The panic at Glastonbury over illegal entrants and “over-crowding” exposes the middle-class Left’s hypocrisy on immigration, says Michael Deacon in the Telegraph.
The band Idles, for example, called Nigel Farage “a fascist”, and sang a song in praise of mass immigration (“My blood brother is an immigrant, a beautiful immigrant/ My blood brother’s Freddie Mercury/ A Nigerian mother of three”) while the crowd proudly held aloft a rubber dinghy filled with dummies dressed to look like Channel-crossing asylum seekers.
This display of compassion was of course deeply moving. Which is why I was surprised to read, on the final evening, that the festival had been “thrown into chaos” by people entering the site illegally, after buying fake wristbands or swarming over the security fence. Apparently, this caused fans to “panic” about the resultant “overcrowding”.
But hang on a minute. Surely those fans should have welcomed the new arrivals with open arms.
After all, anyone willing to risk their life climbing a 13ft fence in order to see Coldplay is clearly desperate. We should be showing these poor people compassion, rather than furiously calling for them to be arrested and sent back where they came from.
No doubt some regulars will say, “But these numbers are unsustainable. It’s making life a misery for people who are already here. Also, we know nothing about all these people who are flooding in illegally – they could be dangerous criminals.”
Quite plainly, though, anyone who spouts this hateful, far-Right rhetoric is a fascist. The only way to defeat the gangs selling fake wristbands is to provide a safe, legal route into the festival. And that means removing the fence, so anyone can walk straight in.
In fact, the people who have bought tickets should be made to pay out of their own pockets to feed and accommodate all the people who got in without tickets. It’s only fair.
Worth reading in full.
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