You can’t miss the fact at Glastonbury that there is an election coming. For one, there is a lot of “get the vote out” messaging. A large black box saying: “Use your superpower: vote,” funded by Dale Vince, the founder of the green electricity firm Ecotricity and a Labour party donor, sits in a field. Yellow stickers on tables read: “Crash the party, vote.” One archway is more overt in its message: “Vote out to help out.” Damon Albarn made a surprise appearance to perform with the Bombay Bicycle Club on Friday, enjoining the audience midway through the set to talk about “the importance of voting this week”.
A couple of signs make oblique reference to the fact that people don’t feel that enthusiastic about the democratic offer: “Politics isn’t about them. It’s about YOU,” reads a sign on one booth. However, Albarn was more explicit: “I don’t blame you for being ambivalent,” he said. “But it’s still really important … maybe it’s time we stopped putting octogenarians in charge of the world?” Some here may have missed the Biden and Trump debate that struck fear into the hearts of progressives everywhere. But there is no question that Biden is an octogenarian – and Trump is not far behind him.
“Politically charged” is the phrase many newspapers have used about this year’s festival, but electric current is way too direct to work as a metaphor for the mood at Glastonbury, which is deeply political yet disconnected from politics, profoundly civic but plagued with self-doubt, and shifts between hopeless and hopeful with the unbiddable randomness of clouds passing before the sun. In fact, Ed Gillett, the author of the book Party Lines, who is here to appear on a panel about the radical roots of rave, explains that there is nothing random about it: “Everything’s fucked and everyone knows that everything’s fucked. That brings in a background hum of grimness. But that can make the moments of connectedness much more meaningful.”
That grimness is real – not just a sense that the country and the world are galloping towards a bleak future, but also a widespread feeling that progressive values have been obliterated. Almost everyone I speak to here, in every age group, says a variation of “I know I’m in a bubble” or “I know this is an echo chamber”, as if they have been preached to about their irrelevance for so long that they have internalised it.
The cost of a ticket – now £360 – is often deployed by commentators to dismiss this crowd as spoilt little rich kids whenever they say anything difficult. But that just reflects how the political establishment treats the young (well, the under-40s): everything (education, housing, food) is heinously expensive; if you can afford it, yuck, how entitled.
There is also a massive – I don’t want to use the word “trauma”, so let’s go with “hangover” – from Glastonburys of the recent past. Lisa Jackson, 42, lives in the newly created Glastonbury and Somerton constituency. She remembers 2016, when the Brexit referendum fell on the Thursday of the festival. “We all left the site to go out and vote thinking: ‘This is going to be fine.’ Then it was pure shock.” People in tents could hear each other crying. Emma, 38, was here in 2017. “I was here singing for Jeremy Corbyn, feeling that sense of hope in the air.” This time around, she will vote Green.
Yet the connectedness is also real. Before PJ Harvey’s set on Friday, the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović appeared, dressed in white, as a peace sign. She referenced no particular war, simply noting: “The world is in a really shitty place. There are wars, hunger, protest, killing, violence. Here, we try to do something different: how to be in the present, here and now, and how we can actually all together give unconditional love to each other.” She called for a seven-minute silence, everyone with a hand on someone else’s shoulder. The silence and stillness she achieved was remarkable.
An unassuming bit of graffiti at the Other stage, written in silver on a green gate, reads: “In no particular order, free Palestine, fuck the Tories, up the reds.” If anything could distill the vibe at Glastonbury this year, this would be it. Apart from one revolutionary communist – Dominic, 33, who intends to spoil his ballot – everyone I speak to says they are planning to vote, but many are still undecided.
Jago, 23, whose animating issue is the climate crisis, says politicians “keep on just chatting breeze”. Becky, 49, from Midsomer Norton in Somerset, says: “Everybody’s hopeful that things are going to change, but it feels a bit like we’ll just have different people doing the same policies.”
The people who are going to vote Labour have none of the pollsters’ confidence in a landslide result. “I feel like they’re going to get in, but it might not be enough,” says Alice Bowen, 43. Dan, 24, will vote Green because he is in Brighton Pavilion, but hopes for a Labour government. The right would probably frame this as confusion or absurdity, hoping for an end to 14 years of Conservatives, but not intending to vote Labour. But voting isn’t football: it’s possible not to want either team to win, if you are looking at the world around you and see the game of politics as only simplifying or distorting it.
Sila Olcay, 24, is wearing a union flag T-shirt with “RISHI” splashed across it, sartorial sarcasm that not everybody here gets. “To me, it felt very obvious,” she says. “But the current state of Labour is not what I want, either. Palestine has completely changed my view.” There is one other person wearing the flag: Mike, a publican from Devon, who, for the first time in his 59 years, isn’t voting Conservative: “It’s the childishness, no positive direction, making promises that just could not be fulfilled.” He won’t tell me how he will vote instead.
Kara, 38, is scornful about the Tories’ latest iteration. “You get the impression that people who are fairly well off are wishing for them to get in. They think because they’re on 80 grand the Conservatives are on their side. When will people realise they don’t care about you unless you’re on a million plus?” Several artists try to start up anti-Tory chants, but the results are mixed. The agit-nu-punk trio Lambrini Girls get a fair call-and-response, but later the DJs Optimo try to start a chant of: “Fuck the Tories,” and it falls flat.
The punk band Idles went with a chant of “Fuck the king”, but that was more of a statement than a singalong. Ascribing a fixed agenda to the wisdom of crowds is a mug’s game, but there is a generalised suspicion of slogans and statements that are too easy. Sitting underneath a sign that reads: “Optimism is a political act,” Ryan, 29, says: “I don’t know what a statement like that is supposed to mean. It’s vapid.”
“The best barometer of Glastonbury is the flags,” says Rosie Rogers, who has programmed the Leftfield discussion tent for several years. A few are overtly party political: “Rishi’s leaving drinks,” reads one; “My father was a toolmaker,” reads another. One does a Coldplay and election reference with: “Sky of Starms,” featuring multiple images of the Labour leader’s head; elsewhere, one says simply: “End Shit Governments.”
But it is the Palestinian flag that dominates this year. “That’s the issue of the day,” says Ben Beach from London. “Along with a general weariness about how utterly uninspiring Starmer’s Labour is.” Solidarity with Gaza comes from performers, too, in ways subtle and overt. Members of LCD Soundsystem have the green, white and red flag painted as their eye makeup; the Irish band Kneecap unfurl a flag on stage and Charlotte Church sings: “Free Palestine.”
The Palestinian band 47Soul played on Saturday to a rapt audience and there is a moving panel event, featuring the journalist Ahmed Alnaouq, who has lost a staggering number of his family members in the bombardments, and Em Hilton from Na’Amod, an organisation of British Jews protesting against Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Support for refugees comes out in inventive, chilling ways. Banksy floated an inflatable small boat across the crowd at Idles; at Terminal 1, next to Carhenge – a post-apocalyptic monument to our car-crash political culture – you have to answer a question from the Life in the UK citizenship test, read out by actors, to get in. It is playfully, deadly serious. As Roisin, 30, says: “It’s nice to know you’re in a world of people who feel the same way about things.”
“Glastonbury is a forgetting place,” says one steward who doesn’t give her name. It’s where you stop thinking about your problems, the problems of the world, about who created them and why. Sometimes, as in 2016, reality just forces its way in. Other times – 2017 – the escapism finds a real-life hero. This year, Gillett says, “it’s very difficult to find things to believe in. So that makes it even more important to create things for ourselves.” Togetherness and hedonism are so interconnected here that what feels like meeting the political moment one minute feels like running away from it the next. Whatever it is, this is not apathy.
In the world outside the festival, disaffected, younger and left-leaning voters are in the spotlight. Labour knows that if victory feels like a done deal, these voters may go green or independent or even abstain. The message within the festival fences is clear: voting is their “superpower”. The problem is: they are not really buying it.
