Afternoon summary
Pressure is mounting on West Midlands police over their ban on fans of the Israeli football team Maccabi Tel Aviv from a match at Villa Park next month, as the area’s crime commissioner demanded a review of the decision. All the main political parties have condemned the ban. But a YouGov poll suggests a plurality of voters are in favour.
The Conservatives have welcomed a Times report saying Rachel Reeves plans to save around £1bn by making the Motability scheme, that subsidises cars for disabled people, less generous. In their story, Chris Smyth and Aubrey Allegretti say:
Tax breaks worth about £1 billion a year are set to be scrapped in the budget, dramatically reducing an exemption by which cars leased under the scheme do not have to pay VAT or insurance premium tax.
In another change being considered, BMWs, Mercedes and other luxury cars could be removed from a scheme that provides such premium brands to more than 40,000 benefits claimants.
In response, Helen Whately, the shadow work and pensions secretary, said:
The chancellor has followed our lead and said she’ll do something about Motability. I’m glad she’s been keeping an eye on our welfare announcements, but the government should be doing much more to fix welfare and reform the Motability scheme.
This week the BBC’s More or Less programme said some of the Tory claims about Motability have been misleading, or just wrong.
For a full list of all the stories covered on the blog today, do scroll through the list of key event headlines near the top of the blog.
Updated
Palestine Solidarity Campaign says Israeli teams should be banned from international competitions
Ben Jamal, director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, told Sky News that his organisation is due to take part in a “very large” protest about the Maccabi Tel Aviv match against Aston Villa going ahead. He said the PSC did not believe Israeli teams should be allowed in international competitions. He explained:
Why? Because of the widespread violations of international law, for two years, participation in what a UN commission of inquiry has judged to be a genocide, for 58 years overseeing an illegal military occupation, and what has been judged by numerous human rights bodies as apartheid.
There’s a precedent for this. Russia has been removed from sporting competitions because of its illegal occupation of Ukraine. And people with longer memories will remember the ban on South Africa participating in sport because of apartheid …
A further important point is that the Israeli Football Association is in direct violation of Fifa’s own statutes. There is a statute that says you cannot, effectively, have teams that belong to your football association conducting matches in another football association’s territory. The Israeli Football Association has six teams that play on illegally occupied Palestinian land. It’s a straightforward violation of Fifa’s own rules.
Jamal also said there was a particular problem with Maccabi fans too. He went on:
Their friends have a notorious history of racist violence and racist chanting. Most notoriousl, but they’ve done this for decades, they participated in a match in Amsterdam in which they rampaged through the city chanting grotesque, anti-Palestinian, racist slogans, including a slogan that said there are no schools in Gaza because we have to kill all of the children, attacked Muslim residents of the city.
On social media it is being pointed out that Keir Starmer himself spoke at a meeting in 2015 in front of a banner saying “Kick Israeli racism out of Fifa”. But when the Mail on Sunday ran a story about this a few years later, Labour said Starmer had never supported a sports boycott of Israel, or expelling the country from Fifa.
