The former leader of Ireland says he assumed Keir Starmer was joking when he first heard that the UK Prime Minister had expressed an opinion on Glastonbury’s booking policies. Starmer told The Sun in no uncertain terms this weekend that, as far as he’s concerned, Kneecap should not be playing the festival this coming Saturday.
Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s Taoiseach from 2017 to 2020, and again from 2022 to 2024, wrote on social media “I really thought this was some sort of gag”. While conceding that, as an ex-political leader, his views on these things no longer “count for much”, he added, “It’s the role of artists to be avant-garde, inappropriate, challenging, disruptive - from James Joyce to Sex Pistols and Playboy”.
There have been plenty of calls for Kneecap’s performance at Glastonbury, and at other festivals, to be axed, ever since the Irish rap trio expressed strongly pro-Palestine and anti-Israel opinions during their set at this year’s Coachella festival.
Those calls have only increased ever since footage emerged of Kneecap member Mo Chara seeming to express support for the proscribed terrorist group Hezbollah at a London show last year, resulting in him facing a terror charge.
However, the group have insisted they don’t in fact support Hezbollah, while plenty of people have commended Kneecap for using their platform to promote the Palestinian cause, with the group’s supporters adamant that festivals cancelling their performances is an unacceptable attack on free speech.
For reasons that aren’t particularly clear to anyone, Starmer chose to enter this debate on one side. Asked by The Sun whether he thought Kneecap should be playing Glastonbury, he said, “No, I don’t and I think we need to come down really clearly on this”.
Adding that he doesn't want to say too much because of the criminal case against Mo Chara, he nevertheless concluded that Kneecap playing Glastonbury was “not appropriate”.
Kneecap themselves have also responded to the PM’s intervention, alluding to the UK government’s support of Israel. “You know what’s ‘not appropriate’ Keir?! Arming a fucking genocide”, they wrote on social media, adding for good measure, “Fuck The Sun”.
Conservative leader and long-time Kneecap critic Kemi Badenoch has also been commenting on the group’s Glastonbury set, though she’s mainly using it to do some BBC bashing, because the group are due to play one of the festival’s stages that the BBC livestreams.
“The BBC should not be showing Kneecap propaganda”, she wrote on X. “One Kneecap band member is currently on bail, charged under the Terrorism Act. As a publicly funded platform, the BBC should not be rewarding extremism”.