Glastonbury flipped the free speech debate upside down

Is the UK a terrible place when it comes to free speech? For a long time, if you asked the British right, they’d say yes. Yes, it’s bad, they’d say. In fact it’s terrible here. Everyone is so sensitive. Everyone wants trigger warnings. Everyone is frightened when confronted with things they disagree with. It’s impossible to really say what you think, without being censored by the woke left.

It’s been ​“crushed”, according to The Telegraph. When a man was arrested for burning the Quran and shouting ​“fuck Islam” The Spectator called it a ​“dangerous moment”, not for Islamophobia, but for freedom of speech. In November, Boris Johnson tweeted: ​“Our police have their hands full of burglaries and violent crime. They are being forced to behave like a woke Securitate — and it has to stop.”

And this February, Keir Starmer was forced to defend himself in the Oval Office itself after JD Vance criticised British censorship. ​“We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom,” Starmer promised, ​“and it will last for a very, very long time”. Will it?

In the run up to the UK’s biggest music festival, free speech and censorship in the arts was centre stage. Kneecap, performing on West Holts – Glastonbury’s third biggest stage – thanked the Eavis family for their support after a campaign to pull them from the line-up. Kemi Badenoch had said the BBC shouldn’t broadcast their set, Keir Starmer had said they shouldn’t play at all, and 30 powerful music industry figures (whose names were leaked) sent a private letter pressuring the festival to drop them.

On the BBC livestream of the festival, Kneecap’s 4pm slot was notably missing, a decision having been made to broadcast them not live but on a content-moderating delay. The myopia of this decision was immediately undercut when a woman named Helen from Wales posted the entire set on TikTok Live, where it was watched by over a million people. During their performance, Kneecap member Mo Chara, due to appear in court again in August on terrorism charges, looked out at a sea of Palestine flags and Irish tricolours and joked ​“the BBC editor is going to have some job”.

He was right. Performing before Kneecap, the punk-rap duo Bob Vylan led a crowd of around 30,000 people in chants of ​“free Palestine” and ​“death to the IDF”. The response was swift. Avon and Somerset police announced they were investigating Bob Vylan and Kneecap for their performances. Bob Vylan were dropped by their agents and had their US visas revoked. The Israeli Embassy said it was ​“deeply disturbed” by the chants. The scenes were comparable, according to The Spectator, to a ​“woke Nuremberg rally”.

Keir Starmer, suddenly aware of the political element of Glastonbury music festival, just 55 years after it started and more than 40 years after it first linked itself to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, was appalled. ​“There is no excuse for this kind of appalling hate speech,” he said.

Whether you find ​“death to the IDF” a disturbing chant or not, and whether you think it’s more disturbing than the actual actions of the IDF or not, it should be uncontroversial to say that the response to the chant is cynical and disproportionate. Does anyone actually believe this is incitement for your average Glastonbury-goer to fly to Israel and attack an IDF soldier? Or is it simply what research from King’s College London found a majority of conservative support for – ​“freedom to express opinions without interference”? The fact that the Bob Vylan situation is being given equal time to international conflict feels like a bizarre and deliberate distraction, particularly on a weekend where IDF airstrikes killed 81 people.

If this level of censorship is the new standard, then it should be pursued for everyone, all the time, without prejudice. It should not be the case that the national broadcaster gets to decide to censor Kneecap’s Glastonbury performance, but defend Have I Got News For You over a joke about bombing Glastonbury to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn supporters. It should be the case that ​“death to the IDF” is treated no more or no less seriously than ​“death to the Labour party” or ​“Diane Abbott should be shot”, or ​“all taigs will be crucified”. If you defend it in some cases and decry it in others then it exposes the entire free speech argument for how farcical it’s really become.

It’s hard to overstate just how badly Keir Starmer has judged all of this. For one, the censorship of artists like Bob Vylan and Kneecap has significantly backfired – over the last year, Kneecap’s monthly Spotify reach has increased from less than a million to over seven million today. Bob Vylan’s Instagram followers and monthly Spotify listeners have surged dramatically since Glastonbury.

You could argue that so many artists at this year’s Glastonbury spoke out not just as a protest for Palestine, but also as an act of resistance against the authoritarianism of Starmer’s government. Kneecap expressed solidarity with Palestine Action, who could be proscribed as a terrorist group after they broke into an RAF base and spray painted two fighter jets. Wolf Alice said ​“no one should be afraid” to express solidarity with Palestine. Jade led a fuck you to ​“justifying genocide”. CMAT, Black Country New Road and Turnstile also led Free Palestine chants.

Palestine flags were draped over equipment, Palestine football shirts worn as stage attire. Elijah Hewson, Bono’s son and Inhaler frontman, gave a speech dedicated to Palestine during his Pyramid Stage performance. He said: ​“I feel like we have to say that because I think our greatest strength is freedom of expression, and there’s no better place to stand for that than right here at Glastonbury.”

It’s a shame that the government of the country where the festival was held disagreed.