I have paid a modicum of attention to British and European media regulation ever since I was removed from UK broadcasting, now and forever. Probably would have been wiser to pay attention before my removal, but, be that as it may, Ofcom decided that my conversation with Naomi Wolf about the Covid vaccines risked causing "harm" to people. And we wouldn't want that, would we?
So I was interested to learn from the weekend's Glastonbury Festival just who you can target for "harm". Back in my youth, Glasto was a big peace'n'lovefest with a somewhat tedious hippie aesthetic. But now everybody seems to enjoy it mostly for the exhortations to murder: all we are saying is give death a chance! For whom? Well, Israelis, of course: A rap duo called Bob Vylan had a catchy chant that went "Death death to the IDF!" Well, the armed forces of the Zionist Entity can look after themselves, but their set was aired live not on unwatched GB News but on Britain's most popular broadcast outlet, BBC Radio Two. The BBC is funded by a government-imposed license fee on the UK public, so it's famously impartial. Thus, in compliance with Ofcom rules on "balance", the Beeb immediately followed "Death death to the IDF!" with Al Jolson's live performance of "Death death to Ayatollah Khamenei!"
Who else can you risk "harm" to? Well, Members of Parliament, obviously. Another rap group, Kneecap (named after a favourite IRA method of social control), enchanted the peaceniks with their beloved catchphrase "The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP":
Kneecap: "The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP."
"Up Hamas, up Hezbollah"
Emily Eavis: "Everyone is welcome here."
Shame on @glastonbury and on her. pic.twitter.com/O88bQOoll7
— Heidi Bachram 🎗️ (@HeidiBachram) June 26, 2025
This is not quite as hypothetical as the "harm" of which I was convicted. In recent years, two Westminster MPs have been murdered - which, outside the Irish "Troubles", had not happened since the shooting of Spencer Perceval in1812 (see The Prisoner of Windsor). Even more recently, a significant proportion of the Ukrainian "male model" community has been arrested for firebombing Sir Keir Starmer's many properties in hopes that he might be having a quiet night in with his good lady wife. Nonetheless, the daughter of Glastonbury's founder is super-relaxed about it:
Kneecap: "The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP."
"Up Hamas, up Hezbollah"
Emily Eavis: "Everyone is welcome here."
Shame on @glastonbury and on her. pic.twitter.com/O88bQOoll7
— Heidi Bachram 🎗️ (@HeidiBachram) June 26, 2025
Also relaxed about it are His Majesty's Constabulary, who are too busy arresting Tweeters. From our pal Sammy Woodhouse:
The Met Police have confirmed they will NOT be prosecuting Kneecap after the group led chants of "Kill your MP" and "Up Hamas, up Hezbollah."
Meanwhile, Lucy Connolly gets 31 months for a tweet.
A full inquiry into ALL political prisoners must be launched.
Mrs Connolly's all but unseen Tweet was deleted by her after four hours, so she's serving eight months in prison for every hour it was at least theoretically visible to the public. By contrast:
'Helen from Wales' hailed 'hero of free speech' after live stream of Kneecap reaches 2 million
So, thanks to a single TikTok post by Helen, a vegan café owner from Swansea, two million people have seen Kneecap urging the masses to kill your local MP. Lucy Connolly languishes behind bars because her unread Tweet risked "harm" to migrants, but Helen of Wales's boffo TikketyTok can risk harm to "Tories" to its heart's content.
Anybody else you can risk harm to? Can I say "Death death to Ofcom"? Or "The only good Glastonbury Festival hippie is a dead Glastonbury Festival hippie"? Or "Kill your local High Court judge"? Or would that risk almost as much "harm" as suggesting your infants have no need of the Covid vaccines?
Meanwhile, "Two-Teir Keir" gave an extraordinary interview to a friend from The Observer, in which he reveals that, other than his war on the remnants of UK free speech, he's spent the last year getting everything wrong. It's a weird and psychologically unhealthy confessional that one could not imagine from any of his predecessors, whether the wretched David Cameron or the Marquess of Salisbury. If you want the scoop, skip the lame-arse coverage from the decaying Spectator and go to my old chum Dan Wootton. The Speccie's snoozeroo "gossip columnist" headlines his piece "Four lowlights from Starmer's Observer interview", yet fails to note the most intriguing lowlight of all.
Six weeks ago, Sir Keir gave a speech on immigration which, while being a statement of the bloody obvious two decades too late, nevertheless went further than anyone else of any consequence in British life has been prepared to go. Somewhat curiously, this speech came just a few hours after his car exploded and two houses of his were firebombed - for which three (at the time of writing) Ukrainian "male models" have been arrested. I would not wish to suggest the PM has a unique fascination with Ukrainian "male models". A fourth man has since been arrested - a "male model" from Romania. Diversity is our happy ending! The words "male model" do not appear in The Observer's account:
In the small hours of 12 May this year, there was a firebomb attack on the Starmer family home in Kentish Town. His sister-in-law, who had been renting the house since he became prime minister, was upstairs with her partner when the front door was set alight. "She happened to still be awake," Starmer says, "so she heard the noise and got the fire brigade. But it could have been a different story..."
The prime minister, who had arrived back from a three-day trip to Ukraine the night before, was due to unveil the government's new immigration policy that morning. "It's fair to say I wasn't in the best state to make a big speech," he says. "I was really, really worried. I almost said: 'I won't do the bloody press conference.' Vic [Lady Starmer] was really shaken up as, in truth, was I. It was just a case of reading the words out and getting through it somehow ..." – his voice trails off...
So Sir Keir has now disavowed the only non-bollocks thing he has ever said. He "deeply regrets" saying Britain risked becoming "an island of strangers", but he only did so, he offers in mitigation, because he was stressed out by all the firebombing from the massed ranks of fetching Slav twinks congregated on his various doorsteps. Unlike the Speccie, my chum Dan Wootton has a nose for a story:
Lucy Connolly was fast-tracked into her gaol cell in nothing flat - because that was the priority of the British state. By comparison, the men who firebombed the Prime Minister's car and houses will not appear in court until next April, because determining how a remarkable number of East European "models" with no English-language facility were sufficiently familiar with Sir Keir's homes and car to firebomb them is not a priority. Presumably, by the time April rolls around, the boyish charmers will have been persuaded to do an Axel Rudakubana and cop a plea, so that no trial need be held at all.
Say what you like about the old Fleet Street, but they would not have foregone the pleasures of a story involving the words "prime minister", "firebombings" and "quartet of male models". The silence of The Spectator is very typical. If you subscribe to James Delingpole's view that the increasingly bizarre individuals who make it to the top of the greasy pole - Starmer, Macron, Trudeau - are there because the people who really run the world have got kompromat on them (which is your basic Occam's Razor), then terror cells of Donbass rent boys blowing up the PM's motor is an obvious false-flag operation designed to discredit the general thesis...
Here's the gist of it all, courtesy of another Bob Vylan crowdpleaser:
Heard you want your country back
Ha! Shut the f*** up!
Heard you want your country back
You can't have that!
I'm Keir Starmer and I endorse this message. As I wrote twenty years ago - whoops, no, thirty sodding years ago, a counter-culture has to have a culture to counter. And in Britain and elsewhere an old establishment has merely been supplanted by a new one with lousier tunes. It's not "edgy" or "transgressive" if you're live on the BBC's biggest outlet at an event run by a bloke with a knighthood. The only true counter-culture is that identified by the pseudo-edgy ersatz-transgressive Sir Bob Vylan - the ones who want their country back. Ask Peter Lynch.
Oh, wait, you can't: He's dead. Sir Keir Starmer and Jeremy Richardson KC killed him - because, in order to prevent you "harming" them, it is necessary for them to harm you.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with my column on the neglected Western Front.
Saturday brought a new edition of my weekend music show, while Rick McGinnis's movie date offered some thoughts on the genre of the motorsport movie. On Sunday our Song of the Week was, in anticipation of Dominion Day, a Canadian classic.
If you were too busy this weekend singing "Death to My Next-Door Neighbour!" over the garden fence, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.