Mary Harrington
Unherd, June 30, 2025
“Those on the Right that hew to a civic-nationalist view of identity tend to break older and more wealthy.”
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.
Lots, as they say, going on here. But two things come through clearly. Firstly, despite all the anguished soul-searching after Brexit, the gulf between British bourgeois culture and that of the rest of the country continues to widen. And, secondly, that the Right is now starkly divided internally on the question of migration and civic nationalism, not just along class lines but also generationally.
It is commonplace to note the relative wealth, ethnic homogeneity, and advancing age of the typical Glastonbury crowd. It’s perhaps plausible, for this crowd, to interpret “heard you want your country back? Shut the f*** up!” not in ethnic tribal terms but cultural ones: that is, as revisiting the “Somewheres and Anywheres” cultural split discernible in the country at least since Brexit……SOURCE