30 June 2025 - 11:15am
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.
On one side of this divide stand the bourgeois progressives, usually white and well-off, who tend to live in more homogenous areas and to regard “diverse” Britain as an improvement: a group visibly well represented at Glastonbury. On the other, classically, we find often more working-class cultural conservatives, dismissively referred to by their opponents using the ethnic slur “gammon”, for whom high levels of immigration are experienced both as economic threat and cultural dispossession.
This group is, to say the least, not well-represented at Glastonbury. Vylan’s song explicitly celebrates their cultural weakness and anger:
“We the people in the street
Got the gammons on retreat
And their blood boils over when we speak”
In one sense, this is well-trodden culture war territory. What felt new about Vylan’s intervention, though, was the framing not in terms of egalitarianism or vulnerability but territorial conquest:
“So let it be heard
We ain’t wasting a scrap when we eat
And when we comе for it then we’re coming to keep”
Secondly and relatedly, what’s new is that a large subset of the Right heard Vylan’s lyrics in exactly these terms: an intervention in a war not of culture but race, between immigrants and the native English. Here, though, the split runs not just between Left and Right, but also through the middle of the Right — not just along class lines but also those of age.
Those on the Right that hew to a civic-nationalist view of identity tend to break older and more wealthy. This reflects the classic “Somewheres vs Anywheres” divide, but is now complicated by a further attack from their Right, at the hands of a typically young and increasingly vocal group for whom “British Values”-type multiculturalism asks too great a cultural sacrifice to bland liberal buzzwords like “equality” and “diversity”.
This fissure is growing increasingly marked, as in the explosive exchanges reported at last Monday’s Roger Scruton Memorial Conference between younger, often more ethnocentrist conservative attendees and the older civic nationalists onstage. It was also reflected in the split Right-wing reaction to Vylan’s set. Older mainstream conservatives were outraged by “Death to the IDF”, (probably accurately) interpreted as code for wishing death on all Israelis, or even all Jews, but had far less to say about “the gammons on retreat”. Younger radicals, though, show relatively little interest in ethnically-coded territorial disputes in the Middle East, while expressing increasingly vocal anxieties over the emergence of ethnically-coded territorial disputes here in England.
Meanwhile, as attested by the BBC’s publication of this footage without any apparent sense of the backlash it would cause, the bourgeois mainstream seems content to continue treating all these questions as both settled and off-limits. Taken together, the situation has the unsettling feeling of a boiler slowly over-heating, with all possible pressure release mechanisms screwed immovably shut.
