This weekend over two hundred thousand festival goers flocked to sleepy Somerset to attend the Glastonbury Festival for five days of music, sun, beer and peace, love and unity.
This year, however, in the words of talentless, irrelevant bigot Sharon Osbourne the festival has been “destroyed” by “one pathetic band”.
The British establishment have whipped up such a deafening chorus of hysteria about this “one pathetic band” over the past six months, it would be genuinely shocking if anyone hadn’t heard of them.
In the build up to Glastonbury this year, therefore, all eyes have been on Irish rap group Kneecap.
Establishment censorship
Kneecap have recently gained mass popular support for their courageous opposition to western imperialism and its role in supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The British state has therefore been maneuvering to silence, smear, and censor them. A number of scumbag politicians – from Tory leader Kemi Badenoch to Prime Minister Keir Starmer – have come out calling for them to be banned from performing at Glastonbury.
Furthermore, one of the band members Mo Chara (Liam Ó hAnnaidh) has even been scandalously been put on trial for ‘terrorism offenses’ for allegedly waving a flag.
Yet every time they are attacked, they come out swinging. They use their publicity to expose the hypocrisy of the establishment and unapologetically defend themselves – and this has only made them more popular.
An at-capacity crowd of tens of thousands flocked to watch their Glastonbury set, where they led chants of ‘Free Palestine’ and ‘Fuck Keir Starmer’ to a sea of Palestine flags.
Band members made multiple speeches condemning the hypocrisy of the British state, their complicity in genocide and showing their solidarity to the group Palestine Action, which is at risk of being proscribed as a terrorist organisation.
Obviously, the BBC couldn’t show this on live television; it would be far too embarrassing. They can’t have the British public connecting the dots and thinking for themselves!
Panic
With all eyes on Kneecap, who could blame the BBC for not preempting the set of militant, anti-racist punk band Bob Vylan? Live on television, they made a speech calling out the complicity of the British government in the genocide in Gaza, before leading chants of “death, death to the IDF”.
Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at the BBC head office at that very moment!
Obviously, the mouthpieces of the British ruling class immediately went into overdrive hypocritically condemning the band for this ‘violence’, with The Telegraph carrying an article describing Bob Vylan’s set as “scenes reminiscent of a Nuremberg rally”.
The BBC and the festival organisers have nauseatingly condemned them for ‘inciting violence’, ‘antisemitism’ and ‘hate speech’. And of course, Keir Starmer has also dutifully joined the chorus condemning the “appalling hate speech”.
Even the police have made a statement that they are “assessing the footage of comments made by both Kneecap and Bob Vylan at Glastonbury to decide whether any offences may have been committed.”
Bob Vylan have come out fighting in their latest statement, hitting the nail on the head:
‘’We, like those in the spotlight before us, are not the story. We are a distraction from the story. And whatever sanctions we receive will be a distraction.
“The government doesn’t want us to ask why they remain silent in the face of this atrocity? To ask why they aren’t doing more to stop the killing? To feed the starving?
“The more time they talk about Bob Vylan, the less time they spend answering for their criminal inaction…
“We are being targeted for speaking up. We are not the first. We will not be the last. And if you care for the sanctity of human life and freedom of speech, we urge you to speak up too.”
The British establishment is in a total state of panic. They have been called out plainly and publicly for their despicable role in supporting Israel’s genocide – and are now seen scrambling around trying desperately to censor artists that say anything overtly truthful!
Stinking hypocrisy
All the moralistic lecturing by the media and the politicians has never rung so hollow. It is genuinely jaw dropping just how out of touch and hypocritical these people are.
Since 7 October 2023, people have had countless images of decapitated children, toddlers burning alive, and people weeping over their dead families burned into their consciousness.
The IDF are not an oppressed ethnic group, but a standing army of a vicious imperialist state armed to the teeth by western imperialism.
It is an army that is carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing and murder against majority unarmed civilians. The IDF have killed or wounded approximately 190,000 people in Gaza, with 50,000 of those being children.
List of Gazans killed by IDF. The first 937 names are babies less than a year old. Names of the children under the age of 18 cover 381 pages and amount to 17,121 children. Of 55,202 killed people, 9,126 were women.
Prosecute Bob Vylan and KNEECAP or Netanyahu, IDF, Starmer!? pic.twitter.com/9VEs0CcsHy— Jorge Martin ☭ (@marxistJorge) June 30, 2025
The explicit aim of the IDF is to cause so much death and destruction that it is impossible for Palestinians to live a dignified existence – this is the dictionary definition of terrorism.
It is no surprise that many ordinary people who want to see an end to imperialist war and poverty are wishing death to those carrying it out: western imperialism and the IDF!
Mass anger
The real reason for the ruling class’ hysteria is clear. They have lost public support. This is one of the most hated governments in living memory and they are terrified of anyone becoming a focal point of opposition.
Unfortunately for them, Kneecap and Bob Vylan are just a taster of what is to come.
Many other artists made pro-Palestine statements over the weekend, including Amyl and the Sniffers, CMAT, Gurriers, and Wolf Alice.
During her set, Jade from Little Mix told the crowd to put up their middle fingers against “low battery, smelly toilets, Reform, welfare cuts, transphobia, silencing protests, selling arms, justifying genocide.” Nadine Shah played her set to images of Gaza and played voice notes from Palestinian children.
The events at Glastonbury this weekend represent something very significant. What we are seeing is mass anger against the capitalist system cutting so deep, it is beginning to reflect itself in culture – at one of the most famous music festivals in the world.
In 2017, scenes of Jeremy Corbyn speaking at Glastonbury to an enthusiastic crowd badly shook the establishment. Now, the artists themselves are the ones courageously using their platform to speak the truth.
The establishment was already struggling to deal with one group of rebellious artists – now they have many others, and behind them stand a powerful mass of workers and youth looking for an outlet for their anger.
Once this force is organised, the ruling class will have more to worry about than which music festivals to censor.
