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You might think that the ongoing controversy over how West Midlands Police handled a football match last year between Aston Villa and the Israeli team Maccabi Tel Aviv was about the game itself.
You'd be wrong. It's really about two far more important things: who controls the streets of Britain, and the police's duty to be open and honest.
On Monday, senior officers from West Midlands Police gave evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee. The MPs wanted the police to explain the reasoning and evidence behind their extraordinary decision to ban Israeli fans from November's match, ostensibly on 'safety' grounds.
This was the second time the officers had been hauled before MPs. Their first session, last month, was a car crash, with much of the evidence they had provided unravelling under a moment's scrutiny.
Astonishingly, Monday's session was even worse.
The day had started badly enough, with a newspaper publishing what appears to be the real reason the police had banned the Israeli fans. This was, in the police's own words, 'high-confidence intelligence' that 'elements of the community' were looking to 'arm themselves' to fight Jewish fans.
The 'community' to which they were referring, in a city as diverse as Birmingham, scarcely needs explaining.
Needless to say, the officers had made no attempt to reveal this intelligence in their previous appearance before the select committee last month. When one MP at this week's hearing asked West Midlands Chief Constable Craig Guildford why he had effectively hidden this crucial material from the committee during his previous appearance, Guildford replied: 'This is the first time specifically that you have asked for that detail.'
Pro-Palestine groups protested outside Villa Park during the game that was played without any away fans
Craig Guildford, second right, told MPs they received some of their intelligence from Google
At this, Scottish Labour MP Joani Reid exclaimed: 'Absolutely outrageous!'
As Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Opposition, put it: 'West Midlands Police capitulated to Islamists and then collaborated with them to cover it up. They knew extremists were planning to attack Jews for going to a football match, and their response was to blame and remove Jewish people instead. They presented an inversion of reality and misled a parliamentary committee.'
It is clear to me that having decided on banning Jewish fans for fear of them falling victim to an Islamist hate-mob, the police then searched for evidence to justify this anti-Semitic exclusion. And when they couldn't find any, they concocted some in a revolting tissue of lies.
There are at least three clear suggestions of this, each of which poses stark questions about the honesty of Birmingham's boys in blue.
First, the intelligence report prepared by West Midlands Police in support of the ban cited a previous Maccabi 'match' in Britain, against West Ham. No such match took place.
As the chief constable revealed on Monday, officers first searched the national police database for information about problems with Maccabi fans at previous matches in Britain. Nothing came up, because there have been no problems. As Guildford told the MPs: 'They didn't find any relevant information within the searches that we made… and they basically Googled… and that's how the information came to be there.'
Google's AI, it now emerges, had 'hallucinated' the fictitious match between Maccabi and West Ham that the police had included in their useless 'report'. The chief constable told the committee: 'We don't use AI.' But they do: Google's search engine increasingly provides AI-generated results.
The police failed to do the most basic due diligence – to me this goes far beyond negligence, and it's clear they were desperate for any information, however spurious, to justify banning Jewish fans.
At last month's hearing, Assistant Chief Constable Mike O'Hara told MPs that Birmingham's own Jewish community had wanted Maccabi fans banned from the city
It is clear to me that having decided on banning Jewish fans for fear of them falling victim to an Islamist hate-mob, the police then searched for evidence to justify this anti-Semitic exclusion, writes Stephen Pollard
Second, at last month's hearing, Assistant Chief Constable Mike O'Hara told MPs that Birmingham's own Jewish community had wanted Maccabi fans banned from the city.
O'Hara added that the police had had extensive consultation with local Jewish representatives (as well as 'a range of faiths, backgrounds and ethnicities') who were 'very concerned'.
Again, this was simply not true. Far from consulting Birmingham's tiny 2,000-strong Jewish community, the police repeatedly ignored their requests to meet, speaking to them only after the ban had been imposed. After last month's Select Committee session, O'Hara wrote to Jewish representatives to apologise and admit that not a single member of the community had told the police they supported a ban. It was, he unconvincingly added, 'not my intention' to mislead.
Once again, it is clear that the police made their decision – and retroactively sought to justify it.
The third and most shocking piece of evidence for the police's outrageous behaviour is a Zoom call that the chief constable says he held with his peers in Amsterdam. As I have said, West Midlands Police based their case for a ban on concerns over public safety, citing events in Amsterdam when Maccabi played Dutch side Ajax.
In their report recommending a ban in Birmingham, the West Midlands police said 'significant numbers' of Maccabi fans were involved in 'demonstrations and confrontations' in Amsterdam, and cited claims that on match day, up to 600 Maccabi fans had 'committed a variety of targeted, hate motivated crimes'.
But all the evidence – not least publicly available Dutch court documents – shows that this is the precise opposite of what happened. The violence seen in Amsterdam was entirely the result of Muslim gangs orchestrating what they called a 'Jew hunt' for 'cancer Jews'. Not a single Maccabi fan was charged with any offence in Amsterdam.
Indeed, when contacted by British reporters about this, Dutch police took the rare step of issuing on-the-record contradictions of every one of the assertions made by West Midlands Police about what supposedly happened in Amsterdam.
The UK police had said Maccabi fans were 'highly organised, skilled fighters with a serious desire and will to fight with police and opposing groups'. Their Dutch counterparts insisted: 'The Amsterdam police does not recognise the claim.'
West Midlands said Dutch police had deployed some 5,000 officers. Dutch police responded: 'About 1,200 were deployed... 5,000 is so not true [sic].'
The Dutch could not have been clearer. But at the first select committee hearing last month, in a moment I suspect will come back to haunt him, Chief Constable Guildford told MPs that he had conducted a private Zoom conversation with Dutch police, who told him that every bizarre allegation West Midlands police had made about events in Amsterdam was in fact correct.
For this to be true, the Dutch police would have had to have effectively admitted to Guildford that they lied to their own courts, lied in their official report, lied to the Dutch media and lied to the British journalists who spoke to them on the record.
And then Guildford must have decided not to bother even recording this alleged Zoom call took place, let alone make a note of its explosive contents. Everyone would just have to trust him on that. Let me put it this way: pull the other one.
The reality is that from the moment the police announced the ban on Israeli fans, it seems that they have used obfuscation, smears and misleading statements to hide the truth.
This is why this scandal is so significant. It is the same lesson we should have learned from the rape gangs, where police in areas with significantly high Muslim populations apparently refused to act amid fears of being accused of 'racism' and an inability to deal with the community response – leading to tens of thousands of English girls having their lives destroyed.
It is time that, as a country, we started to tackle extremism properly. Of course the chief constable must resign. Of course he must now be investigated for alleged misconduct in public office.
But the lessons here go deeper than the actions of one rotten police force – and I pray that we finally start to learn them.