Weimar on the Villa.

The Resistable Rise of Robert Jenrick.

Cultural Marxism has hijacked the West Midlands Police Force, and now conspires to serve the interests of an Islamist cabal, intent on imposing Sharia Law on the city of Birmingham and expelling the unbelievers.

That’s a mad thing to write, isn’t it? Sounds completely batshit. And it’s precisely the position held by the political and media establishment in the UK. Last week, for example, Paul Goodman- and that’s Baron Goodman to you, pleb- wrote an article in the Daily Telegraph, comparing Brum to Weimar Berlin, and suggesting that the Chief of Police, Craig Guildford, had been forced by local Muslim organisers to ban travelling Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from attending their Europa League fixture at Aston Villa last autumn.

Now, the dogs in the streets of Brum knew the Maccabi fans’ presence in the town could only be a shitshow. One year previously, the team had played in Amsterdam against Ajax, where there was widespread violence after Maccabi ultras, en masse, paraded through town, chanting slogans about raping Arab women and killing their children- all, of course, in the context of the Israeli state’s ongoing genocidal violence against the population of Gaza. And, as it goes, the chants in question are so lurid, violent and extreme that you can’t even post bowdlerised versions of them as comments on the Telegraph’s website. A fixture against Maccabi’s local rivals, Hapoel Tel Aviv, was called off some three weeks before the Villa match, again following extreme violence. It would have been extraordinarily difficult, unpleasant, and probably dangerous for anybody living in B6 to go about their business on the evening of November 6th had the Maccabi fans been in attendance. It is what it is.

So. A series of recommendations relating to community safety were made to the local authority by a high ranking copper, in the context of a football fixture likely to be attended by visiting supporters with a demonstrable propensity for violence, as a consequence of which an operational decision was made to exclude the travelling fans. Not only is this far from without precedent in the football world, but it’s not even the first time that travelling fans have been barred from attending a game at Aston Villa. Somehow or other, it appears that the Baron Goodmans of this world have coped.

But not this time. For the best part of the past 3 months, the story of the Maccabi fans’ exclusion has occupied the attention of a political and media class desperately defending the interests of violent foreign football ultras with a passion I’m hard pressed to recall them ever displaying towards homegrown fans, with the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, ridiculously describing a Thursday night, November Europa League fixture- genuinely, just the middest of the mid- as a matter of ‘national importance’; I have a tenner here which says that neither she nor Baron Goodman can remember what the score was that night- assuming either of them ever knew.

The situation hit crisis point last week, when- hilariously- it transpired that the report Goodman presented to evidence his recommendation had been written with the use of AI, which had hallucinated a fictitious Maccabi-West Ham clash as further proof of the Maccabis’ violent conduct. More screeching ensued, Mahmood declared she had lost confidence in Goodman and, within days, his ‘retirement’ was announced. Goodman is the first Chief Constable in decades to face this level of opprobrium, despite the very obvious fact that he’s hardly the first senior officer either to have lied or to have been incompetent.

Cressida Dick- and I don’t think I’ll ever quite get over the fact that there’s really a person called ‘Cressida Dick’- stayed in post for the best part of 20 years after members of her force were responsible for, and subsequently lied about, the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, while no officer has ever faced any consequences for the Hillsborough disaster, at which 97 football fans died.

Nobody died or suffered severe harm in Aston on November 6th. But nobody lasts long in this country once the rightwing press has marked their cards.

It’s no coincidence that this shitstorm has blown up where it has. As I’ve suggested before, Brum is a lightning rod for the rest of the UK- or the rest of England, at any rate- and it encapsulates everything the nativist right hates. The city isn’t white enough for the ethnonationalist tendency presently dominant within the ruling class, who now have no hesitation at all about openly verbalising open racist hostility and conspiracy theories about the untermensch. Aston is just 2 miles down the road from Handsworth, where, of course, my favourite fantasy punchbag, Robert Jenrick spent a couple of hours one afternoon last year, making a video complaining about everyone’s complexion being too dark for his liking. He’s had quite the week himself, grovelling to Nigel Farage in the hope of a decent job, having made a twat of himself by leaving a letter on the office photocopier.

And, in passing, I think it’s worth taking the time to reflect on what it says about the political moment we’re in that one of Jenrick’s most notable steps on his journey from ‘Robert Generic’, pudding-faced Remainer, to Ozempic-fuelled flagshagging culture warrior was an act of gratuitous spite towards displaced children- an act which would have earned him a kicking in anything approaching a healthy society, rather than a prospective Cabinet seat.

Jenrick, the chancer, is now trying his chances with Reform UK- a party looking likely to form the next Government, standing on a platform of ethnic cleansing- the removal or ‘remigration’ of 600,000 people presently living in the UK- potentially the biggest single act of human displacement since the partition of India.

And its striking, to me at least, that this isn’t being talked about anywhere in the media as the tectonic thing it so plainly is. For a start, how much will it cost? We live in a media landscape where every policy proposal, every proposed initiative, is subject to the most intense, penny-pinching scrutiny, where we’re told that we can’t possibly ensure that kids don’t go to school hungry, that we can’t conceivably let an 8 year old have a potato waffle their parent hasn’t struggled to put on the table because, oh my good Lord, would you think of the costs!? But the estimated hit to the British economy of up to £1 trillion represented by the ‘remigration’ agenda? Yeah, move along sir. Nothing to see here.

In the States, Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) hoovers up a cool $170 billion of the budget and, again, that’s fine and couldn’t conceivably be put to better use. British politicians make no secret of their own hankering after ICEmen of their own. And, of course, as we know, the money spent by the American state on its little domestic death squad isn’t even the worst of it.

So, as in America, if you’re calling for the forced deportations of hundreds of thousands of British residents, then you’re calling for the British state to enact a programme of mass violence against its civilian population, and I think it’s probably worth considering what the implications of that will be- not least because, when I say 'by the British state’, the ‘anti-state state’ logic of British neoliberal capitalism inevitably means that the violence will be ‘outsourced’ to Capita, or to Serco, or to G4S, or to whichever other parasitical entity can flash enough ankle at the right Minister, at the right time. And as it goes we’ve already got some pretty good indicators of what that will look like.

In 2012, Capita was ‘awarded’ a 4 year Home Office contract, in which it was tasked to contact people, by means of text messages and letters, regarded as having no legitimate grounds to be in the UK, and so required to leave. While the Home Office has published little information in the wake of that project, which was quietly shelved, data does indicate that, of 143 complaints received, it was accepted that 14 people should never have been contacted by Capita at all: so, a failure rate of 1 in 10. How much better do we reckon the Home Office’s data recording capacity has got in the intervening 14 years of austerity? How many people face the future prospect of being pursued by Farage’s/Jenrick’s/Badenoch’s goons on the basis of entirely false information?

And in October 2010, Jimmy Mubenga was choked to death by ‘officers’ working for G4S during the course of a proposed ‘removal’ flight. They had been provided with no training on basic control and restraint techniques, and they were subsequently found to have exchanged 65 racist text messages- several of which were sent after Mubenga’s death.

I’ve written before- and Christ, have I written before? -of the oafs from Worcestershire who are behind the Raise the Colours flagshagging grift Jenrick so wanted a piece of, and of how they’ve moved from harassing Brummie locals, hanging flags where they’re not wanted, to harassing and intimidating migrants and charity workers, both here in Brum and in Calais. Channelling their best Arturo Ui energy, the RTC leadership is in disarray, with the drug dealer and shit kidnapper- shitnapper?- Danny Thomas and the alleged fraudster Ryan Bridge both accusing each other of having their hands in the till- donations of up to quarter of a million quid presently being unaccounted for.

While it’s delicious to see them eating each other, the fact remains that these guys- these guys, for fuck’s sake- have managed to recruit a crew of angry, pissed off, deeply alienated white men, prepared to take action at street level, who have been told, endlessly, for years, that their children’s futures are jeopardised by the presence of wave after wave of feral subhuman ‘invaders’. In the foreseeable future, this sort of behaviour will constitute a career option- albeit a precarious and badly paid one. Because there’s no chance the ruling class is going to stop baying for blood now, and if they can get rid of the Chief Constable of the West Midlands Police Force for not bending the knee to them, what the fuck do you reckon they can do to you?

So, if angry, abandoned white lads are prepared to turn out to harass black and brown people for free in Oldbury of a January night, why will they not be prepared do it for £12 an hour, and a Serco bib, secure in the knowledge that they’re acting on the instructions of His Majesty’s Government? They might even get a taser and some cuffs! Think of the power. How many more Jimmy Mubengas are we likely to see?

So we really need to start anticipating what the impacts of that will be on our communities, and how we prepare for those impacts.

And, as ever, the antithesis of fascism is community. We need each other, and we need to look out for each other, to have each other’s backs, right now, as monsters walk among us.

Brum’s bin workers are still on strike. After 13 months, and after millions of pounds pissed away, some of the city’s most essential workers are still fighting for the most basic of things, a living wage. There’s a solidarity megapicket planned for the morning of January 30th, and on the same evening there’s a solidarity party in support not only of our Brummie strikers, but also their comrades in Chennai, India, also engaged in strike action, against privatisation, threats to wages, and fire and rehire.

If the Brummie bin workers don’t win, if their wages and conditions are driven even further down by a local authority nominally elected to serve the cause of organised labour, the number of angry, skint white lads looking to find an explanation for the cancellation of their future, and ready to listen to the next chancer screeching about immigrants can only grow.

I’m planning to be at both of those events. We all need to be at both. Nip along, and I might even buy you a pint.

Assuming you don’t look anything like Robert Jenrick, anyway.