Media: death rattle

By Richard North - January 18, 2026

Although there will be more than a few lining up to say: “I told you so”, yesterday was the day when any hope that there might be an adult audience out there on social media well and truly evaporated.

The proximate cause of the onset of my pessimism is the hue and cry over the Maccabi ban and the retirement of Craig Guildford. There can be no dispute that there is a continued interest in the issue – and a strong sense of outrage that the WMP chief constable should have got off so lightly. But the X social media platform collectively is acting like an old-fashioned lynch mob, determined to see him strung up to satiate their bloodlust.

There is virtually no interest in looking deeper into the affair, seeking to understand the role of the parties apart from the police, and no concern that the local authority mechanisms might have been subverted from inside, with the elected members having lost control.

Yet, the more I have looked into this whole affair, the more I am convinced we are looking at the tip of an iceberg, with depths that plumb a deep and sinister abyss.

For instance, one article I picked up and have been sitting on for a while, leaving me puzzling as to where it fits in, was published in the Birmingham local media on 17 October, the day after the fateful letter from the SAG to Aston Villa FC.

This has the leader of Birmingham City Council, John Cotton, warning Guildford “not to ban Israeli fans from a Villa game because doing so would suggest the city was ‘not safe’”, an assertion which – if correctly reported – is staggering in its implications.

There certainly can be some doubt about the accuracy of the reporting because, a few days later on 21 October, Cotton was on ITV News, saying that he disagreed with the decision made by the Safety Advisory Group to ban supporters of Maccabi TA.

Cotton is directly quoted on the broadcaster’s website, saying: “The Safety Advisory Group works independently on the basis of operational advice, we now found ourselves in a position where the club has taken that decision itself, what I’m concerned about is ensuring we continue to be a city that’s welcoming and open to all”.

The point at issue is that the Safety Advisory Group is a Council body, set up specifically to advise the Council which retains the statutory authority for initiating formal action. As such, it is nominally responsible to Cotton himself who was certainly in a position to instruct his officers to over-ride any decision that the SAG might have made.

The website says he respects the independence of the group, which is a nonsense. The group, as part of the machinery for implementing law for which the Council is responsible, cannot be in any sense be independent. It is extraordinary that Cotton doesn’t seem to know this.

With this in mind, though, we saw yesterday, a piece published by the Telegraph headed: “How West Midlands Police ‘capitulated to Islamists’”, with a sub-heading stating: “As the embattled chief retires, critics claim the force has been ‘captured’ by Corbynist Left-wingers and Muslim anti-Semites”.

This may well be true but, digging down into the article, it refers to Tahir Ali, the Labour MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley, who the paper says “has strong views on the safety advisory group”, telling the House of Commons this week: “The safety advisory group had a huge part to play, and members of it were biased and had an agenda. Some of them, I am ashamed to say, belonged to my party”.

I looked up the reference in Hansard and the full quote is quite revealing. “It was right and proper to have an independent report commissioned, the findings of which no one can challenge because it was done independently”, he says, then adding:

We need to be cognisant that it is not just the chief constable who is made the scapegoat in all this; the safety advisory group had a huge part to play, and members of it were biased and had an agenda. Some of them, I am ashamed to say, belonged to my party. Will the Home Secretary agree that tough action needs to be taken against the individuals who set out to influence the decision on a personal basis, rather than as an independent member of that safety advisory group?

This is a reference to two councillors, both Muslims, who were at the group meetings, Waseem Zaffar, of Labour, and Mumtaz Hussain, of the Lib Dems. Both had called for a boycott of the Israeli team and justified their support for a ban by telling the safety advisory group: “The community want it stopped”.

Waseem Zaffar (pictured) is now the subject of official complaints – amid accusations that he was “biased” and should not have been part of the SAG’s decision-making process.

He had, we are told, previously publicly pressed for a ban on Israeli clubs in sport over Israel’s actions in Gaza and had written an opinion piece setting out why he was personally boycotting the Villa game against Maccabi Tel Aviv because of Israel’s “genocide”.

He was then one of just two city councillors to have a say at a crucial meeting of the Safety Advisory Group where it was agreed that away fans should be banned, when, according to one of the complainants, he expressed “deeply anti-Israel and anti-Zionist beliefs that equated to antisemitism”, bringing the council into disrepute as a result.

Another complainant claims he failed to properly declare his interest in the issue, as required under the council’s Code of Conduct, before being part of the decision-making meetings.

Zaffar was also mentioned in the most recent meeting of the Home Affairs Committee, when Joani Reid, Labour MP, had queried why a city councillor who had previously made “antisemitic comments and generalisations on Twitter and in public” had been part of the decision-making SAG.

She is quoted as saying: “I think it’s clear that there was a very serious error of judgement here, which has really harmed the confidence of the Jewish community in Birmingham, that such people with such predetermined views of the Jewish community and Israelis were allowed to be involved in that committee meeting”. She later described Zaffar’s contributions to the discussion, as recorded in SAG meeting minutes as “antisemitic ramblings of a far-left councillor”.

At this point, one really must ask what that chair of the SAG was doing and how he reacted. It cannot have escaped his attention by then that there was a heavy anti-Semitic influence on the deliberations, suggesting at the very least that extreme caution was needed to avoid any decision being presented as partisan.

It must then be recalled that it was the SAG which called for more detail from the police on the threat proposed, saying that a “clearer rationale” was needed in order to make its recommendations.

We now know that Mick Wilkinson, a chief inspector at West Midlands police (WMP), was the author of the email that was sent to the SAG and was the force’s sole representative during a video meeting with Dutch authorities, from which the claims as to Maccabi fans’ behaviour was fabricated.

However, it transpires that Wilkinson did not record or minute the meeting. He says he took a single handwritten note before transcribing it into an email more than a week late, which formed the “clearer rationale” that was being asked for.

From the SAG perspective, therefore, all the SAG had to go on was a single e-mail comprising second-hand information amounting to little more than hearsay.

There were no supporting documents, no first-hand evidence and not even the cover of an official report – just the verbatim, unsupported observations of a single police officer, largely based on handwritten notes taken of an informal conversation, of which there was no official record.

One might think that a diligent council official, charged with making such a momentous decision, might have inquired as to the provenance of the material he was given, and made some independent checks. When I came to look at this issue, on 18 October, it took me all of ten minutes to find press reports which completely contradicted the police narrative.

Thus, whatever the role of the police, the behaviour of the SAG chair, Michael Enderby, is looking more and more suspect, as is the Council’s failure to realise what was going on and intervene in an obviously flawed process.

Despite all this, though, attention on X is almost exclusively focused on the role of the police; any other factor is almost completely ignored. Thus, over the last few days, as I have sought to widen out the scope of the issue, pointing to the role of the local authority – backed up by sound and deep-seated research – my reward has been to see my X engagements collapse.

Essentially, this and my wider experience of the genre tells me that people are not interested in what you have to say unless you are telling them what they want to hear, without deviation but with as much repetition as you like.

Social media platforms such as X have chosen their heroes and their fans will follow over the cliff without a second thought. But you will search in vain for original thinking.

Far from being a sounding box for a new, creative world, where new ideas and thinking are embraced, I see X as the death rattle of a society that has completely lost its way.