Morning Star Editorial: Glastonbury furore shows how fast our freedoms are being dismantled
Bob Vylan performing on the West Holts Stage, during the Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm in Somerset, June 28, 2025ARE concessions to coax MPs into voting for cruel social security cuts a sign that the Starmer government is listening and learning?
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The Prime Minister demands an explanation from the public broadcaster for failing to suppress footage of crowds chanting in solidarity with Palestine at a music festival. The organisers of a peaceful demonstration in January are up in court next week for alleged breaches of police restrictions by laying flowers in memory of Gaza’s dead children in the road. The police are reviewing footage of the Glastonbury crowds, trying to sniff out behaviour they can prosecute someone for.
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The BBC, falling over itself to make amends for failing to meet Starmer’s censorship preferences, smears the singer Bobby Vylan, accusing him of “anti-semitic sentiments” for leading chants of “Death to the IDF” (Israel Defence Forces).
But to denounce an army is not to denounce a race. And given serving IDF soldiers revealed in the Israeli press just last week that the IDF is actually ordering its troops to fire into unarmed crowds of Palestinians gathering to collect food from its tightly controlled aid centres — a sick “hunger games” scenario in which over 500 Palestinians have already been gunned down — it’s understandable that feelings against this genocidal military are running high. Anyone who thinks Vylan’s chants are more “appalling” (the PM’s term) than the government’s continuing supply of arms and intelligence to facilitate mass murder has their priorities wrong.
The gravity of Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s proposed Palestine Action ban cannot be overestimated. To try to head off any potential opposition by MPs, she has lumped the direct-action group with two neonazi formations, the Maniac Murder Cult and the Russian Imperial Movement, in a single banning order.
To label a group terrorist for splashing paint on military aircraft is an outrage, one that as others have noted would define as terrorist some of Britain’s best known historical protest movements, from the Greenham Common women to the Suffragettes.
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