The lackadaisical response to a musician who told Britons who “want your country back” to “shut the fuck up” and who led chants of “death to the IDF” has been cited as an example of two-tier justice in a country where middle-class housewives are locked up for tweets.
Days after death chants by musician ‘Bob Vylan’ were broadcast live by the BBC from the Glastonbury Festival in Somerset, England, the organs of state are slowly starting to respond, with concerns about offensive and potentially illegal content. State broadcaster the BBC has now acknowledged it shouldn’t have been aired at all, the broadcasting regulator says there are questions to be answered, and police are investigating whether a speech crime took place.
Given the ferocious response the government has been perceived to have made in response to other speech crimes in recent memory, warnings have inevitably been made about “two-tier justice”, the name given to a rising feeling among some in the United Kingdom that the law is applied unevenly to different groups depending on how favoured they are by the state. The Conservative Party’s Shadow Home Secretary — interior affairs spokesman — Chris Philp said it was his opinion that the law had been broken and, for the sake of consistency, arrests must take place.
He said: “It seems clear Vylan was inciting violence and hatred. They should be arrested and prosecuted – just like the Government insisted happen during the riots last summer. By broadcasting his vile hatred, the BBC appear to have also broken the law.”
Per the Daily Telegraph, Philp compared the response to that of Lucy Connolly, a controversial case where a housewife received a long prison sentence for a swiftly deleted tweet during the post-Southport attack riots last year. Philp is reported to have said: “He should receive the same treatment under the law as others, such as Lucy Connolly. He should be arrested and prosecuted immediately. A failure to do so would be a clear example of two-tier justice under Sir Keir Starmer and his attorney general, Lord Hermer.”
Of course, allegations of two-tier justice clearly stick in the craw of the Prime Minister and those around him, no doubt, given that it challenges their image as the good guys, and have elicited a furious response from otherwise self-assured professional men. ‘Lord’ Hermer, a long-time friend of the Prime Minister and left-wing activist who now serves as the UK’s Attorney General, is said to have claimed that the notion Britain has now developed a two-tier justice system is “disgusting”.
Further, those who talk about it are creating “dangers” to the UK’s “essential institutions” that the public needs to “get behind”, defenders say. Such ill-tempered responses are not unusual, either: the most senior police officer in the United Kingdom, Sir Mark Rowley, felt motivated to throw the microphone from the journalist’s hand to the ground when they attempted to question him about the issue.
Meanwhile, days after the event, comments on the Vylan performance are filtering through. The BBC, which broadcast the full performance unedited including apparent remarks against white legacy Britons like “Heard you want your country back? Hah, shut the fuck up” and against Israel such as “death, death to the IDF… From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” has now acknowledged it erred.
In comments that came just as the UK government’s broadcasting regulator said “the BBC clearly has questions to answer”, the BBC stated on Monday that its broadcast “included comments that were deeply offensive. The BBC respects freedom of expression but stands firmly against incitement to violence. The antisemitic sentiments expressed by Bob Vylan were utterly unacceptable and have no place on our airwaves.”
They said they have not published the broadcast to their on-demand catch-up service and said they now realise “with hindsight we should have pulled the stream during the performance. We regret this did not happen.” The BBC said it plans to review “our guidance around live events” for future broadcasts.
The organisers of the festival themselves, who generally make some noise about their pro-Hamas politics being non-negotiable while allegedly quietly acting pragmatically in private, also condemned the Vylan set. They said: “With almost 4,000 performances at Glastonbury 2025, there will inevitably be artists and speakers appearing on our stages whose views we do not share… However, we are appalled by the statements made from the West Holts stage by Bob Vylan yesterday. Their chants very much crossed a line and we are urgently reminding everyone involved in the production of the festival that there is no place at Glastonbury for antisemitism, hate speech or incitement to violence.”
As The Guardian notes, support for Palestine otherwise permeated the festival, with multiple acts showing Palestinian symbols, chanting Palestinian slogans, or entering into discourse on the war. In one case musician Nadine Shah read a letter from ‘Artists from Palestine’ during her set which articulated support for Palestine Action, the direct action pseudo fifth-columnist organisation that sabotaged military jets at a British air base earlier this month and is apparently on the verge of being declared an outlawed terrorist organisation by the British government.
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