Glastonbury and Reform’s middle class problem

You can compost your veg peelings, own a Le Creuset pot and still think mass immigration needs to be brought under control

Summertime is here, and with it, the official start of the silly season. Parliament has less than three weeks to go before they head off for yet another holiday, but that won’t stop a certain ball-achingly tedious discourse from doing the rounds on X for the umpteenth time.

After four years of consistently awful weather (don’t believe me? Watch the last few series of Clarkson’s Farm), we’re finally having a glorious summer — so of course, people are complaining about it. The Met Office is reportedly investing in cutting-edge carbon nanotech to find a suitably black shade for its temperature maps once the mercury tips above 25°C in July. No doubt ‘a new record will be smashed’ somewhere inside the turbine of a 777ER that just happens to have a thermometer jammed in it.

And of course, no British summer would be complete without the annual Glastonbury commentary. This year has been no exception, with Bob ‘Daddy Issues’ Vylan generating the requisite controversy to rapturous applause — to the predictable ire of The Telegraph and the Spiked!-adjacent commentariat. In fact, Spiked! editor Tom Slater’s article on Glastonbury is so unhinged that for the first time I’m grateful for Britain’s restrictive firearms laws.

Much of the commentary on Glastonbury has focused on free speech issues — whether or not such statements should be prosecuted (obviously they shouldn’t) and whether or not the law is being applied evenly (obviously it is not). Fortunately, more and more people on the Right — including, tentatively Reform UK — have decided to take up the free speech absolutist position supported by this publication, rather than playing games and trying to get their opponents prosecuted, a tactic that will inevitably backfire. But here, I intend to make a somewhat different point.

For all the anger, the actual targets of attack were the usual ones: white, middle-class people enjoying themselves. Slater thundered, ‘The Gail’s crowd, the Glastonbury goers, have imbibed the poison [Jew hate] fully now.’ Meanwhile, his former boss, Brendan O’Neill — sounding like a Tatecel — raged at ‘…Dalston’s white girls dangerously bereft of political guidance.’ He even suggested that the truly subversive act would be to wave an Israel flag so that ‘…genderfluid posh kids would be blubbing into their Palestine flags.’

The whole discourse around anti-Semitism is both tedious and dishonest. Suffice to say, middle-class anti-Zionist highlighter girls are, as a rule, not anti-Semitic. Hettie’s Instagram story about ‘Gaza being soooo grim and you should Free Palestine’ — and yes, I’m being misogynistic here, not classist — even if foolish, isn’t exactly pipelined by the writings of Goebbels. If there is a generalised problem with anti-Semitism in this country, it stems almost entirely from within the Muslim population, with the occasional boomer anti-Zionist going too deep down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole. Guess what doesn’t get mentioned in the articles.

Spiked! are a bunch of grifting media whores. Remember that they were in favour of open borders just a few years ago, and still support abortion up to birth — something they’re surprisingly effective at hiding from their largely bovine but trusting audience. They themselves, while interesting (they’re basically a cult), aren’t particularly important. But like other safe, centre-right types, they are emblematic in how they focus obsessively on someone’s middle-classness as a vector of attack.

Aside from being a sort of ‘miasma of learned responses’, I don’t need to tell you how counterproductive this is. On the one hand, it’s anti-aspirational. I personally love Reform UK’s slightly chintzy, seaside-town aesthetic, but in fact, the party has been, quite successfully, a broad church — attracting people from across backgrounds and social classes. This much should be obvious from the heterogeneity of the places where Reform has found success: they won a landslide majority in this year’s local elections in both County Durham and Kent. In terms of personnel, Lee Anderson is a former coal miner, but Farage went to Dulwich, and ex-Reformer Lowe went to Radley. Reform has a rightful Thatcherite pedigree, and while there have been some worrying forays into post-liberalism-adjacent policy — e.g., raising personal allowance thresholds at great expense, abolishing the two-child benefit cap, and redistributing all the profits from the proposed Britannia Card scheme to the poorest tenth of wage-earners — at its heart it remains a proudly middle-class, aspirational party.

The other issue is that this Pavlovian hostility to anything ‘middle class’ is a reflex that’s likely to alienate many people who are, for example, genuinely concerned about immigration and integration, but who feel that they need to sneak off to Herne Hill Velodrome at the weekend like it’s a secret gay lover. One of the main reasons the Right has made gains in recent years is that more people — yes, including middle-class civil servants and the like — are waking up to the fact that the current settlement is unsustainable. Figuring out who actually occupies social housing and how much it costs, for instance, requires hours of number-crunching. Realistically, Bob the Sparky isn’t going to do that. If you’re constantly sperging out about ‘posh people’ every fifth tweet, you’re probably not going to bring Nicholas (30 ans) on side — especially when Reform has already underperformed in that demographic compared to Trump’s appeal in the United States. Among the younger generation, a ‘vibe shift’ is definitely still possible, but it hasn’t yet happened. Reform need to help create the right conditions for it.

So, I implore you: tell your friends that it’s okay to be middle class and vote Reform. You can compost your veg peelings, have thoughts about Brutalism, own a Le Creuset pot and still think mass immigration needs to be brought under control. You’re allowed to enjoy natural orange wine and still want a government that isn’t actively sabotaging the country. Being middle class isn’t a crime — but staying silent while everything collapses around you might be.

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This article was written by LaoCaiLarry, a Pimlico Journal contributor. You can subscribe to his Substack here. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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