Mick Hartley

Howard Jacobson, at UnHerd, on Glastonbury:

It’s the agglomeration that should worry us more than whether or not the BBC should have pulled the plug or the police should take action. How do you take action against however many thousands were complicit — not by their silence but by their enthusiastic collaboration in Bob Vylan’s call for death to Israeli soldiers? And it’s those complicit thousands we should worry about. Is there any expression of hate they wouldn’t accede to once the festival madness is upon them?

In their submission to the authority of the performer on the stage, in their arm waving and obedient chanting, are they not reminiscent of the crowds that filled marching squares and beer halls not that many years ago? I say no more than “reminiscent”. I don’t claim that Glastonbury is Munich. And I don’t even say that what crowds will sing about euphorically one day, they will put into murderous effect the next. But music and crowds are a lethal mix, carrying us away, taking us out of our shivering individual selves into the warm arms of comrades who feel and believe as we do. Sacha Baron Cohen’s endearingly racist Borat famously persuaded a group of drinkers in an Arizona bar to join him in singing “Throw the Jews down the well”. For all the bemused discomfort some of the drinkers clearly felt, they were unable to resist Borat’s appeal. Who wants to be a party pooper? History teaches that the impulse toward individuation was a long time coming; it further teaches that it takes no time at all for that impulse to go into reverse.

Jacobson draws some comfort from the theatre, where the power of art – we hope – overrides the power of the crowd.

In fact, there is a marvellous play on in London at present — Giant, in which the Jew-obsessed children’s writer Roald Dahl is given enough rope to hang himself 10 times over and manages it even more than that without trying. He delivers far more bitter diatribes against Israel than Bob Vylan and Kneecap manage because he has more words. What makes the play art as opposed to propaganda is its dramatic form, questioning, testing, playing this off against that, weighing all that’s said in the light of the speakers’ psychic compulsion to say it. When Dahl’s self-destruction reaches its apotheosis in a riff of violent Jew mania that makes the Glastonbury lot sound like kindergarten name-callers, the audience audibly gasps. Gasps.

I take great comfort from that gasp. Somewhere, what is shocking still shocks. Somewhere, the individual heart still refuses the blandishments of the mob. Unfortunately, terrifyingly, that somewhere isn’t Glastonbury.

Yes, but the theatre is not always such a beacon of the individual conscience against the power of the mob. Take for instance Caryl Churchill's deeply unpleasant little diatribe Seven Jewish Children, which Jacobson himself so eloquently demolished….