Writer (The War After, How to Age), journalist, Professor of Life Writing and Culture at London Metropolitan University. New book: How Women Can Save the Planet
Joined January 2012
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Anne Karpf retweeted
Thoughts on the Manchester City story. The immediate reaction was to check the fixtures and see who they are playing next. Liverpool. Away. The Kop is going to be in particularly strident voice. Even if City appeal this devastating judgement on financial breaches, the court of terrace opinion across football will still be a chorus of disapproval.
Anger is in the air – at the alleged offences and the time taken for judgement to be reached. And that anger, mixed in with a large pouring of schadenfreude will be heard. Especially as Liverpool missed out on a title and a League Cup to City in the period under review.
This is not yet full-time in the seismic meeting of the Premier League versus City. There may even be extra time if City, as expected, appeal the independent panel’s judgement on the majority of the financial charges laid against them. Once more unto the breach, m’learned friends?
City have 14 days to appeal the judgement but it could be months before it is heard. As City can’t then appeal to CAS under PL rules, this long, expensive, exhaustive legal process is at least nearing an end and the result, pending any appeal, is a nightmare for City.
This, also, is a problem for Government, given City’s Abu Dhabi ownership and the UK’s trading and diplomatic links with the UAE. There should, of course, be questions asked about those in power at City if they’re found culpable of these breaches. Fit and proper? There could, of course, be individual claims by clubs denied trophies and relegated clubs citing points lost to City and the financial cost of relegation. The ramifications of the judgement are deep and wide.
City’s reaction may prove to look for every avenue of potential recourse, whether to do with time taken, procedure, legal niceties, whatever. City have consistently and vigorously claimed their innocence, and spent 10s of millions on their defence, so it is hard to see them going quietly into the night.
But if their appeal fails they clearly merit the most severe of sanctions. People talk about large fines. Pointless against mega-rich clubs. People talk about transfer bans. Have you seen the size of City’s squad? The average age of their players? (25). And the quality of their academy? Even if some players push to leave, or rival clubs seek to take their players (Real Madrid will surely be on alert), City will still not be short of talent.
If it is confirmed that City broke the rules on an industrial scale than the only suitable punishment is expulsion from the Premier League. If this seems harsh on City’s fans, then consider the thoughts and feelings of fans of other clubs, who played by the rules.
It is important to note that this is different to the oft-stated case of Swindon Town being relegated two divisions in 1990 for irregular payments (later reduced to one). The four-division Football League was a single entity then. The Premier League and EFL are separate competitions with different rules. Anyway, if City were relegated to League One, as some critics desire, how would that be fair on one of the teams rising from League Two being denied promotion?
It seems to me that the suitable sanction, if the appeal fails, is a 50-point punishment to be imposed for this season, in all likelihood guaranteeing relegation. City would then have to fight their way back, and some of the fans might enjoy the journey (no VAR, hurrah). Older City fans can recall fighting up the pyramid from lower. But on their return City should then start their subsequent two seasons in the Premier League with a 20-point handicap. This has to be a sustained as well as severe punishment.
Other punishments? If City’s appeal fails, there will be calls for the eight trophies won during the period in question, 2009-2018, to be wiped and/or handed over to the runners-up. Standing to gain are Manchester United (twice) and Liverpool in the three title races; Stoke City in the FA Cup; Sunderland, Liverpool and Arsenal in the League Cup; as well as Chelsea in the Community Shield.
Do these potential recipients even want the trophies, the sky blue ribbons discreetly removed? They have every cause to feel angry but my hunch is that many fans will simply be content with having the honours stripped from City, wiped from their records, a blank space left in the record books. An accusing asterix for all time.
Even with fans innately defiant, City enter a dark period. Every press conference with Enzo Maresca will have a sub-text. In every interview with a player lurks have a painful question. Those many, many good staff at the club with nothing to do with any wrongdoing, totally blameless individuals, will feel the tension and the criticism. Fans who love the club will doubtless back them. It’s what fans do.
The Premier League's image as a competition has been damaged by this. The Premier League's image as an organisation capable of strong governance has been enhanced by this. The oft-criticised CEO Richard Masters deserves praise for his persistence and patience. But, beginning at Anfield and continuing, this story really isn’t quite close to full-time yet.
Anne Karpf retweeted
Every trophy built on that era of cheating needs to be retroactively reawarded.
Man United, Liverpool and Arsenal should all get their trophies, prize money and damages.
Then send them to non-league football. They shouldn't even get to play the Carabao cup!
Anne Karpf retweeted
One final, horrifying subtext to Miliband’s speech announcing a trade ban on the settlements should not go unremarked.
In desperately trying to keep alive the West’s two-state solution, Burnham’s government is not just ignoring reality: the fact that there is no partner in Israel – electable or otherwise – to implement such a vision.
Burnham and Miliband are also insisting, in the entirely improbable event that a Palestinian state can be extracted from Israel, that the Palestinian people should be required to make peace with an unrepentant, heavily militarised, racist state that has recently committed genocide in Gaza.
None of the 11 states that joined the UK this week in sanctioning the settlements can apparently imagine Palestinians ever living in anything more than a small, demilitarised, economically dependent pseudo-state, with no real choice over its leaders, or control over its borders and economy.
Similarly, there is no suggestion that a neighbouring, territorially reduced Israeli state would need to be reformed ideologically, or made to engage in any kind of truth and reconciliation process, or face sanctions until it sees the error of its genocidal ways.
The Jewish supremacist ideology of Zionism, the dehumanising logic of the Israeli settler-colonial mindset, and the religious fundamentalism of large swaths of the Israeli population - all critical to the rationalisation of the Gaza genocide - would remain unchallenged.
On this view, it seems, long-established impulses towards apartheid and genocide would simply evaporate, even as the West continues to indulge Israel’s every whim.
This isn’t a recipe for peace, even of the flawed kind. It is a demand that the Palestinian lamb continue to dwell with the Israeli wolf.
The truth that Burnham’s government refuses to face, as with every government before it, is that peace won’t magically arrive with Palestinian statehood. A Palestinian state – or, more likely, a single state embracing Palestinians and Israeli Jews – can emerge only when Israel has been dismantled as a heavily armed settler-colonial state, as happened with apartheid South Africa.
Israeli society will need to be re-educated through a painful truth and reconciliation process, as also happened in apartheid South Africa. Israelis will have to be made to confront the facts about a century of atrocities committed against the native Palestinian people.
Britain is not contemplating doing any of this – because the threads from unravelling the crimes of Israel and the Zionist movement would lead straight to the door of 10 Downing Street and other western powers.
This is an extract from my latest article Britain's settlement trade ban is cosmetic. For it to work, it must sanction Israel. Find a link to the rest in the reply post ⬇️
On the contrary, it's indeed a brighter day for British Jews, many of whom - like me - have been urging actions like this, and far greater, for a long time. It's the Israeli government which has put us in peril, fanning antisemitism. You don't speak for all British Jews
This is truly a dark day for British Jews.
Today our Government has chosen to ignore the deep concerns expressed by so many of us.
The measures announced amount to little more than political flag bearing for mendacious anti-Israel rhetoric and those who harbour a dangerous obsession with the Jewish State. These measures will succeed only in bolstering the very extremism they seek to target.
On the eve of Rosh Hashanah and at a time when our community is more vulnerable than ever to the wave of extremism that has been building over recent years, these sanctions do nothing to advance the cause of peace. Nor do they make anyone safer – quite the contrary.
Gesture politics of this kind feeds into an increasingly hostile discourse about Israel, and the cumulative effect of such punitive policies is to further embolden those, at home and abroad, who use hatred as a weapon against Jews.
BBC News - Nigel Farage tells BBC he 'wasn't listening' during foreign donor talks filmed undercover
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0qx…
Is this the equivalent of 'not inhaling'?
Anne Karpf retweeted
🗣️ A US official confirms to @Emilylgoodin that President Trump and Gianni Infantino spoke following Flo Balogun's red card.
"The President and Infantino did speak, and the President wanted to better understand the reason why a red card was given and why there was a suspension.
"The appeal process is run by an independent board. The US government provided additional evidence that was used in the appeal process."
🚨 Exclusive: The White House made a direct call to FIFA to ask Gianni Infantino to review Folarin Balogun’s red card.
FIFA approached for comment and referred to the findings of its independent committee.
FIFA sources insist White House influence could not affect the decision due to the powers contained in Article 27 and the independent nature of the disciplinary panel.
Anne Karpf retweeted
The same Judge which issued contempt of court proceedings against the leading barrister of Palestine Action activists, reinstated a barrister who lied about his qualifications.
The stitch-up of the Filton trial is entirely political.
🚨NEW: KC Anu Mohindru has been allowed to continue being a barrister despite falsely claiming that he studied medicine at Oxford University and for claiming that he was a qualified doctor.
He also claimed that he had played cricket for the Bar, for Lashings Cricket Club and for MCC, and that he was a cricketing blue having represented Oxford in a varsity match against Cambridge.
A tribunal disbarred him for telling his 23 Essex Street interviewers a “reckless, foolish and completely unnecessary lie” about studying at Oxford, and because he “doubled down" on his CV.
On appeal at the High Court, Mr Justice Johnson overturned Mohindru's expulsion, stating that it "would be wrong to impose the ultimate sanction merely because dishonesty is present".
Anne Karpf retweeted
Keir Starmer was not merely a disappointment. He is a mendacious figure of ethical decrepitude, a man who won the Labour Party leadership based on promises that he jettisoned five seconds after winning - a Labour leader who dared banish from the Labour Party not only his predecessor but also remarkable human beings like director Ken Loach - the gentleman who has taken the historic Labour Party and transformed it into a vessel for the very oligarchy it was elected to restrain.
Consider the litany of Starmer’s moral and logical failures. He promised a 'different Britain', yet his actions were a masterclass in Tory-lite politics—using the same maxed-out credit card analogies that once served the austerity brigades to justify his own failure of vision. He promised a human rights lawyer’s approach but he embraced a racist-lite version of Farage.
On Europe, Starmer promised Brexiteers that Brexit is Brexit yet stood before those who yearn to rejoin the European Union, winked at them to make them feel that Britain would gradually reconnect, even rejoin, with the EU while offering nothing of substance. This is not leadership; it is a fraud.
And then there's the manner in which Starmer and his government rushed to offer Israel unequivocal support in pursuing its genocide in Gaza, sacrificing precious political and civil liberties in the UK by imprisoning grandmothers, priests and peaceful activists who dared support Palestine Action, an organisation that Starmer and his minions proscribed as terrorists for practising the usual activist tactics of trespassing to spray paint military planes that had demonstrably aided in the genocide. To add insult to injury, Starmer performed the diplomatic pantomime of recognising a Palestinian state, in a manner that ensured it would never happen.
But above all else, this is a government that has learned nothing from the post-2008 era. Starmer and his Chancellor are playing the same tired austerity game while enabling and empowering the Finance Curse perpetrated by the City of London, throwing in forgood measure cuts in international aid to fund a military spending trickle under the guise of a "Strategic Defence Review" . It is the same old doctrine: austerity for the masses, socialism for the financiers and the arms dealers.
History will remember Mr Starmer as a man without conviction, a Prime Minister who offers not a shred of honesty, but merely the cruel illusion of change. He is ethically decrepit because he had chosen, consciously, to abandon principle for power. And for that, history will indict him. Good riddance, I say.
theguardian.com/politics/liv…
Anne Karpf retweeted
This is misleading framing by the BBC.
Completely omitting from the headline that the synagogue hosted an event that was encouraging and facilitating Palestinian land theft.
Instead it’s worded as though a place of worship itself was the target.
Anne Karpf retweeted
BIAS
The same judge who is likely to sentence four young people as “terrorists” (even though they were not convicted of a terrorism offence) previously reduced violent far-right racist Tommy Robinson’s prison sentence, overriding an earlier High Court decision!
Short thread 🧵
Anne Karpf retweeted
This was the @FIFAWorldCup reception for the Senegal national team…
I've been wanting for years to write a piece about people living with dementia, to dispel the myth that you go from zero to 100% overnight. Finally, I have. My eloquent interviewees are reframing the narrative
theguardian.com/society/2026…
Good piece - and well said, Rabbi Herschel Gluck
Met Police chief accused of misinformation over Palestine marches synagogues claim middleeasteye.net/news/met-p…
Zack Polanski challenging the assumption that all British Jews support Israel
Source: Instagram share.google/hvvakV8zui0jlaM…
Anne Karpf retweeted
The head of the newly-formed Reform Friends of Israel, Jason Pearlman, was until December a media adviser to Israel’s president Isaac Herzog.
Pearlman claims Israel has not committed a single war crime in Gaza.
declassifieduk.org/no-war-cr…
Anne Karpf retweeted
👉 NEW — Why don’t UK media mention the Israel lobby?
Because they’re part of it.
By @markcurtis30 declassifieduk.org/why-dont-…
