And now let’s bomb Glastonbury

A small yield nuclear weapon, such as the American W89, dropped on Glastonbury in late June would immediately remove from our country almost everybody who is hugely annoying. You would see a marked reduction in the keffiyeh klan, for a start, and all those middle-class Extinction Rebellion protestors would find, in a nanosecond, that their rebellion was pointless, because extinction had arrived even more summarily than they expected. Go on, glue yourselves to that, Poppy and Oliver.

Street drummers, liberal politicians, provo vegans, radical rappers, spiritual healers, Billy Bragg, that bloke who owns Forest Green Rovers, druggies, tattooed blue-haired hags, almost the entirety of middle-class London – all evaporated. I am not saying that we should do this, of course – it would be a horrible, psychopathic thing to do. I am merely hypothesising, in a slightly wistful kinda way. One on Glasto, one on Brighton, and the UK would soon begin its recovery, with only a few chunks of gently glowing cobalt 60 left to remind us of what we are missing.

One on Glasto, one on Brighton, and the UK would soon begin its recovery

The BBC would cease to exist, too. It identifies Glastonbury as an expression of the UK ‘coming together’, which shows you how much it understands about the country. It has poured millions of pounds of licence-payers’ money into its coverage, and 400 staff were there last weekend, including the director-general, Tim Davie. Or at least 400 staff were actually working there – I’ll bet another 400 or so were there in their little tents, desperate to surf the vibe or whatever the phrase is. All those people, then, and they still couldn’t get it right.

Nor should we take seriously their claims that pulling the ridiculous Bob Vylan from air would not be anywhere near as simple as flicking a switch. It is every bit as simple as flicking a switch, in that all they had to do was flick a switch. They had rafts of presenters who could have filled the time, plus cameras at every other stage in the festival site. All it needed was someone with the merest vestige of sentience to make the decision – but, then, this is the BBC we are talking about. Whoever was in charge of output at that moment – almost certainly someone called ‘Johnny’ or ‘Ayesha’ – probably just thought the stuff about the IDF was ‘top bants’.

In truth, I am not much worked up about the Bob Vylan (or Kneecap) stuff, per se. They were only doing what an endless list of hip young musicians have done at every summer festival going all the way back to Country Joe McDonald and ‘one-two-three-four what are we fighting for?’ – i.e., channelling infantile far-left agitprop devoid of nuance and context to an audience of gullible drongos. The difference is that the BBC decided to cover it, thinking – as it unquestionably does – that the majority of the country would be cheerfully humming along with Bob Vylan’s tuneful music and are entirely down with the sentiments expressed. That is the BBC’s real crime.

It is worth a brief digression here on the nature of protest songs, of rock musicians playing politics and whether they have an effect or not. The BBC would argue that they do have an effect, that they tap into a perhaps previously unexpressed sentiment among the wider public and hence herald great change.

Au contraire. In the mid- to late-1960s, the more protest songs and festival chants there were, the further to the right swung the rest of the electorate. As evidence, I would point you in the direction of Richard Nixon’s comprehensive victory in 1968 and then, after Country Joe had done his stuff at Woodstock, a landslide in 1972. They all seriously believed McGovern was going to win that one, so wrapped up inside their radical bubble were they all (including the broadcasters). All those youthful protests of the 1960s resulted in surprise victories for the right at the polls a few years later – in the UK with Ted Heath in 1970, in France with an unexpected win for Pompidou in 1969, and of course the USA. The more fervently they insist that they are right, the more likely it is that the rest of the country will tell them to get stuffed.

I suppose it is possible that Bob Vylan will do for Tim Davie, the DG – although he is the least of the corporation’s problems, frankly. He knows he has a workforce which, in its arrogance, subscribes to a set of political beliefs unshared by the people who pay for its existence. And it is so endemic that there is nothing he can do about it. One little thing I noticed: the BBC News dutifully covered the Bob Vylan debacle and did so even handedly. But on every single occasion, on radio and TV, the story was immediately followed by a report of Israeli ‘atrocities’ in Gaza. Every single time. Do you think that is an accident?

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‘Which pop group did you disapprove of in the war, Daddy?’](https://www.spectator.co.uk/illustration/which-pop-group/)

There was a programme on BBC Radio 4 on Monday, as part of the ‘Currently’ series, about Louise Lancaster, an environmental protestor who was finally (on her fifth conviction) handed down a four-year sentence (later reduced to three years) for organising a protest which seriously inconvenienced hundreds of thousands of people. You would be hard-pressed to find a more egregiously biased example of broadcasting. Lancaster – a middle-class teacher from Grantchester – was portrayed as a kind of saint, suffering state persecution for her entirely valid beliefs. The Sun and Daily Mail were mentioned disparagingly and every action taken by Lancaster lauded. The BBC decided first to commission this rubbish and then put it out. Can you imagine it doing a similar piece about Lucy Connolly? Not a chance.

That is the real problem with the BBC. It is utterly incapable of recognising the bias it displays every day on an hourly basis, no matter how often that bias is pointed out. Bob Vylan, frankly, is the least of it.

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