What if Britain was run like Glastonbury?

A hippie farmer is more effective than the Home Office

The Glastonbury Festival is the spiritual home of England’s metropolitan middle class. As the country’s most prestigious music event, it is hugely sought after and also inevitably attracts a great deal of mean-spirited spite.

I know people for whom it is a great highlight of the year, a thing to look forward to as the pleasures of life flatten in middle age. It is unquestionably a net positive to the world, and by all accounts has a great atmosphere. This weekend’s event looked no different.

This has much to do with its guiding spirit, which goes back to its foundation in the early 1970s. Glastonbury arose from the free festival movement, local farmer Michael Eavis inspired to start an event after seeing Led Zeppelin. It had a strong hippie influence, and the town of Glastonbury itself has a long association with wacky West Country spirituality, its high street full of ‘magik’ shops the last time I visited. The location of the first Pyramid Stage in 1971 was chosen via the method of dowsing, and the site has a miniature version of Stonehenge, which is designed to fit with the summer solstice. There is also a local link with King Arthur, which became far stronger after the bodies of ‘Arthur’ and ‘Guinevere’ were discovered at the abbey in 1191 in an obvious fraud to raise the prestige of the institution and fund the Third Crusade. 

But there is also a more Christian social justice element. Eavis is a Methodist, the religious movement which was once the backbone of the Left in this country, strongly influencing both the Liberal and Labour parties. He was a member of the CND, an anti-war campaign which also had a large Methodist element and which held its first ever meeting at Methodist Central Hall; Glastonbury festival helped fundraise for the anti-nuclear campaign in the 1980s. 

Eavis has also been a long-standing member of the Labour Party, although switching to the Greens after the Iraq War before returning to the tribe, and famously invited Jeremy Corbyn to speak at the festival in 2017, calling him ‘the hero of the hour.’ The leader of the opposition received a thunderous reception at the festival, where the previous year the Brexit result had provoked shock, dismay and even poetry.

Glastonbury has also been active in supporting the rights of refugees and migrants, so for example, in 2015 hundreds of boots left over from the event were donated to the camp at Calais.

Festival goers strongly approve, and one year a banner was unfurled in support of migrants, proclaiming ‘I don’t see any borders. Do you?’ Yet, as some eagle-eyed observers noticed, this statement of solidarity was put up against a huge fence, one that organisers built around the site to stop the festival being overrun.

This year’s event, where the pro-refugee theme was once again in evidence, has also attracted criticism due to the size of the fence surrounding the festival, which resembles something from the old days of the Iron Curtain. It’s fair to say that many of the attendees will have never seen a border like that in real life.

But then perhaps Glastonbury is less a hippie commune and more like a textbook example of a high-functioning conservative state, and the effectiveness of its border is only the most striking feature.

Being part of the West Country hippie scene, the festival used to allow New Age Travellers to enter free, a noble idea but one that would cause problems, reaching a nadir in 1990 with violence. From 1992 this free entry would be denied, and that same year a bigger fence was put in around the festival.

But borders don’t stop people, so conventional wisdom tells us, and fence jumpers continued to get in, and in at least one year in the 1990s there were as many freeloaders as fee-paying festival goers; it is estimated that in 2000 fence-jumpers numbered 100,000. Realising that the safety issues risked their licence, in 2002 the organisers brought in the Mean Fiddler Organisation, now Festival Republic, to run security, installing a ‘superfence’ that proved hugely effective.

From 2007, people also had to pre-register by providing contact details and sending a passport photo, which was then printed on the ticket. As security was ramped up, so reported crime went down (funny that).  

Prices also went up. Costing just £1 in 1970 £1, and free the following year, Glastonbury tickets went for £5 in 1979, £87 in 2000 and £335 this year. In contrast the medium UK wages went from £17,803 in 1999 to £33,000 in 2022, although Glasto ticket prices do track the increase in average house prices from £80,000 to £270,000. Glastonbury costs reflect a wider trend of exclusive cultural events becoming more expensive, but they have hardly affected its popularity.

Indeed, as the festival has become more exclusive, both by increasing the cost of tickets and by making illegal entry much harder, it has clearly become safer and more enjoyable for those involved. It has become a high trust society.

A high trust society does not function solely because of borders, of course. It also needs some sense of common purpose, or patriotism, which encourages people to behave more prosocially because they are invested in its future and feel a sense of solidarity. So, in order to stop people leaving tents littering the fields, Glastonbury’s organisers started a campaign for its citizens to treat the land with more respect, calling it ‘Love the Farm, Leave No Trace’. 

Glastonbury even has its own sophisticated transport system, with trains provided from London and shuttle buses to the station and to Bristol. (Although there are also quite a lot of private helicopters which, again, I’m fine with — sounds fun.) Imagine a country which invested in transport infrastructure.

As a microstate, the Republic of Glastonbury is in conflict with the larger neighbour surrounding it, a low-trust vetocracy, which is why Lana Del Rey had to stop playing at midnight. (This reminds me of one of the great quintessential moments of modern British social history, the time that Westminster Council shut down Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney.) Yet Glastonbury, as Eavis has said, can never be closed by its neighbours because it is too useful to the local economy; the wealthier a country is, the more powerful and influential. 

Rather than hating the people enjoying themselves, many of us simply wish that Britain could be more like Glastonbury. The reason why the vision of border fences grates is that in a very liberal society, wealthy people enjoy the benefits of high trust which they also seek to deny the rest of the population. A state run like Glastonbury would not feel powerless to prevent unwelcome arrivals because its cultural influencers compared restrictions to genocidal regimes of the past; it would not allow 12,000 convicted foreign criminals to wander the streets at liberty. It wouldn’t allow its festival goers to be endangered like that.

We simply ask that people arriving in our country — who will probably stay forever — are treated with the same scrutiny as people entering a four-day festival organised by a farmer. If an ageing hippie can organise an effective border, why can’t the Home Office?

Without trust, society functions far less smoothly, and life is also just much grimmer for everyone. As I wrote earlier this year, if you don’t have an effective fence around the edges, you end up building fences within. (Predictably, the new low-trust society law that followed the Manchester bombing is leading to countless village halls being faced with closure.)

A country of 70 million cannot expect to enjoy the same degree of trust as a festival a fraction of the size, but with greater barriers to entry it can hugely increase it. Some countries have managed to maintain social solidarity in the age of globalisation, while in a low trust society only the wealthy continue to enjoy the benefits.

They attend exclusive festivals, join exclusive clubs, and enjoy the de facto borders created by housing costs. In those neighbourhoods they can send their kids to schools where they are safe and happy because most of the parents will be the sort of people who go to Glastonbury.

If the festival was not guarded by barriers keeping out free-riders, trust within the fence would collapse. The spirit of Glastonbury may be about openness, but that is not just because of its Methodist-hippie foundations, but because openness is a prestige-enhancing belief, precisely because the wealthy most benefit from it.

Borders and national rights may be cruder and more exclusive barriers to entry than the ability to pay several hundred pounds for a weekend, but they also are more democratic — and, in that way, much fairer.