Another year, another Glastonbury culture war moment. Last year it was Banksy’s inflatable model Channel migrant boat, which “sailed” across the crowd during an Idles set. This year it was Bob Vylan, leading a packed crowd in a rousing rendition of “Death to the IDF” and — less commented-on by the press, but just as provocative to the kind of people who don’t attend Glastonbury — a rock-rap number whose chorus goes: “Heard you want your country back? Shut the f*ck up!”.
This incident spawned two main types of Right-wing reaction. The first kind focused on “Death to the IDF”, with some suggesting the band should be arrested for inciting violence. (The BBC’s footage of the performance has since been taken down.) The second was less offended by Vylan’s views on Israel than what was interpreted as triumphant gloating at the displacement of white Britons by immigrants.
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On one side of this divide stand the bourgeois progressives, usually white and well-off, who tend to live in more homogenous areas and to regard “diverse” Britain as an improvement: a group visibly well represented at Glastonbury. On the other, classically, we find often more working-class cultural conservatives, dismissively referred to by their opponents using the ethnic slur “gammon”, for whom high levels of immigration are experienced both as economic threat and cultural dispossession.
This group is, to say the least, not well-represented at Glastonbury. Vylan’s song explicitly celebrates their cultural weakness and anger:
“We the people in the street
Got the gammons on retreat
And their blood boils over when we speak”
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“So let it be heard
We ain’t wasting a scrap when we eat
And when we comе for it then we’re coming to keep”
Secondly and relatedly, what’s new is that a large subset of the Right heard Vylan’s lyrics in exactly these terms: an intervention in a war not of culture but race, between immigrants and the native English. Here, though, the split runs not just between Left and Right, but also through the middle of the Right — not just along class lines but also those of age.
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