Nowhere is Immune

With poll ratings still slightly below the thirty per cent required for another electoral landslide, Team Starmer has made a brave attempt to break with the Thatcherite orthodoxy of the past few decades. Although the old bag had no particular objection to poverty or migrant-bashing, she did disapprove of football hooligans even when they were English; and since dispensing with poverty and migrant-bashing is off the agenda, Team Starmer decided to condone football hooliganism instead. When police and local authorities in Birmingham banned Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from attending a forthcoming match on grounds of past misbehaviour, the CEO of Team Starmer promptly denounced them as antisemites: a label which presumably must now be applied to the police and local authorities in Tel Aviv, who have postponed a scheduled match because of Maccabi supporters exercising their sacred right to self-defence in the face of legitimate and understandable concerns. Whether Team Starmer has made any attempt to undermine the operational autonomy of the police in Tel Aviv remains as yet unclear.