Glastonbury chanters or the Southport hate-tweeter – throw the book at one, you must throw it at them all
If so, they could put the two nasty idiots from Bob Vylan in it. Obviously all of Kneecap, too. Maybe those guys would have their cell on the same landing as Lucy Connolly, the woman who was imprisoned for two years and seven months for a repulsive tweet in the wake of the Southport child killings. They could be joined by whoever at the BBC didn't pull the Glastonbury live stream on Saturday after Bob Vylan started their repulsive chants, given that Conservative frontbencher Chris Philp is now officially calling for the corporation to be 'urgently' investigated. I see Chris is also calling for the BBC to be prosecuted – so I guess he's already done the police investigation for them, and all at the same time as absolutely aceing his brief as shadow home secretary for where-are-they-now political outfit the Conservative party.
In terms of Spewing Hate Into The Nation's Living RoomsTM, it must be said that the footage of Bob Vylan's offending set is still embedded into multiple stories on the MailOnline website, all containing an exhortation to 'watch the full video'. Should whoever is leaving the videos up on MailOnline also be investigated and prosecuted? Perhaps Chris Philp could adjudicate. Either way, let's keep a cell or five for them in the special new prison. After all, why on earth shouldn't we imprison a few journalists, too? In for a penny, and so on.
Needless to say, embattled prime minister Keir Starmer has made time to have plenty of official views not just on the behaviour of the two bands, but on any future decisions to book them. If all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail – and if your big job before politics was being director of public prosecutions, then I'm sure everything looks like a prosecutable offence.
It certainly did to the prime minister after last summer's riots in the wake of the Southport murders, when Starmer seemed to relish the response happening the best way he knew how: by rushing it through the courts. Connolly was one of those prosecuted, in her case for a manifestly revolting and racist but also clearly tossed-off post responding to a false rumour the killer was an asylum seeker, saying people could set fire to asylum hotels 'for all I care'. She admitted inciting racial hatred in court, but has since become something of a cause celebre for the fact that she is a mother with an otherwise clean record (and one who had lost a young child herself), and that she has got a harsher sentence for this tweet that she later deleted than some convicted rapists.
I wrote in the immediate wake of the riots that it was clear that something big had happened in the UK – though it wasn't yet precisely clear what. Unfortunately, the prime minister seemed to think it was fairly simple. 'Let me also say to large social media companies and those who run them,' he said, albeit to some reporters instead, 'violent disorder clearly whipped up online: that is also a crime. It's happening on your premises, and the law must be upheld everywhere.' Sadiq Khan seemed to think it was something to do with the Online Safety Act not being 'fit for purpose'.
In more successful hot takes, it was also the moment that Elon Musk test-drove his epithet 'two-tier Keir'. That one has stuck, and it will stick even harder if, for example, sublebrity band Bob Vylan don't get the book thrown at them in the same way that no-mark Lucy Connolly did. To be clear, I don't think any of the aforementioned lot ought to be in prison, however vile and unacceptable their behaviour was. But if you don't deal with them in pretty much the same way, then people are going to be talking far more loudly about two-tier justice again.
This type of talk has already reached all the way into the Oval Office where, in February, vice-president JD Vance suggested to Starmer that the UK had a free speech problem. You might have seen that Bob Vylan have just promptly had their US visas revoked for what the deputy secretary of state called 'their hateful tirade'. But we can't expect consistency from the Trump administration.
What we expect of our own country is infinitely more important. I used to think masses of legislation around what horrible things people could or couldn't say was a niche-application civilisational advance, but I have changed my view, and now fear we are sleepwalking towards a society where half the people will think certain incarcerated miscreants are political prisoners, and the other half will think a different bunch of incarcerated miscreants are political prisoners. I am very much for living in a country where we don't think we have political prisoners at all. Getting there isn't simple – but stopping travelling in the wrong direction would be a good start.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
This article's URL was amended shortly after publication to remove draft text that was included in error.
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