Glastonbury: A Sign of Britain’s Darkening Times

Commie Corbyn is up to his normal anti-White, anti-British tricks, but this time from the Bully Pulpit of the Glastonbury Festival stage. 

From The European Conservative

By Rod Dreher

The British people never voted for their own replacement, yet the ruling class has continued to make it happen.

We have to talk about Glastonbury. This weekend, it became a sign of our darkening times.

The annual popular music festival takes its name from the ancient English town that hosts the event. “Glasto,” which draws over 200,000 fans yearly, is such a major cultural event that the BBC livestreams performances on its website. On Saturday, the vast Glasto crowd, and the fans watching from home across Britain, had a glimpse of why David Betz’s warning that the UK is ripe for civil war should be taken seriously. 

On its stage, the singer of the punk-rap English duo Bob Vylan chanted “Free, free Palestine!” No surprise there—Glasto has always been left-coded, more or less a Labourite Woodstock. But then the singer—a dreadlocked black man whose real name is the posh-sounding Pascal Robinson-Foster—led the crowd in chanting “Death, death to the IDF!” He was talking about the Israeli military.

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, inshallah,” he added. This is the longstanding slogan of Palestinians and their allies who wish to cleanse the state of Israel of its Jews. The inshallah—Arabic for “God willing”—was an eye-rolling fillip. 

I can’t tell you what the Irish rap trio Kneecap said, because the BBC had decided in advance not to broadcast its Glastonbury set. Kneecap frequently makes incendiary anti-Israel remarks in its performances (e.g., at the Coachella Festival in April, “F**k Israel! Free Palestine!”). Reports indicate that the rappers did the same at Glasto, adding this time, “F**k Keir Starmer!” Charming lads.

Rappers being vulgar and politically radical? I know, I know: dog bites man. Not news. But what happened at Glastonbury really is news, and here’s why.

In its set, the Bob Vylan duo performed its popular song, “I Heard You Want Your Country Back” for the immense crowd. Its lyrics include:

I heard you want your country back
Shut the f**k up
I heard you want your country back
Uh-uh, you can’t have that
…
You stole it right outta my hands
And pulled the rug right under my feet
I’m Nat Turner meets Nat King Cole
A well-dressed brother with a revolution in my soul
We the people in the street
Got the gammons on retreat
And their blood boils over when we speak
So let it be heard
We ain’t wasting a scrap when we eat
And when we come for it then we’re coming to keep

… The only place I know
Stolen right under my nose
By ignorant scum
Tryna lay claim to a land that ain’t theirs anyway
Wait—what did you say?

This is an anti-white, anti-English anthem; “gammons” is leftist slang for ‘normal white English people.’ Bizarrely, the singer accuses white Britons of having stolen the land where their ancestors have lived since at least the Anglo-Saxons invaded in the 5th century, after the Romans withdrew. While little is publicly known about the background of Pascal Robinson-Foster, given that in 1950, blacks in Britain made up about 0.04% of the population, it seems fair to say that his people have been in the UK for less time than Paul McCartney has been alive. 

And yet, he accuses the white British of stealing the country from him, and promises to take it back for good. Do notice that he rapped this racist provocation to a crowd made up mostly of cheering white Britons. 

As an Englishman tweeted this weekend about Bob Vylan’s anti-Jewish rant, Lucy Connolly—a political prisoner of the Starmer government—is doing jail time for tweeting, then quickly deleting, a message arguably less provocative.

In reaction to the Southport murders by a son of African migrants, Connolly called for violence against asylum seekers, but thought better of it and deleted the post. An ugly statement by Connolly, of which she was rightly ashamed. 

Still, she’s in prison now on a race-hatred conviction, while a popular black rapper calls for violence against white Britons and chants for the cleansing of Israel of Jews—and is cheered by hundreds of thousands and has his foul message broadcast nationwide on the BBC.

The Bob Vylan song, as well as its singer’s hateful chants, are a sign of how utterly deranged the left-wing mind is in Britain today. In 2020, the UK Left, including angry mobs, took up the cause of Black Lives Matter. Never mind that the claims made by the American BLM movement had nothing at all to do with the history of Great Britain. It didn’t matter: the British Left disengaged its mind, and leaned heavily into its feelings. 

Similarly, what the complex and bloody struggle between Israelis and Palestinians has to do with the lives of the British people, such that so many of them would endorse public displays of hate and calls for violence, is not obvious. Yet that’s what happened at Glastonbury: the Gazafication of British politics and culture. The irony that these 200,000 Glasto-goers cheered for the cause of Hamas, which started this war by invading Israel and slaughtering over 1,000 innocent civilians, including attendees at a music festival, was lost on these idiots.

Speaking of irony, the day before, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn took to the Glastonbury stage and called attention to a sign that he had seen on the perimeter fence outside the concert:

The sign hangs on a fence marking the border between the festival and the outside! Corbyn, though, said the sign sends a “message” to Donald Trump: “Build bridges, not walls.” Like so many on the UK left, Corbyn is pleased to see the migrant boats bringing hundreds of illegal aliens across the Channel to Britain daily, where they are supported with welfare by the British taxpayer. But if any of those asylum seekers had tried to cross the border into the Glastonbury Festival? Well, there was a special on-site jail to hold them. 

Why not? The reason for the Glastonbury border was to make sure that the people who had bought a ticket to the festival—admission was a gobsmacking 443 euros—and who had a right to be there, received what they were entitled to get. There seemed no special clamor among the Glastos to tear down the fence and let people who had not paid come into the festival. But when the gammons want to run the British borders like the Glastonbury organizers administer its perimeters—well, screw those white SOBs, we’re coming to get what they took from us.

Think about it: it’s easier to get into Britain than it was to get into Glastonbury. 

It would be comical if it weren’t so serious. Calls for ethnic cleansing (Israel) and race war (Britain) were made before a cheering crowd, and broadcast on national television—and the British don’t even see what’s staring them in the face.

It’s serious because the British people are living under an increasingly oppressive regime of ‘two-tier justice,’ in which white people are treated more harshly by the law than non-whites. The country is still struggling to absorb the horrific fact that police and politicians allowed thousands of working-class white English girls to be systematically raped for years by Pakistani Muslim men, and did nothing about it because the authorities didn’t want to be racist.

It’s serious because when the Sex Pistols, in the 1970s, called for “anarchy in the UK,” to cite the title of one of their most popular songs, it was reasonable to laugh it off. As messy as 1970s Britain was, it was a very stable country. That is no longer the case. 

It’s serious because the two-tier way of thinking permeates the cultural establishment in Britain. As with media, academia, museums, and other territories controlled by the Left in America, in the UK, it is permissible to engage in open hatred for white people there.

And it’s serious because Britain is undergoing ethnic replacement at a staggeringly fast rate. In 1960, the British population was almost entirely white. Demographers forecast that at some point in the 2060s—only a hundred years later—Britain’s white population will cease to be a majority. 

As Ed West points out in his most recent newsletter,

For a majority ethnic group to go from 99 per cent to minority status in little over a century is incredibly rare, except in cases of military catastrophe. It would be notable if this didn’t lead to some form of conflict.

Writing in The Critic, Laurie Wastell observes that mainstream conservative UK politicians don’t want to talk about the dangers of demographic change. But the signs of serious disruption are too numerous to be ignored. Writes Wastell:

Across the country, multicultural Britain is tearing at the seams. … Birmingham MPs campaign for an airport in Mirpur, Pakistan, even as rubbish piles up in their own city; a young female Muslim councillor calls for an end to the “free mixing” of men and women; a Labour MP stands up in parliament and calls for, in effect, an Islamic blasphemy law. 

Far from newcomers embracing our values, as Britain’s population changes, our culture changes. Pubs become mosques. The UK is now the Western capital for Sharia courts. …  only one in four British Muslims believes Hamas committed murder and rape in Israel on October 7th. 

Not only have the British people never voted for their own replacement, but, as Wastell points out, for many years, polls have shown widespread anxiety over it. Yet the ruling class, including both Labour and Conservative governments, have continued to make it happen. 

The British are a famously polite people. It is thought quite rude to notice these things. And of late, not only rude but, at times, criminal. As in other European countries, pointing out what is happening with migrants, crime, and demographic replacement is to risk fines and imprisonment. Elderly philosopher and writer Renaud Camus was convicted by a French court in 2020 of hate speech for saying that he hopes it never comes to this, but if he had to choose between “submission” to an alien culture (he meant Islam) or “war,” then he would choose war every time. 

In a recent essay on Camus, titled “The Crime Of Noticing,” the English writer Douglas Murray decries how Camus and people like him are treated by the pro-migration crowd. They follow this scheme to disable noticers:

First, that it isn’t happening, that what you are seeing with your eyes you are not seeing; second, that it is happening but it is good for you; third, that it may not be good for you but you deserve it; and finally—it doesn’t matter, because it’s going to happen anyway.

This is how Britain in 2025 finds itself with hundreds of thousands of (mostly white) people spending nearly 500 euros to go to a gated music festival and hear denunciations of borders, calls for genocide of Israeli Jews, a de facto celebration of Hamas terrorists who massacred Israeli civilians, and a call for a race war against white British who supposedly stole Britain from blacks. And almost nobody—at least almost nobody in power—notices! Those in power who do are not going to do a damn thing about it, aside from tweet angrily, and make stern-sounding remarks on television. 

The powerless in Britain, though—the “gammons” hated by the Left and the elites—are increasingly unwilling to live by these lies, and to submit to the people and the ideology dispossessing them in their own land. What will they do, then? Renaud Camus has an answer. David Betz has a prophecy—a prophecy that he extends to all of Western Europe, where one finds the same demographic catastrophe and elite hostility to those who notice it and complain.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The future is not fated. But the hour is very, very late.