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https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/01/06/the-maccabi-tel-aviv-ban-was-a-sop-to-islamic-sectarians/

For me, one clip says it all. There sat a clammy-looking Craig Guildford, beleaguered chief constable of West Midlands Police, addressing the camera with all the joie de vivre of a hostage appearing in a proof-of-life video. ‘Salam alaikum’, he said, addressing Birmingham’s Muslim community in August 2024, his nerves – or else his general dimwittery – showing in his mangled pronunciation. ‘Thank you to the leaders and elders [who] have afforded me this opportunity to speak to you personally.’ Wait, what? Who’s in charge here? It shouldn’t be for the chief constable to grovel before ‘leaders and elders’ for allowing him to address the citizens who pay his wages. We are a liberal democracy, not a tribal society. Or at least we used to be. Welcome to the results of Britain’s decades-long experiment with the benighted doctrine of multiculturalism, which has led to the Balkanisation of great swathes of the country along sectarian lines. In the old days, every citizen was equal in the eyes of the law, to be policed even-handedly, without fear or favour. Today, however, especially in parts of the land dominated by Muslim populations, officers must engage with self-appointed ‘leaders and elders’, who tend to show all the hallmarks of insularity and fundamentalism. In fact, they often act remarkably like members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that in Birmingham, Yorkshire and elsewhere, the mullahs now call the shots. Consider, for instance, the municipal Christmas tree that was erected in the centre of Bradford last year. Well, I say Christmas tree: the authorities saw fit to rename it a ‘multicultural tree’, which was supposedly a ‘symbol of the amazing way in which the city of Bradford and district positively embrace diversity’. I think I just did a little sick. The thing felt like one long grovel, seemingly designed to beg the local Muslim population to indulge the presence of a non-Islamic tradition – shorn of all its Christian significance – on their territory. (Ironically, Bradford is 33.4 per cent Christian, according to the last Census, and only 30.5 per cent Muslim, yet the smaller of those groups seems to wear the trousers.) Could you imagine the boys in blue striking such a subservient position towards any other minority in Britain? Sikhs, maybe? Jews? Buddhists? Me neither. Which brings us back to the West Midlands, the dysfunctional societal soup in which bobs the obsequious and flaccid dumpling of Craig Guildford, who surely cannot possibly hang on to his position much longer.