SARAH VINE: It’s at all times girls who get it within the neck

The idea of going to Glastonbury has never really appealed to me. I’m sure it’s great fun if you’re into clammy sleeping bags, overpriced veggie-burgers, warm beer, chemical toilets and middle-aged women in sequins, but strangely, I’m not.

But even if I was suddenly seized by an irrational urge to spend five nights in a tent slowly basting in my own juices, I don’t think I could stomach it. Not so much because of the swarms of influencers taking selfies, or the New Age charlatans hawking their wares – but because it has just become so incredibly political.

Let’s face it, Glastonbury these days isn’t really about the music (this year’s line-up was less than electrifying) – it’s just an opportunity for Left-wing luvvies to take to the stage and spout their one-sided, half-baked opinions to an audience of adoring fans too starry-eyed or too wasted to do anything other than bleat their approval like a herd of lobotomised sheep.

Exhibit A: Damon Albarn, lead singer of Britpop band Blur, going on stage and instructing the audience: ‘You have to show how you feel about Palestine. Are you pro-Palestine?’ Cue cheers and much waving of Palestinian flags.

Truly, irony is dead. Rich, white, middle-aged man tells crowd of festival-goers to cheer a nation in whose name the military wing of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups perpetrated an attack on – wait for it – festival-goers in Israel (the Supernova festival in Re’im) in which revellers were kidnapped, raped and murdered in ways so barbaric they beggar belief.

Damon Albarn, lead singer of Britpop band Blur, went on stage at Glastonbury and instructed the audience: ‘You have to show how you feel about Palestine . Are you pro-Palestine?’

A message supporting Palestinians and condeming Israel is projected onto the Woodsies stage screen at Glastonbury Festival 2024

Young girls were mutilated and defiled, the actions of their killers gleefully documented on film and circulated widely on social media.

Who can ever forget the footage of Shani Louk, her half-naked, broken body being paraded through the streets of Gaza in the back of a pick-up truck, paramilitaries resting their boots on her, civilians spitting on her as they chanted ‘Allahu Akbar’?

Any one of the beautiful young things in the audience at Glastonbury, with their sequinned make-up and tattoos, could have been Shani. Any one of them could have found themselves being mercilessly hunted down, shot, gang-raped and set on fire, as happened to those festival-goers.

And yet who do they cheer? Who do they revere? Is it the memory of these fellow festival-goers, lives cut short in such brutal, unimaginable circumstances? No. It’s Palestine, in whose name Hamas perpetrated these atrocities. Palestine, a state whose people elected Hamas as its political leaders. Guys, seriously: what the hell is wrong with you?

I am not for one moment saying that Israel has not carried out its fair share of violence in this unholy conflict, nor am I suggesting that the Palestinian people have not also suffered terribly, especially in the wake of those attacks.

But what happened on October 7 was in a category of brutality all its own, on a par with what Isis did to the Yazidi women of Syria, or what Boko Haram did to those Nigerian schoolgirls just over a decade ago. And it happened to the same sort of people currently enjoying a fun-filled weekend of music at Worthy Farm.

For Albarn to not even acknowledge the victims is, to my mind, an act of shameful cowardice. A man in his position, revered by so many, has a responsibility to use his influence wisely. Of course, by all means call for an end to the suffering in Gaza. But don’t pretend, as he did, that there are not two sides to this conflict. Don’t ignore the victims of October 7 for the simple reason that their fate does not suit his narrative or political agenda. Don’t play the audience for cheap cheers. That is not only dishonest, it’s also dangerous.

But then Albarn has form on this sort of thing. In 2010, Gorillaz – his spin-off band – became the first big British group to play in Damascus, Syria, which is of course run by President Bashir Al-Assad.

Syria under Assad is a close ally of Iran and supports a number of groups that carry out attacks against Israel. At the time, Albarn described the event as ‘a wonderful experience’. That might not be everyone’s interpretation of a trip to one of the most anti-Semitic nations on the planet, but you crack on, Damon. You do you.

But there’s something else here, a whiff of misogyny. Many of the victims of the Supernova festival were women, attacked with that oldest and vilest weapon of war, rape. Killing civilians is wicked enough; raping them before you do is an act of degradation designed to dehumanise your victim. Not to mention a war crime.

It is also an act of male violence towards women. Which brings me to Exhibit B: the week’s other colossal cockwomble, another virtue-signalling rich, white, middle-aged man fond of telling others what to think: David Tennant.

Accepting a gong at the British LGBT Awards ceremony, he took the opportunity to launch a vicious attack on Kemi Badenoch, the women and equalities minister, over trans rights. He said he wished for a world in which ‘Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist any more’.

Backstage, he went further, saying his message to trans youngsters was that ‘it’s a tiny bunch of whinging little f***ers that are on the wrong side of history and they’ll all go away soon’. 

He’s referring, of course, to what trans activists demonise as Terfs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), that is to say, any woman who expresses even the slightest bat-squeak of concern about male-bodied individuals competing in female sports, or sharing changing rooms in schools, or serving time in women’s prisons, or having access to women-only spaces or even just the way that, as biological women, we are expected to refer to ourselves as ‘cis’ (a horrible, ugly word).

It takes a true misogynist to describe women concerned about the rights of other women as ‘whinging little f***ers’. I imagine much the same was said in the gentlemen’s clubs of Mayfair at the turn of the last century about the likes of Emmeline Pankhurst in her campaign for women’s suffrage. Woman, know thy place.

Truth is, whether in the name of war or in the name of woke, it’s always women who get it in the neck. It’s our rights, our bodies, our dignity that’s expendable.

That is the message Albarn is sending by failing to acknowledge the victims of October 7 while glorifying Israel’s enemies; that is the message Tennant sends when he calls women like Badenoch whinging little f***ers and wishes they would disappear.

I don’t care what you call me, I’m not going to ‘go away’. And neither is Badenoch, nor J K Rowling, nor Sharron Davies.

If on Thursday this country elects a man who has not yet expressed a clear view on whether women can have penises, we ‘whinging little f***ers’ will have our work cut out. It’s going to take more than an arrogant, entitled man like Tennant to stop us.