions.

Another important misstep in this controversy was down to the initial passivity of the Home Office, followed by a “clumsy” intervention from Whitehall. While the Prime Minister was right to express profound concern at the ban, the Government’s eleventh-hour attempt to overturn it only inflamed local tensions further and did nothing to move matters forward.

By the time No. 10 intervened, the damage to community trust was already done. As our report makes clear, that is because the Home Office failed to coordinate or escalate the matter until it was too late to be effective.

We were also deeply troubled by the role of the Birmingham Safety Advisory Group (SAG) who actually made the formal decision to ban away fans. While we found no evidence (which included listening to the recordings of their meetings) to conclude that the SAG’s decision was made because of political pressure, we discovered nothing that would enable us to conclude otherwise. What was clear, as we stated in the report, was that councillors, with a stated political aim, had a disproportionate opportunity to influence SAG decision-making on a deeply divisive political issue. That is why our report recommends that elected politicians should no longer sit on SAGs to ensure operational safety decisions are free from political pressure.

Despite our profound criticisms of the decision to ban away fans, our inquiry found no evidence of antisemitism in the decision-making process. While the ban was misguided and built on bad data, we could not conclude it was motivated by malice or prejudice against the Jewish community.

Instead, we found a “toxic mix” of institutional incompetence and an administrative desire to avoid a complex policing operation. In my view, the harm done was not born of hate, but of a systemic failure to test evidence borne out of, in the words of Yeats, a police force and SAG, confronted (and subsumed) by competing pressures “lack[ing] all conviction” and preferring what seemed like the easiest solution and line of least resistance.

While Yeats was not seeking to defend such dereliction, he reserved his greatest ire for those “full of passionate intensity” who have no doubts about the righteousness of their cause.

In this context, I have seen that from the outset of our enquiry, with emails and social media attacks suggesting I am a paid apologist for Israel and complicit in a Jewish conspiracy. I’ve heard it before, and to be honest I fully expected it again this time. What I was not expecting was the equally “passionate intensity” of the Campaign Against Antisemitism castigating our committee for “pull[ing] its punches”, for failing to call out what they seem to be suggesting was an Islamist inspired conspiracy in which the WMP were actively complicit.

This is a deeply disappointing verdict which I utterly reject. So let me repeat again – we found no evidence of antisemitism in the decision-making process and nothing to suggest there was “intentional appeasement” or that “senior police lied to parliament to cover it up”. In short, to attack the Report for failing to reach such a conclusion is as misguided as those who seek to argue the Report is nothing more than the work of the Israeli lobby.

As a member of the committee, I will continue to fight for a culture of transparency where evidence is tested, not manufactured or assumed, and where people’s rights are never sacrificed for administrative convenience or political expediency. We need a return to evidence-based decision-making and be wary of seeing conspiracies, be they Jewish or Islamist, round every corner and no matter the temptation.

Paul Kohler has served as the Liberal Democrat MP for Wimbledon since 2024