Britain's last acceptable hatred

(People who go to Glastonbury)

Saturday was warm and sunny in London, one of those special golden summer days when our city is one of the greatest on earth. So, naturally, I spent the day indoors writing an article about the looming disaster facing the country.

Because our daughter needed help early on Sunday morning, I missed out on the chance to go on a camping trip with the families of our youngest child’s class - but since I’ve come down with Covid and was noticing the symptoms already, maybe that’s for the best. It’s a shame to miss the people, but I’ve never hugely enjoyed the squalor inherent in camping, one reason I haven’t been to the Glastonbury festival.

Glastonbury is an established part of the British cultural calendar, along with Wimbledon, test matches and the Proms - but it’s one that provokes more resentment than all of them combined. People never tire of pointing out how expensive it is, how privileged the crowd are and – Humza Yousaf voice – how white.

Glasto attendees have become representative of a resented class, happy to saw off all the branches of a social order they benefit from, carefree about the second-order effects of the feel-good ideas they promote.

But mostly it’s just young(ish) people listening to music and having fun, which is why I’ve never enjoyed the rage people feel; it’s this Tim Chapman tweet, but unironically in my case. Most people aren’t at Glastonbury for politics, they’re just there to listen to music and enjoy themselves. That seems like a nice thing, and yet there has been a tendency on the Right to hate – or pretend to hate – nice things, and so we must add it to the things we’re against.

Glastonbury is left-coded because left-wing opinions are fashionable, and so very fashion-conscious industries like music embrace them. Once upon a time this might have been framed as counter-cultural, but we’re so past this point that only crusty old-new establishment men can claim that the rock’n’roll spirit is about rebellion; it’s about morality.

The festival’s political element certainly riles people, a world of Gary Stevenson, Gary Lineker and Led by Donkeys, with their thought-provoking art. Last year Banksy unveiled an inflatable model of a Channel migrant boat, although my personal favourite was the poem that appeared during the year of the Brexit referendum, ‘Our little friend the EU’.

Of course the festival’s founder, Michael Eavis, is an ardent socialist who, of course, is not desperately keen to pay inheritance tax. These are the little nuggets perfectly designed to warm our conservative hearts as we miss out on the fun.

Eavis has himself lamented that his festival is too ‘middle-aged and middle-class’, but I’m sceptical how much he actually thinks that, or if anyone really does. As I’ve written before, Glastonbury is white for the same reason that liberal-coded organisations are always much whiter than more conservative ones – because white liberals are the whitest of white people (to reuse an analogy I’m fond of, conservatives have one copy of the western liberalism gene, while progressives have two, which may have deleterious effects).

In fact, Glastonbury is less a festival of rebellion and more like the sort of well-functioning conservative state Peter Thiel might have designed. (They even have a jail, fund it properly and don’t release people unnecessarily early so that they reoffend.)

Of course, the politics has become more notable, and as Noel Gallagher put it, ‘It’s getting a bit woke now, that place, and a bit kind of preachy and a bit virtue-signalling. I don’t like it in music - little f**king idiots waving flags around and making political statements and bands taking the stage and saying, “Hey guys, isn’t war ­terrible, yeah? Let’s all boo war. F**k the Tories man,” and all that. It’s like, look – play your f**king tunes and get off.” Donate all your money to the cause – that’s it, stop yapping about it.’

My suspicion is that this is a facet of rising costs – the more exclusive an institution in the English-speaking world, the more aggressively progressive it will be, reflective of aristocratic confidence.

Aristocratic confidence is a necessary but dangerous thing, always creating a risk of provoking the mob at the gates – although they would have trouble getting past the fences at Glastonbury. This year was no different.