Since Saturday at the West Holts Stage, punk duo Bob Vylan has garnered attention from much of the right in the country, after their chants of “Free Palestine” and “Death to the IDF”. Far-right activists in Cornwall are calling for the group to be banned from performing at Boardmasters.

Andrea Hogan, an unelected figure for the Reform UK party in Cornwall has called for the group to be banned from Boardmasters 2025, the local festival ran from Wednesday 6 to Sunday 10 August. She claims the band “stood before thousands and spewed hateful chants”. This was despite the band’s statement made on Instagram that clarified the chants were not directed towards “Jews, Arabs or any other race or group of people”.

The chants themselves have been defended for their content, as they did not contain any degree of hate-speech, and were directed towards a military organisation currently undertaking a genocide in the Gaza strip. And many on the left have taken notice of the inconsistency in the comments made by right-wing political figures who advocated for “free speech” throughout the prosecution of Lucy Conolly for her tweets inciting racial hatred against asylum seekers. These figures include Nigel Farage and Nick Ferrari, who on LBC yesterday, bemoaned the BBC’s handling of the event, and criticised the broadcaster for not cutting the chants from the running.

Hogan, Reform UK Cornwall’s press officer and campaign manager for St Austell and Newquay, amongst taking a keen interest in “demographic change” in the UK, has also called for the Burqa to be banned in public spaces. She has, in her admin role on the Reform UK Cornwall Facebook group, reposted videos of far-right academic Matt Goodwin, claiming that the arrival of foreign nationals to Britain is a “big reason” why “60% of British women no longer feel safe in London”. The statement Hogan has posted was not an official statement to the press, but a post made on the Reform Cornwall Facebook page, then broadcast by local media.

Similar calls for event spaces to cancel the shows of Kneecap emerged after Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh was charged under the Terrorism Act 2000 for alleged display of support for a proscribed organisation. This was followed through when Eden Sessions cancelled the bands 4th of July show.

Boardmasters have declined to comment on the issue at this time.

Image Via: Ithaka Darin Pappas. CC BY-SA 4.0  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/Wikimedia Commons