Yes, the BBC did cock up with its live stream of Bob Vylan, says Brian Reade. But the right-wing moaners should be directing their rage elsewhere
A few months ago America’s Vice President warned that the greatest threat to British democracy was not Russia’s nukes but our shutting down of free speech.
JD Vance lambasted the UK for “criminalising” dissenters who held alternative viewpoints, saying: “I believe that dismissing people’s concerns is the most surefire way to destroy democracy.” He even argued that Keir Starmer should be made to repeal our hate-speech laws if he wanted to secure a trade deal with Donald Trump.
And the Right in this country heartily applauded their MAGA soulmate. Kemi Badenoch proclaimed: “Free speech is precious, and under threat. We must fight for it because it challenges dangerous orthodoxies.” And a leading Daily Mail commentator wrote a gushing eulogy, under the headline: “Sock it to ’em JD”. However, the thing about right-wing libertarians who clutch their pearls over so-called “cancel culture” is that free speech only really appeals to them when they’re in agreement with it.
When Black rap duo Bob Vylan used a sick turn of phrase at Glastonbury to condemn Israel’s military actions in Gaza, that sacred principle of defending free speech went out of the window. Tory politicians and media outlets bayed for Vylan’s heads, demanding criminal investigations, cheering as their US visas were revoked and arguing that failure to arrest them would amount to “two-tier justice”.
The very same defenders of liberty who gave wide berths to controversialists like Elon Musk and Laurence Fox, defended Katie Hopkins’ calls for gunships to be turned on refugees in small boats and wailed about Roald Dahl books having words removed, were enraged that a punk rapper should be allowed to chant “death to the IDF”. Mainly enraged because it was being aired by their despised whipping boy, the pinko BBC.
And, yes, the BBC did cock up by broadcasting the clearly controversial duo live, but Glastonbury is an anti-Establishment music festival where anything can be said. For example, On Bob Vylan’s Glasto backdrop were the words “Eat The Rich.” Maybe the police should also arrest them for incitement to cannibalise James Dyson?
Maybe the Beeb should have put a trigger warning up saying: “This act may contain opinions about killings in Gaza that the majority of genocide experts believe to be genocide”? Or maybe not, because then the Right would have called it “nanny state interference” designed to turn our mollycoddled youth into snowflakes.
The hypocrisy is ludicrous. Had Glastonbury been going during the height of the US bombing of Vietnam would the BBC have felt the need to censor any hippies chanting “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?” Would that have been hate speech?
Not to be outdone by the Tories, Keir Starmer jumped on the outraged bandwagon by calling Vylan’s outburst “appalling”. Meanwhile, since Vylan’s outburst, an estimated 300 innocent Gazans have lost their ability to mouth any speech at all, due to being mercilessly killed by IDF bombs and bullets. And Israeli newspaper Haaretz quoted IDF soldiers as saying they had received orders to fire live ammunition into crowds of unarmed Palestinians at food points. “It’s a killing field,” said one combatant.
Yet nothing the IDF does, or any calls the extremists in the Israeli cabinet make about wanting to wipe Gaza off the map, attracts anywhere near the scale of right-wing rage that four words spoken by a punk rapper does. Now that’s appalling.
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