Glastonbury, Liberal Fantasy, and the Real Silent Majority

John Harris’s latest Guardian piece, “Glastonbury is a glimpse of England’s silent majority” (13 July 2025), reads like a dispatch from an alternate universe. His central claim—that the liberal warmth and inclusive vibes of Glastonbury represent not a fringe but “a quiet majority” in England—is not just wrong. It’s revealing. It tells us far more about Harris’s worldview than it does about the actual state of the country.

Let’s be honest: Glastonbury doesn’t represent the average Brit. It reflects a very specific slice of society—Guardian-reading, university-educated, largely white, urban, and upper middle class. These are not the marginalised but the culturally dominant. The “progressive” values Harris sees there—climate activism, trans inclusion, EU nostalgia—are the values already hardwired into our media, our public institutions, and our schools. To present them as some emerging grassroots consensus is to completely misunderstand the nature of cultural power in Britain today.

Harris doubles down on this fantasy by insisting that this bloc—these festival-goers, these polite, pro-diversity liberals—are being ignored by politicians. But who exactly does he think runs the show? These are the people who dominate the civil service, headline the BBC, run HR departments, and shape mainstream opinion. They are not a “silent majority” at all. They are the chattering class, and everyone else is sick of listening to them.

The rise of Reform UK is the clearest sign that the public is not simply disengaged—they are pushing back. In the most recent general election, Reform captured more than four million votes and overtook the Liberal Democrats in many working-class areas. They didn’t do this by promoting progressive harmony or EU re-entry. They did it by speaking plainly about immigration, gender ideology, and national identity—issues the liberal elite have tried to shut down. The Greens, meanwhile, barely moved the needle. The Lib Dems performed adequately in Remain-leaning affluent seats, but there’s little to suggest a groundswell of support for redistributive, pro-EU climate radicalism. Harris’s suggestion that the centre-left is poised for a renaissance is sheer wishcasting.

And it’s not just here. Across Europe and the United States, the direction of travel is clear. Voters are drifting away from parties that push top-down globalism, aggressive diversity agendas, and authoritarian green policy. In France, Marine Le Pen’s RN has moved from pariah to serious contender. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’s PVV dominated the last election. In Germany, the AfD is polling ahead of Scholz’s SPD. In the US, Donald Trump’s return to political prominence is driven by his rejection of precisely the kind of progressive cultural narrative that Glastonbury represents. What Harris offers is not analysis—it’s evasion.

Even where Harris gets something right—acknowledging that Glastonbury is no longer countercultural—he immediately misses the point. He sees the festival’s mainstreaming as evidence of widespread liberal values. But it would be more accurate to say that Glastonbury no longer needs to be countercultural because its values are already the establishment. It has become a pageant for the moral consensus of our ruling class. And the rest of the country is growing weary of being preached to by people who cannot define what a woman is, who believe men should be in women’s prisons, and who think “progress” means punishing working families with net-zero levies while flying in headline acts from California.

Perhaps the most telling line in the piece is this: Harris says the country needs a new political force that is “redistributive, pro-European, and committed to fighting the politics of resentment.” But the real resentment—the deep, simmering contempt—is not coming from the voters. It’s coming from the very class he represents, who resent being told they’re wrong, who resent the idea of ordinary people having cultural boundaries, national loyalties, or traditional values.

In the end, Harris claims that we need a new centre party, ignoring Yeat’s prescient line: “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Harris cannot see the obvious truth—the centre has already gone. It didn’t fall apart by accident. It collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions: claiming to be inclusive while silencing dissent, claiming to be kind while sneering at the working class, claiming to be rational while denying basic biology. The centre failed, and people are done waiting for it to fix itself.

What we’re witnessing now isn’t a battle between silence and speech, or between kindness and cruelty. It’s a reckoning between a dying liberal consensus and a rising, angry electorate that’s had enough. Glastonbury doesn’t symbolise the future of Britain—it symbolises the bubble that no longer knows it has burst.