How Glastonbury became a playpen for the turbo-smug and talentless

For once I am grateful for Glastonbury. For on this gloriously sunny weekend they’ve done us normal Brits a solid by huddling together on Worthy Farm every pompous tit in the land. Gary Stevenson’s there, with his mockney bollocks about capitalism. And lunatic boob-expander Zack Polanski. The cunning stunts of Led by Donkeys too, natch – those Brewdog ballbags have not once spied a gathering of moneyed white people that they haven’t wanted to titillate with such daring fare as ‘Tories are bad’.

Original soy boy Owen Jones is there, to talk about the tens of thousands of souls who’ve perished in Sudan’s brutish civil war. Only joking: he’s talking about Gaza. Half of Novara Media is there, leaving Dalston’s white girls dangerously bereft of political guidance. And Dale Vince, Caroline Lucas, even Gary Lineker, who’s doing a talk on how to ‘get along’ in a ‘world being pushed apart’, which is a bit fucking rich for someone who’s just lost his job for sharing a post about Zionists illustrated with a dirty rat.

And of course Kneecap, Numpties With Attitude, those tea-cosied almost-forthysomethings who make the brunching classes swoon by saying ‘Fuck Israel’. And the pricks of Palestine Action, which has caused a stir, but I think it’s fab: better that they’re knocking back piss-weak beers with other keffiyeh cocks in a field in Somerset than knocking down Jewish-owned businesses in London. And your most annoying neighbours, the ones who have the Pride flag in their windows and call their kids Edred and Ambrosia: they’re there too, bopping to Charli XCX before hitting the Healing Field for a spot of ‘Laughter Yoga’ and some ‘nourishing refreshments from the Chai Wizard Cafe’.

There used to be a brilliant website, back when the internet was good, called Cunts’ Corner. Now we have a real-world Cunts’ Corner, once a year, where every faux-virtuous bloviator of the bourgeoisie decamps for five days, generously fencing themselves off – literally – from the non-twat populace. So thank you, Sir Michael Eavis, you mad old hippy, for giving Brits brief, sweet annual respite from the moral wank of the turbo-smug classes. Everyone, the sun’s out, and the arseholes are in their Somerset playpen – go wild!

Yes, after years of dissing Glasto, I’ve learned to love it. I mean what other event takes irritants like Caitlin Moran out of action for five days? Of course she’s there. She got Times readers falling off their mobility chairs this week by telling them she used to go to Glasto in ‘sexy boots’, and once ‘consumed such a quantity of MDMA that it took me several hours to realise that the Orb had in fact finished their set’, but now she goes in ‘orthotic trainers’ and her ‘drugs stash’ consists of ‘HRT, electrolytes, beta blockers and a nightly pill to mitigate hormonal hair loss’.

The cringe is incalculable, I know. But look on the bright side: for a full five days this wildly remunerated penner of shite columns, this square person’s idea of a cool person, this 50-year-old who thinks it’s perfectly normal to write about her ‘lovely furry moof’ that looks like a ‘marmoset sitting in [my] lap’, will be too busy awkwardly bopping to The 1975 to write a single goddamn word of prose. I hope that’s why Eavis got his knighthood – not for services to music, but for services to working-class Britons whom once a year he gallantly shields from the self-regarding piffle of the leisured elites.

Ms Moran’s TMI blather about once taking MDMA at Glasto and now taking HRT sums up what has happened to England’s best-known festival. It started in the summer of 1970. It was a hippy-fest in which men with beards and women without bras rocked out to genuinely brilliant bands. The headline act in 1970 was T-Rex. It is the very definition of ‘decline and fall’ for a festival to go from hosting beautiful Marc Bolan to those theatre-kid faux Provos from Kneecap whose idea of poetry is: ‘I’m a H O O D / Lowlife scum, that’s what they say about me.’ Lol, if you have to tell people you’re a ‘hood’, then you aren’t.

Glasto is now more menopausal women and rickety men than red-blooded hippies looking for a high and a shag. The average attendee age is 40-odd. Even Eavis is worried. My festival is too ‘middle-aged and middle-class’, he once lamented. Damn right it is. That’s reflected in this year’s ‘talks’. Who other than an ageing broadsheet bore wants to hear geriatric millennial Owen Jones wang on about ‘injustice at home and genocide abroad’? I can just about remember my misspent youth and not one solitary minute of it involved listening to someone in his 40s froth like a loon over a foreign war.

Gary Stevenson – financial trader turned peddler of pseudo-Marxian froth for witless rich kids on TikTok – is speaking in a session called: ‘Why are you getting poorer?’ I don’t know, maybe it’s because you just forked out £373.50 for a ticket to Glastonbury? He’ll be joined by comedian Jolyon Rubinstein. I’m sorry, but the day I listen to lectures about poverty from someone called Joylon is the day I turn to Caitlin Moran to find out what’s cool. Labour MP Clive Lewis will be holding forth on how to ‘tackle the far right’. Bro, your party literally jails people for tweets and wants to crush criticism of Islam! If you don’t mind, I think I’ll find my anti-fascism elsewhere.

The sheer wankiness of Glasto is summed up in today’s Led By Donkeys stunt. They’ve set up a rocket installation adorned with the words ‘Send Them To Mars’. It contains a list of names that these craft-beer tossers would like to expel into outer space. It includes Nigel Farage (yawn), Liz Truss (get over it), and Hulk Hogan (eh?). And there’s JK Rowling, too, perfectly proving that there is nothing more offensive to the patchy-bearded, plastic-radical bros of the English middle class than a woman with an opinion. It used to be fat comedians in smoky clubs who balked at women who spoke out of turn – now it’s posh arseholes from Stoke Newington.

The hypocrisy of Glasto is stunning. ‘Open borders!’, they cry, while surrounded by a fence that the screws at Alcatraz would have envied. ‘No to racism!’, they yelp, while obsessively denouncing the world’s only Jewish nation. ‘Be kind!’, they cry, while raging against those uppity bitches who would rather not see a cock in their lockerrooms. Listen, if you want to do something truly rock’n’roll at Glasto, wave the Israel flag. Half the bourgeois farts in the audience would instantly drop dead from shock. The other half would be sprinting back to their yurts for a hemp tea and a lie down. Genderfluid posh kids would be blubbing into their Palestine flags. Pudgy anarchists would threaten to storm the stage but then run out of energy. Every cunt with a guitar would sign an open letter to the Guardian asking: ‘HOW DID THIS HAPPEN.’ It would be glorious. Do it, someone, please.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy