The 2025 Glastonbury festival came to a close on Sunday, and tired bodies with sore heads will have packed their tents and trudged home knowing that they have to wait two years until the next festival.
Next year the festival will take a fallow year — the music festival takes a break every five years to give the land of Worthy Farm time to rest, and to give the cows some extended peace and quiet.
As much of a relief as that will be to the land and the livestock, it will be a disappointment to music fans and to fans of political free speech alike. This year, the highlight of the show for the latter camp was almost certainly the appearance of “Bob Vylan”, with the rap group’s singer Pascal Robinson-Foster gloating “I heard you want your country back? Shut the fuck up!”, as well as leading the crowd in chants of “Death to the IDF”.
Some may have found this performance jarring, and somewhat at odds with the vision of a peaceful multicultural Britain celebrated by many. That we have incorporated millions of people from across the world, often against the express wishes of the native population, and from cultures seemingly deeply incompatible with Britain’s is held to be a huge success story. Judging from the shrill outrage, even from many conservatives, this is perhaps the first time that many have encountered something to dispel this fairytale. However, like the frequent so-called “hate marches”, as well as the throngs of protesters declaring their allegiance to another often hostile nation that grabs everyone’s attention in London and other cities across Britain, when people state loudly and clearly what they believe in this way, we should listen rather than try to silence them — you do not cure the disease by hiding the symptoms.
The response from the British political class was somewhat predictable, although perhaps split between cold calculation and being played like a cheap violin. Howls of outrage, calls for prosecution for speech crimes, demands that the BBC be sanctioned for failing to censor the group’s performance all inevitably ensued.
Bob Vylan, much like the Irish rap troupe Kneecap that has played from much the same songbook already this year, were almost certainly less than mortified that their calculated act of outrage bait had successfully ensnared some political beasts. Grimly predictable among those that blundered into the pit, lit with a giant neon “Elephant Trap Here” sign was the official Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. By choosing to direct their chants towards the IDF (the national military of the State of Israel) rather than simply “Israel” ought to have been a further giant pointy arrow towards the aforementioned elephant trap, indicating that the professional outrage performance artists had workshopped the whole thing with a lawyer beforehand to know where the threshold for criminal speech was, but yet Kemi blundered on undeterred. Showing steely resolve not to be deterred by all of the people warning her about the great big pit covered in leaves she duly took to Twitter condemning the performance, as well as telling GB News that: “The BBC needs to do better. There were loads of acts that they could have filmed that day. Why did they film the one that was pushing messages that were incitement to hate?”
Badenoch has form on this kind of stuff. Earlier in the year she supported the police prosecution of Kneecap for using bad words, declaring that “Kneecap’s glorification of terrorism and anti-British hatred has no place in our society.” I have written before about why the Kneecap prosecution is bad).
This calamitous approach to free speech from Kemi Badenoch is not just anti liberty, but also a huge missed opportunity. The motivations for Keir Starmer to call for police action against acts such as Kneecap and Bob Vylan are clear. Unlike people such as Lucy Connolly, the 41-year old mother currently serving two and a half years in prison for an off-colour Facebook post, Kneecap and Bob Vylan know where the line is, what their lawyer’s phone number is by heart, and that the government is broadly on their side. Starmer also knows that prosecutions are likely to come to naught, but that the outrage helps to get public buy-in for censorship and for the state putting people in a cage for saying bad words, or for saying acceptable words in a forbidden order.
While Kemi Badenoch is frequently on the wrong side of the principle of free speech for all, the de-facto leader of the party Robert Jenrick is often just as ready to attempt to shut down speech he finds distasteful, which is a strategic mistake all round.
The Conservative party over its 14 years in government was firmly committed to opposing free speech and liberty of expression. It expanded the scope of proscribed speech, as well as bringing in non-hate crime incidents. All of which not only reinforced the framework for criminalising words and sentences, but also in the case of NCHI processes, helped to provide methods for the police to harass and intimidate the public on a wide scope of issues. Some of the most damaging effects of the Conservative Party’s commitment to speech criminalisation was not just that it suppressed speech directly, but that it led to a climate of fear and self-censorship.
If Badenoch (and, let’s face it, Jenrick) is serious about drawing a line to distinguish the party from that which was robustly rejected by the electorate at the electorate, they should do that with free speech absolutism. Not just because it is the right and the moral thing to do, but because the culture of fear over speaking one’s mind about problems faced by Britain that the previous government stoked actively hinders them in opposition.
The case of Robert Jenrick is a particularly difficult thing to unpick. He has stated on plenty of occasions that the sight of “hate marches” in Britain woke him up to the realities of foreign conflicts that had been imported by his own party. In 2023, he stated that: “I think there are communities in our country where people are leading parallel lives. It’s an obvious observation that a million people coming into our country every year is immensely challenging to successfully integrate.” Why he is keen to have those marches curtailed is a mystery. If he is serious about change, he should be keen for millions of others to experience the same wakeup call, even if he finds their message disturbing.
Jenrick would do well to look towards France to see what an only incrementally smaller scope of tolerated speech looks like. You only need to see the example of the legal turmoils of Eric Zemmour to understand how limits to speech can bind even prominent politicians. Speaking on the French “C à vous” in 2016, Zemmour stated that Muslims should be given “the choice between Islam and France” According to him, France had been experiencing “an invasion for thirty years,” and added that, “in countless French suburbs where many young girls are veiled,” a “struggle to Islamise a territory” was being played out, “a jihad.” It’s confrontational stuff, but surely within the realms of acceptable speech for a public polemicist, and also very close to sentiments alluded to by Robert Jenrick. The tribunal and the court of appeal didn’t agree, with Zemmour condemned to a 5,000 euro fine for incitement to religious hatred, as well as to pay one euro in damages to the association Coordination des appels pour une paix juste au Proche-Orient — EuroPalestine as well as foot the 3,000 euro legal bill. The Supreme Court upheld the view that his statement amounted to taking “aim at Muslims in their entirety and constituted an implicit exhortation to discrimination”.
Luckily, help appeared to be at hand. If uproar about the idea of Britain leaving the European Convention of Human Rights is anything to go by, then we should all be aware that it is the sine qua non of all essential freedoms. Surely the European Court of Human Rights would afford protections in such a straightforward case of freedom of expression, or else what would be the point of it? No such luck, with the court paying scant regard towards any freedom of expression that might have been hoped for under Article 10, doubling down on French court decisions with the absurd stance that his freedoms should not come before “duties and responsibilities” as a journalist to not stoke tensions between communities.
All of which ought to be a lesson to those on the centre right in the UK.
If British politicians are serious about making changes and undoing damage caused by immigration at odds with the British way of life, they need to get serious about free speech. Without it, they simply play into the hands of those that wish to preserve the status quo. Liberty and free speech absolutism must become the default position. Without it, we won’t get anywhere.
