All the world’s a stage, as the Bard said, and Glastonbury is a pretty big one, attracting 200,000 people this year, with a fair contingent, from the footage I saw at least, not the young ravers you might imagine but people every bit as middle-aged as myself, – though some of them seem to be labouring under the delusion that chanting ‘f**k Keir Starmer” is the ultimate act of rebellion.
It’s a bit like Kneecap talking about ‘freeing’ Mo Chara. He’s not locked up, for God sake, and you couldn’t buy all this publicity and endless opportunity for faux-martyrdom given by the hapless British establishment to a druggie band who are now being portrayed as modern-day Tom Clarkes suffering durance vile in Chatham prison when they are nothing of the kind.
Not to be outdone by Kneecap, a punk band (maybe they are rappers, I’m not interested enough to know) called Bob Vylan were catapulted to a headline news position by their Glastonbury antics, but while their tirade against the IDF grabbed the most attention, their message to middle England about being forced to accept enormous, unprecedented demographic change was more revealing, especially given that the message was echoed on another Glastonbury stage by a special guest of the organisers, Jeremy Corbyn.
Bob Vylan’s lead singer – whose real name, hilariously, is actually the very-unpunk-sounding Pascal Robinson-Foster (bringing to mind a Wodehousian newt-fancier) – wants to “confront issues including racism, homophobia, toxic masculinity, and far-right politics”. One song is “often” introduced, apparently, with the salutary reminder that “violence is the only language that some people understand”.
“I heard you want your country back,
Shut the fuck up
I heard you want your country back
But you can not have that”
So Mr Robinson-Foster snarled on Saturday, in what seems like a unconvincing lesson in how to tackle toxic masculinity, but served well as a rallying cry against the plebs who feel that their country – the country they were born and raised in – is changing at speed and perhaps in ways they are not altogether comfortable with. Until Brexit, however, they mostly grumbled quietly about their concerns for fear of being called racist or being told, as they were by Mr Robinson-Foster, to “shut the fuck up”.
He’d likely deny that his charming message is aimed at the plebs, of course, because middle-class lefties are completely deluded, or perhaps deeply dishonest, on this issue. They like to insist that their anger and bile is aroused by their compassion towards minorities, allowing them to denunciate working class stiffs from the safety of their gated communities and exclusive addresses – because everyone knows that property prices act as a veto like no other on who is allowed to live there.
The hugely popular commentator Michael McCarthy put Bob Vylan’s track to some visuals which tell their own story.
The aggression in the lyrics is telling though, isn’t it – as are the mocking, cry-baby motions. Forget about empathy and the emotional intelligence expressed in a soya latte order. Those who want their country back can ‘shut the fuck up”. That’s how you can speak to disempowered people, apparently. They don’t deserve respect. There will be no discussion, just public castigation and cancellation of the kind we regularly see when, say, those who called out the rape and torture of white working-class girls by Pakistani gangs were accused of jumping on a “far-right bandwagon” by Keir Starmer.
I suppose those girls – some of them just children – should “shut the fuck up”; as should the victims of the increased crime that disproportionately affects working class communities when out of control migration is ignored; as should the families of those killed and maimed by terror attacks; as should the communities who are deeply worried about the impact of Islamification on their way of life.
They can all ‘shut the fuck up’ while Bobby Vylan’s vile aggression is being cheered on by the mostly-white useful idiots who can afford the €450 ticket to Glastonbury and think they are are morally superior because they eat vegan curries before they slop off home to their non-diverse neighbourhoods and leave a filthy mess of tents and rubbish behind for the nth year in a row.
In a compelling commentary on the Glastonbury diatribe, writer Ed West said that it was notable how many examples of “vocal minorities overtly expressing ethnic hostility and ancestral grudges” cropped up at the festival, with crowds cheering along at “barely disguised racial triumphalism” and gloating.
He says that “the aim is also to recast the British, an ancient and distinct people with thousands of years of history on their island, as a New World-style nation of immigrants” – something that is also happening here in this country, because, if you are one of a majority of Irish people who feels uncomfortable with the pace of change, then you will know that the message, not just of Bobby Vylan, but of the establishment in this country is also that you can ‘shut the fuck up’. West writes that:
In any society, the arrival of unvetted young men from distant shores would be cause for alarm, especially for the safety of women, and the continual stream of convictions for sexual crimes by these newcomers creates a deep sense of unease. As smaller communities experience diversity for the first time, some have also suffered alarming episodes of violence. Last summer, as the country settled down from its worst riots in a decade, two people were stabbed in rural Norfolk by a Zimbabwean migrant. In October 2023, there came the murder of an elderly man in Hartlepool by a Moroccan migrant, a crime that the authorities and media were, at best, opaque in reporting at the time.
Britain is belatedly at least having some kind of discussion about the impact of immigration, despite – or maybe because of – the bullying and hectoring from the left, and by the left I mean almost the entire establishment until about five minutes ago. In Ireland – which is also home to an ancient and distinct people, whose highly complex and sophisticated culture was almost destroyed by previous forcibly-imposed immigration – we’re still mostly being subjected to the kind of nonsense with which long-time Glasto hero Jeremy Corbyn regaled the heaving masses.
“Look on the wall right over there which surrounds this wonderful festival,” he says. “There’s a message on that wall for President Donald Trump: Build bridges, not walls”, says the man to the idiots who can’t see the irony and the obvious contradiction in his observation as they share bongs in the safety provided by an enormous fence erected to keep the great unwashed out.
As Hannan said, the lack of self-awareness is really astonishing. These people are utterly absurd. But they can also be also nasty bullies, and there is no greater bully than the middle-class virtue-signaller who enjoys punching down on the only category of people whom it is acceptable to openly disparage and hate: working class people, especially white working class people who are opposed to even more mass immigration. Just as with the voters flocking to Reform in Britain however, in this country the people who’ve been told to ‘shut the fuck up’ for too long are increasingly deciding that they will be silenced no longer.
What Bob Vylan and Kneecap don’t get it that they are, on this issue, actually singing from the same hymn sheet as the establishment and the globalists they profess to despise. (Kneecap, whose right to free speech I’ve defended, would really want to stop making historically illiterate statements and learn a little about what happened to Ireland and our culture after the last time we were foolish enough to welcome in the world and then subjugated to the point where we were powerless to prevent a plantation.)
It’s easy to feel that the world is with you, of course, when you’re being feted on a massive stage in Glastonbury while you push for open borders. But change is afoot. Ordinary people have increasingly had enough. Their response to Bob Vylan telling them to ‘shut the fuck up’ is now likely to tell him to do the same.