Bob Vylan must be free to be vile

It is all so depressingly predictable. Few can fail to have been disturbed by those scenes at Glastonbury at the weekend, when punk-rap duo Bob Vylan launched into a chant of ‘Death, death to the IDF’ and an enraptured, ecstasy-pickled crowd joined in. Tragically, the justifiable public outrage at this sickening display of Jew hatred has now given way to unjustifiable calls for censorship and prosecutions.

Avon and Somerset Police confirmed on Saturday that they are investigating evidence to see if a criminal offence was committed during Bob Vylan’s set. The Conservative Party has demanded arrests and stiff prison sentences. Bob Vylan frontman, real name Pascal Robinson-Foster, should be ‘arrested and prosecuted immediately’, according to shadow home secretary Chris Philp. Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice has also chimed in to call for Robinson-Foster’s imprisonment.

It doesn’t end there. Philp has even accused the BBC of breaking the law by livestreaming Bob Vylan’s Glasto set. Yesterday, on X, he told the police to ‘urgently investigate and prosecute’ the Beeb for ‘transmitting hateful material’.

Speaking to the Telegraph, both Philp and Tice back up their demands by citing the case of Lucy Connolly, the childminder and wife of a Conservative councillor who was jailed for 31 months for a vile tweet amid last year’s Southport riots. ‘What [Robinson-Foster] did was far worse than what Lucy Connolly did’, says Tice. ‘His chanting was clearly anti-Semitic, it was clearly racist, it was an incitement to violence.’ Philp argues that a failure to arrest Robinson-Foster for hate speech ‘would be a clear example of two-tier justice under Sir Keir Starmer and his attorney general, Lord Hermer’.

Of course it would be absurd to pretend there is no two-tier justice when it comes to enforcing hate-speech laws. The police’s enthusiasm for smashing down the doors of so-called hate speakers seems to dry up whenever that hatred is directed at Jews. Judges similarly feel moved to show clemency when faced with a defendant who has expressed support for a rabidly anti-Semitic, genocidal terror army. But the answer to this outrageous policing bias is not to demand the censorship be doled out more consistently. It is to demand an end to the relentless policing of speech in the first place. We need to defend the freedom of Lucy Connolly and the Bob Vylan frontman.

After all, free speech is meaningless if it does not include the right to say things that people consider bigoted, offensive and inflammatory – all of which undoubtedly apply to Bob Vylan’s grotesque chant. The proper response to hatred is not to arrest people for it, but to challenge it. Slapping some handcuffs on a rapper and some BBC producers will do nothing to combat the vile anti-Semitism that is becoming disturbingly normalised in the West. All it will do is undermine free speech for all of us, giving the green light to the police to carry on dictating what we can and can’t say.

The BBC certainly has questions to answer. Allowing its livestream of Bob Vylan to continue, live and unedited, after those blood-curdling chants is a staggering failure of editorial judgement. Had Robinson-Foster simply began effing and blinding for an extended period, they would have surely cut the feed, given the time of day it was being livestreamed. But it seems his Jew-killing slogans are perfectly acceptable.

By all means, let’s condemn Bob Vylan’s grim excuse for a musical act, but we must uphold their right to be vile.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.