The only acceptable outcome after the BBC's Glastonbury horror show is Tim Davie's resignation

Telegraph

12 hours ago

In 2026, there will be no Glastonbury. Have all the BBC execs and Corbynistas from Crouch End (often the self-same insufferable people), with their recreational keffiyehs and kefir yogurt poultices to treat Chlamydia (the sexually transmitted disease not the name of their daughter), decided a year of atonement is in order for the grotesque display of anti-Semitism? I'm afraid not.
The Somerset festival has a fallow year to allow the land to recover from the righteous stampede of woke wellies and ethically-crafted Crocs. Well, the grass may grow back, but the reputation of our national broadcaster is as scorched as the earth the hordes of stoned progressives leave behind. Millions of licence-fee payers will today be asking, why should the corporation continue to call itself the British Broadcasting Corporation when it promotes anti-British values while causing pain and fear to our Jewish citizens?
'Death, death to the IDF [Israeli Defence Forces]!,' crowed rapper Bobby Vylan, real name Pascal Robinson-Foster, and the vast crowd joined in the blood-curdling, homicidal chant – a moment which the Chief Rabbi has rightly described as a ' time of national shame '.
I met Sir Ephraim Mirvis recently and he is a man of almost saintly sweetness, but the 'Be Kind' brigade at Glastonbury caused him finally to snap. 'The airing of vile Jew-hatred [… ] and the BBC's belated and mishandled response brings confidence in our national broadcaster's ability to treat anti-Semitism seriously to a new low,' the Chief Rabbi posted on X.
'It should trouble all decent people that now one need only couch their outright incitement to violence and hatred as edgy political commentary for ordinary people to not only fail to see it for what it is but also to cheer it, chant it and celebrate it.Toxic Jew-hatred is a threat to our entire society.'
After that stern rebuke from the spiritual leader of British Jews, you would have expected BBC director-general Tim Davie to tender his resignation. The situation demands nothing less. It turns out Mr Davie was present at the festival on Saturday afternoon and he could easily have ordered the livestream on BBC iPlayer to be halted. Instead, the repugnant performance at the West Holts stage was allowed to continue with a feeble on-screen warning.
To add insult to potential incitement, the Irish rap trio Kneecap, took to the stage directly after Bob Vylan (as Bobby Vylan's rap group are confusingly called) and led chants of 'Free Palestine'. Band member Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh – performing as Mo Chara – appeared in court last month charged with a terrorism offence for allegedly displaying the flag of Hezbollah, a proscribed terrorist organisation.
Could some highly paid, Bafta-winning Tristram not have looked at that charming line-up and thought, 'Hang on, this is a potentially incendiary bit of programming. Should the BBC really be giving a platform to someone accused of terrorism?' Even Sir Keir Starmer said Kneecap's appearance was 'not appropriate.' Either no one in a position of power cared, or – more likely – they were happy to tacitly endorse those performers and their rancid sentiments.
(Although the BBC didn't live-stream Kneecap, it did upload a largely unedited version of the performance to iPlayer.)
The Beeb's official apology was a joke: far too little, too late. 'The anti-Semitic sentiments expressed by Bob Vylan were utterly unacceptable and have no place on our airwaves,' it said.
'We welcome Glastonbury's condemnation of the performance. The judgment... to issue a warning on screen while streaming online was in line with our editorial guidelines […] With hindsight we should have pulled the stream during the performance. We regret this did not happen.'
Editorial guidelines? Unacceptable? Regret? As the whole stinking, Jew-hating mess is now under investigation by Avon and Somerset Police as a possible public order incident, something stronger than regret is urgently called for. Compare and contrast the leisurely reaction to Bob Vylan calling on a vast throng to murder Israelis (the IDF is not just soldiers, a majority of people in Israel are either in the IDF or are IDF reservists) with the lightning clampdown on Lucy Connolly and others who merely tweeted their anger and dismay to a small number of followers after the Southport massacre of little girls. A few days ago, Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, told the BBC it was 'disgusting' to claim the UK has a two-tier justice system.
Let me tell you what's disgusting: it's the way flagrant displays of anti-Semitism have been tolerated on the streets of our capital city for 20 months, since the October 7 murderous Hamas rampage through southern Israel, with that prejudice given daily succour in biased reporting about Israel's actions by the BBC, which has a clear problem with anti-Semitism, whatever it might say, and other news outlets. There is a straight line, I reckon, from Jeremy Bowen's sympathetic accounts of Hamas-controlled Gaza to crowds in a West Country field chanting, 'Death, death to the IDF!'
What's disgusting is ordinary Britons being criminalised for their justifiable anger at the predictably awful consequences of illegal migration as successive governments fail to 'smash the gangs'. Instead of stopping the boats the ineffectual cowards stop the mouths of their own people.
Yesterday, on the phone to her husband Ray from Peterborough prison, Lucy Connolly wondered, 'Why can pop stars at Glastonbury get away with saying stuff like that while they send me to jail for 31 months?'
We know the answer, don't we? It is fashionable in Leftist circles to cosy up to the Islamist barbarians, waving the Palestinian flag. But murmur a word against undocumented, young male 'asylum seekers' who, as Lucy Connolly told police, pose a danger to British children and you're guilty of inciting hatred against a protected characteristic.
The Jews may have suffered actual genocide in the 20th century but, as one senior police officer explained to me, they are now seen as 'white supremacists'. While this floundering, shameless Government plots an Islamophobia law in a desperate attempt to shore up its Muslim client group, it is Judaeophobia that stalks the land.
As it happens, Lucy Connolly does not believe anyone should be behind bars for 'shooting their mouth off'. Not even that vile preening idiot Vylan. Lucy is a believer in free speech, as am I, although we may shudder and feel that a line is most definitely crossed when a gathering of entranced Britons engages in Two Minutes Hate against Jews at a music festival.
The BBC should stop spending a fortune on Glastonbury, a corporate jolly attended by between 400 and 900 staff with an estimated (although unconfirmed) £7 million handed over to the Eavis family.
The hotels with buses and taxis laid on every morning, the on-site designer pods and dinky little vintage caravans bedecked in jaunty bunting, that rosary of the 'Be Kind' brigade. The mountain of free food, the staff bars, the four-wheel-drive buggies that are on tap for the broadcasting elite
A massive clique of bien-pensant backslapping, 'they greet each other as if it's their annual Club Med holiday, the entitlement is off the scale,' recalls one engineer who worked at Glasto but grew too nauseated to go back.
Why do all those smug creatives feel they have a licence (the bill footed by our licence fee) to impose their embarrassing political views on the rest of us? Not just by signalling the correct way to vote and feel, but by actively insulting people in middle and older age who are the ones that continue to pay for the BBC.
Bobby Vylan wished death on the IDF, on the men and women who have done their damndest to protect Western civilization by routing Hezbollah and Hamas and damaging Iran's nuclear capability. He also took aim at the corporation's audience whom he called 'gammons' in his execrable doggerel:
I heard you want your country back
Shut the f--- up
I heard you want your country back
Uh-uh, you can't have that
I heard you want your country back
Well s---, me too…
We the people on the street
Got the gammons in retreat
About that, at least, Bobby Vylan is correct. We do want our country back because it doesn't belong to the hateful and divisive likes of him. Part of getting our country back and banishing anti-Semitism may involve defunding the BBC, now so deeply and fatally detached from the best instincts of the British people. Many of us have supported the Beeb all our lives; the Jew haters of Glastonbury could just have changed our minds.