Weekend-long, multi-channel party political broadcast for Corbyn — paid for by YOU
FOR England’s well- to- do revolutionaries, Glastonbury’s the time to get drunk, dance, take drugs, have sex – and talk politics on behalf of the impoverished classes they’ve never met but who, in their arrogance, they presume to speak for.
The entry level cost of spending a long weekend in this Somerset mud-and-canvas echo-chamber is £238, way beyond the means of the people they purport to care so much about. Popular too are the £995 teepees to make your stay a little more comfortable and, if Daddy’s trust fund has done really well this year, there’s always the option of a six-berth yurt at £10,495 plus entrance fee.
As Bruce Dickinson of the heavy metal group Iron Maiden once said, Glastonbury really is ‘ the most bourgeois thing on the planet’.
This year, however, the atmosphere is even more self-delusional. Because as well as the usual super-smug pop stars and politicians – including Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson and former shadow chancellor Ed Balls – the festival was dominated by the greatest cashmere communist of them all: Jeremy Corbyn.
‘Oh! Je-re-my Cor-byn’ sang the crowd to the tune of the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army. Someone fashioned a likeness of him out of sand; others signalled their worship via T-shirts and necklaces.
Corbyn’s rise from anonymous backbench beardy to Prime Minister-in-waiting has been as meteoric as it is mystifying. Even his own party has struggled to understand it, although in recent weeks they have begun to put aside their misgivings in the light of his success at the general election.
What’s clear is that only a fool would doubt his appeal to a certain sector of the electorate: The young, politically earnest middle classes who each year turn up in their tens of thousands to Glastonbury.
Part of the attraction for this predominantly white, well-heeled crowd is that they clearly self-identify with Corbyn. That is because, like them, he is the product of a highly privileged upbringing, growing up alongside his brothers (Edward, Piers and Andrew) in genteel splendour in a seven-bedroom manor house in rural Shropshire.
He remains the eternal student politician, a firebrand fantasist who has never actually had to operate in the real world of politics, never had to make the tough choices that inevitably come with power, never had to accept responsibility for situations over which he has no real control, never had to make unpopular decisions for the greater good of the nation.
He’s an old man who appeals to the young and the impressionable because he not only spouts the same political platitudes but also because, like them, he has not yet grown up – a trait that he has in common with the organiser of Glastonbury himself, the eternally tedious Michael Eavis.
Bad enough that this pair of superannuated socialists should hold such sway over the generation in whose hands all our futures rest; what’s really worrying is the way the BBC – whose charter is predicated on lack of bias towards any political party – panders to their toxic agenda.
It has long been the case that the Corporation basically treats the festival as one giant BBC works out- ing, shipping in a seemingly endless supply of presenters, producers and hangers- on at the taxpayer’s expense; this year, however, all pretence of impartiality has been dropped.
We have seen the most comprehensive BBC coverage of proCorbyn, anti-Tory, music- based propaganda in the history of the festival, with over 30 hours of TV, and Radios 1, 2 and 6 Music all hosting back-to-back live shows. Even dear old Radio 3 has been roped in for the first time ever.
All catering for a self- selecting army of wealthy virtue- signallers with about as much experience of real life as Walter Mitty.
But perhaps even more significant is that the coverage has spread like a rash online which, when it comes to influencing public opinion, matters so much these days. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube – these are all outlets that the BBC has used to amplify Corbyn’s narrow political agenda to the widest possible audience.
THEresult has been a weekendlong, multi-channel, taxpayerfunded party political broadcast for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.
Let’s examine the evidence. Saturday, 3.30pm: A hush descends as fans await Corbyn’s appearance on the Pyramid Stage. Viewers of the BBC’s live feed, available on its website and on the red button service, are treated to half an hour of a Corbyn- supporting crowd waving CND and free Palestine flags.
As the crowd waits, there are growing anxieties on Twitter that the BBC will mute its coverage. They need not have worried. Corbyn eventually appears alongside Eavis and presents him with what looks like a signed copy of the Labour manifesto.
‘Is it right that so many people live in such poverty in a society surrounded by such riches?’ he asks, seemingly oblivious to the fact that an awful lot of those rich people (or their offspring) are standing
before him in their Hunter wellies. He goes on to denounce Donald Trump (always a crowd pleaser in these circles), urging him to ‘build bridges, not walls’, conveniently omitting to mention the 4.5 mile long, 12ft high aluminium ‘ super fence’ which surrounds the Glastonbury site in order to keep out the riff-raff who can’t afford the ticket prices.
Speech over, Radio 1’s Twitter feed carries a picture of him waving to the crowd with the words: ‘When you ace the chorus.’ The tweet is later deleted.
Saturday evening, and Corbyn’s words are reported on the news on BBC1, as part of an item on the discovery of inflammable materials on 27 tower blocks across the country. A section of his speech is played in which he says: ‘Is it right that so many people are frightened of where they live at the moment having seen the horrors of what happened at Grenfell Tower?’
What Corbyn doesn’t say, of course, and the newsreader doesn’t mention, is that many of those tower blocks, such as those in Camden, were built by Labour in Labour-controlled boroughs.
DETAILS, mere details. The BBC News website posts a fawning piece about the speech, alongside gushing quotes from musicians.
‘He comes across quite genuine. It seems like he’s fought for a lot of good causes,’ says rapper Dizzee Rascal. Mike Kerr of rock group Royal Blood adds: ‘He seems like someone who speaks for, particularly, my generation of people. He seems like someone that represents us.’
I wonder how they’d feel if he ever got to implement his tax plans, which would see them paying over 50 per cent of their income to the Exchequer.
Talking of tax, John ‘Day of Rage’ McDonnell was top of the playbill yesterday. The people in Grenfell were ‘murdered by political decisions’ he told his audience, mindful as ever of the need not to make political capital out of the horrific deaths of so many innocents.
It’s the easiest thing in politics to be a crowd-pleaser. All you need to do is understand your audience, and Corbyn clearly does. But as we have seen time and again with other populist politi- cians – from Nick Clegg to Donald Trump – an ability to woo the crowds does not necessarily correlate with a talent to rule.
Corbyn is undoubtedly a populist politician. Hanging out at Glastonbury with a host of celebrities gives him a little showbiz sparkle, of being on the right side of cool, a fully-paid-up member of the In Crowd.
Contrast all this with poor Theresa May.
While IRA- supporting Corbyn was pulling pints of cider at Glastonbury, Theresa was in Liverpool for Armed Forces Day paying tribute to those who have sacrificed their lives in order to keep us safe. It may not be sexy, but it was undoubtedly the moral thing to do.
Corbyn’s contribution to Armed Forces Day, in comparison, was to tweet an old photo of himself alongside veterans from Remembrance Sunday 2015.
This is a man who has styled himself as the ultimate virtuesignalling politician for the ultimate virtue-signalling generation – at the ultimate virtue-signalling pop gathering.
In reality, though, he has yet to signal anything concrete other than a determination to foment class war, create division and promote the politics of envy in the pursuit of a credo that has long ago been proven unworkable: Communism.
For the BBC to so unquestioningly award him a one-sided platform for his propaganda is unforgivable. But for the whole organisation to fall so completely under his spell just demonstrates the total lack of intelligent thinking or grown-up leadership that goes on there. And how far it has strayed from its core guiding principles.