The painful, bourgeois conformism of Banksy

I was reminded of my favourite Banksy story this morning.

King Robbo – the late pioneer of the UK graffiti scene, hailing from the council estates of north London – would often tell it. Apparently, Robbo was once introduced to some young, aspiring graffiti artists in a pub in Old Street. Most were keen to pay homage to him.

But then one upstart from Bristol cockily pretended to have never heard of him. Robbo gave him a slap. ‘You won’t forget me now, will ya?’, he recounted to a Channel 4 documentary crew in 2011. ‘And with that, he picked up his glasses and he run off.’

It was Banksy. Who has been slapping the public in the face ever since.

Banksy’s latest piece of ‘street art’ appeared at the Royal Courts of Justice yesterday. It depicts a bloodied protester, placard in hand, being attacked by a judge wielding a gavel, glaring from under his wig.

It was discovered just days after hundreds of activists were arrested in London for holding up placards saying ‘I support Palestine Action’, in solidarity with the anti-Israel activist group of the same name that was recently proscribed by the government – making even expressing support for Palestine Action a serious criminal offence.

You can see why Banksy would want to row in behind his fellow vandals, who were banned after they did £7million worth of damage to an RAF base. (Though I note he didn’t have the balls to write ‘I support Palestine Action’ on the protester’s placard, and thus risk arrest himself.)

This isn’t the first time Banksy has blundered, with all the subtlety of a sixth-former, into the Middle East’s most intractable conflict, either. He has even inflicted his Instagram-friendly stencil work on the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank – as if they haven’t suffered enough.

Plus, anyone can see that the clampdown on Palestine Action fans is insanely authoritarian – even if you think, as we at spiked do, that its activists are bigoted scum. (On top of that RAF base, they also smashed the windows of a Jewish business in north London, falsely claiming it was linked to an Israeli arms manufacturer.)

Still, it’s fascinating that Banksy has only now noticed that the British state has become outrageously illiberal when it comes to speech and protest, isn’t it? There wasn’t a peep from this alleged outlaw with a spraycan when thousands of people were being locked up over spicy social-media posts, or protests were banned entirely during lockdown.

Indeed, he spent 2020 spraying pieces inside Tube trains, encouraging people to wear masks. Once upon a time, working-class graffiti writers covered the trains in their name to boost their street cred and be seen. Nowadays, millionaire ‘street artists’ cover the trains in stencilled rats using masks as parachutes to support official public-health advice.

You’ve got to hand it to him. Banksy has made a fortune by reflecting the cultural elites’ biases back to them and passing it off as edgy. He mourns Brexit, presents working-class voters as bigoted vermin, weeps for the planet, then reassures the sort of people who buy coffee-table books that they are the rebellious, counter-cultural ones.

He’s the artist for bourgeois bores who think they’re railing against the system, but are actually just disgusted by ordinary people. Who think they are the ones being silenced and marginalised, despite their considerable cultural clout and comfortable lives. Who think they are slapping the toffs, but are actually just slapping the plebs.

Perhaps Robbo had the measure of him all along.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater