At Glastonbury, I saw what England's silent majority really looks like. Why aren't politicians listening?

The Guardian

2 days ago

It was a hot day in July, but the headlines felt as if they could have come from any day over the last six months. While the dependably shrill TV channel GB News asked its viewers whether negotiations with France 'could signal a shift towards closer ties with the EU', Keir Starmer and his colleagues were in final talks about so-called small boats. Before he got to the diplomatic details, the BBC's Nick Robinson boiled down the views of millions of Britons to the deathless cliche: 'Why don't we just send them back to where they've come from?'
Kemi Badenoch was about to make a speech about restricting non-British nationals' access to disability and sickness benefits – another instalment, it seemed, of her toxic quest to divide people into 'makers' and 'takers'. Terrifyingly, Nigel Farage's Reform UK colleagues were talking about focusing their belief in Elon Musk-style budget-cutting on children with disabilities. In the searing heat, everything felt as if it was fusing together to form the usual picture – of a stroppy little island, full of mistrust and loathing, and an angry chunk of the electorate now so huge that politicians of all parties must not just respect its collective wishes, but implement them in full.
Ten days earlier – and bear with me here – I had spent three days in a rather different political atmosphere, among the multitudes at Glastonbury. Even before all that controversy had erupted over the Irish rappers Kneecap and the hitherto-obscure duo Bob Vylan, the buildup to the festival had already seen a burst of hostile commentary about Glastonbury's political side. 'Could we please drop the nonsense that it is countercultural, at the bleeding edge of interesting, against-the-grain, perhaps even revolutionary, sentiment?' asked one rather silly piece in the Telegraph. To which the correct and rather complicated response would be yes; with notable exceptions – from the ubiquity of Palestinian flags, through the debates and discussions in the festival's Left Field, to everything that happens in the area called Green Futures. But here's the thing: even if you largely accept that Glasto has long become an ordinary part of the cultural mainstream, that's actually what makes it so interesting.
We are long past the point where the crowds there represent an avowedly radical subculture, which was the thrilling sense I got when I first went there (in 1990, which was a very long time ago indeed). Now, the people who go – from hard-partying twentysomethings barely cognisant of the need for a tent, to festival veterans in sensible outdoor gear who carefully plan each day's bands and go home to jobs in the public sector – are a microcosm of a vast and ever-growing part of the UK population, which is why so many people try to get tickets, and so many thousands watch it on TV. We are talking, essentially, about the Britain – or, more specifically, England – that will never, ever belong to Farage, and the mixture of kindness, ease with modernity and fuzzy liberalism that defines it.
There is a kind of progressive cringe that gets in the way of acknowledging this fact. But while the media class focuses almost exclusively on a bundle of cliches about 'hero voters' in 'red wall' seats, this new England now sits at the heart of our politics. It explains why the Conservative presence in the commuter-belt home counties is shrinking fast, and the list of seats represented by the Lib Dems includes scores of traditional Tory heartlands – something Badenoch does not seem even dimly aware of. For Labour, millions of liberal, left-ish voters define a story of rising dismay about Starmer's government, and the fact that it is losing more support to the Lib Dems and Greens than it is to Reform UK. The Green party now has MPs in rural Herefordshire and ruralEast Anglia, and record-breaking numbers of councillors.
Much as opinion polling remains a somewhat dismal and unreliable science, there are plenty of issue-specific statistics that paint the same picture. Even if they are presented as a way of somehow getting people into work, 40% of us are against new limitations on disability benefits. Despite politicians' reluctance to say so, 45% of British adults think Israel's actions in Gaza are genocidal. Forty-nine percent of people 'strongly support' a wealth tax. Contrary to the idea that everyone outside London, Manchester and Bristol has an essentially Farage-ist view of human movement, 45% of us think that immigration into the UK should either increase or stay the same. Sixty-one percent of people either strongly or 'somewhat' support the government's net zero target, with only 12% ticking the 'strongly oppose' box.
Despite Reform UK's apparent monopoly on explanations for our fragmenting party system, all this is central to why everything is in such a massive state of flux. The Lib Dems are now almost neck and neck with the Tories in the polls. The Greens are now steady, on about 10% – a figure that would surely rocket upwards if they improved their dire PR skills. Moreover, adding these parties' share of support with Labour's usually gets you close to 50%, which only highlights how misplaced the popular idea of a seethingly reactionary country irrevocably on the path to a Reform UK government really is.
As orthodox politics buckles and fragments, it feels as if, sooner or later, something will have to give. The latest manifestation of the strain Westminster orthodoxy is under is the new leftwing force being fitfully formed by Jeremy Corbyn and the former Labour MP, Zarah Sultana; but I am not sure it will quite meet the moment. If we were in some alternative universe where our party system mapped on to people's views, a modern party of the liberal left would not be hard to envisage. Its style of politics might fall somewhere between Ed Davey and the former Green leader Caroline Lucas.
Though it might not be radical enough for some people's tastes (mine included, possibly) it would speak clearly about the climate emergency, be proudly and loudly European and be carefully redistributionist. Crucially, it would spurn the politics of resentment and scapegoating, and confidently fight Farage – and, for that matter, Reform-ish Tories such as Robert Jenrick – on territory Labour refuses to go near: the modern right's views about the UK and its history, who is and isn't British, and all the rest.
This would, perhaps, be the kind of party many people – not least in the Guardian – are always willing the Labour party to become, even though that never seems to happen. As much as any political force could, it would speak for millions who now see the political centre being dragged further and further away from them, and quietly recoil. I see this new England every year at Worthy Farm in Somerset. Most importantly, it reveals itself whenever I visit the relevant swaths of the country. When will it finally be given its proper voice?
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
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