YE SHALL NOT PASS

In the annals of British cultural self-sabotage, few episodes have achieved the exquisite absurdity of the Wireless Festival’s cancellation last week, in the spring of 2026. One pictures the promotional poster—Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, looming like a slightly deranged colossus in his trademark Yeezy camouflage, the festival dates emblazoned beneath him in optimistic sans-serif, the whole thing promising three days of urban glamour and overpriced cider in a London park. That photograph, that glossy promise of revenue and mild civic disorder, has now been quietly interred. The Home Office, in its infinite wisdom, decided that Mr West’s presence would not be “conducive to the public good,” and the promoters, having consulted every stakeholder short of the ghost of Enoch Powell, folded the tents and issued refunds. Millions lost, reputations dented, and the only thing left intact is the government’s reputation for moral fastidiousness of a peculiarly selective kind.

One ought to begin, as Clive James might have done, with a gentle, almost affectionate mockery of the man himself. Kanye West—or Ye, as he now prefers, like a Bond villain who has downsized his ego to a single syllable—is, let us admit, a walking compendium of eccentricities. His music, once a thrilling collision of soul samples and wounded bravado, has long since curdled into the sonic equivalent of a man shouting at clouds while wearing sunglasses indoors. The auto-tune that once masked technical shortcomings now sounds like a cry for help from a malfunctioning robot. His image? The oversized clothes that appear to have been designed by a committee of avant-garde toddlers who had just discovered felt-tip pens; the boots that look engineered for lunar exploration rather than the streets of Finsbury Park; the endless carousel of ex-wives, presidential campaigns, and tweets that read like the diary entries of a man who has mistaken his own reflection for the Second Coming. He is, in short, the sort of celebrity who makes one nostalgic for the days when rock stars merely wrecked hotel rooms instead of entire geopolitical alliances.

And yet, for all that soft ridicule, the cancellation feels less like justice than like a particularly British form of bureaucratic overreach dressed up as virtue. The man has said vile things—anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi-adjacent pronouncements that no civilised person should defend. One does not have to admire the chap to recognise that barring him from these shores on the strength of old interviews and social-media eruptions sets a precedent more ominous than any Yeezy sneaker. Music has always been the refuge of the difficult, the deranged, and the occasionally dangerous to know. We let Wagner be performed despite his views; we tolerated the Rolling Stones when they were peddling Satanism by the kilo. If the criterion is now that an artist’s opinions must pass a Home Office decency test before the amplifiers are switched on, we shall soon be left with a playlist consisting entirely of Ed Sheeran and the collected works of the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts.

The real sting, of course, lies in the selectivity. While Ye was being politely escorted to the departure lounge, another act was not merely permitted but actively celebrated on these islands. Step forward Bob Vylan, the Ipswich punk-rap duo whose Glastonbury set last summer provided the sort of entertainment usually reserved for revolutionary tribunals. There they were, on the West Holts Stage, with the BBC cameras rolling live, leading thousands in chants of “Free, free Palestine” followed, for good measure, by the rather more pointed “Death, death to the IDF.” The Israel Defence Forces, in case the acronym needs spelling out, being the military of a nation with which Britain maintains cordial diplomatic relations. The BBC slapped on a warning label faster than you could say “public apology,” the Prime Minister himself described it as “appalling hate speech,” and the corporation later confessed it should have pulled the plug. Police investigated. No charges resulted. The festival carried on. Bob Vylan, far from being declared non-conducive to the public good, were allowed to finish their set, crowd-surf, and depart with their visas intact—at least until the Americans, in a rare display of transatlantic decisiveness, revoked theirs.

Here, then, is the true divisive figure in contemporary music: not the erratic American in his moon boots, but the home-grown duo whose idea of a sing-along is a direct call for the demise of a foreign army. Kanye’s sins, however grotesque, were largely confined to interviews, tweets, and the occasional album track that sounded like a cry for attention. Bob Vylan’s were performed live, on a major stage, broadcast to the nation, and met with the sort of institutional shrug that suggests certain forms of divisiveness are simply more fashionable than others. One is reminded of those Victorian moralists who could overlook a gentleman’s adultery provided he kept it within the right social circle. Today’s arbiters of public taste draw the line at Ye’s vintage antisemitism while extending the velvet rope to a chant that, in any other context, would have had the tabloids baying for deportation. The lost revenue from Wireless is, naturally, the least of it. What has been cancelled is not merely a festival but a certain idea of consistency. 

If the test is whether an artist’s words might incite hatred or division, then Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury performance—cheered by a crowd waving Palestinian flags while the BBC’s iPlayer viewers were treated to an on-screen health warning—ought to have triggered the same exclusion order. Instead, we have the spectacle of a government that can welcome individuals with far more troubling histories while drawing the line at a rapper who once wore a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt and called himself a genius. The photograph of that cancelled festival poster, with its promise of headliner glory, now stands as a small monument to selective outrage: a reminder that in contemporary Britain, the right to perform is not a question of artistic merit or even criminal record, but of whether your brand of provocation aligns with the prevailing political weather. One can almost hear the sigh of relief in the corridors of power. Another potential embarrassment averted, another awkward conversation with stakeholders avoided. Yet the public, ever contrary, may notice the pattern. 

Kanye West, for all his flaws, was at least a known quantity: a man whose eccentricities had been on public display for two decades. Bob Vylan’s chant was something sharper, something delivered in the moment, to a live audience, with the full weight of a festival stage behind it. If the Home Office truly fears division, it might start by applying the same standard to both. Until then, we are left with the melancholy spectacle of a festival poster that will never be hung, a photograph that has been cancelled not because the image was offensive, but because the man in it had the temerity to be unfashionably offensive in the wrong direction. In the great British tradition, we have once again chosen principle over pragmatism—provided, of course, that the principle is the one currently in vogue.

GENERATION GAMES Pt IV: PENSIONERS IN THE DOCK

In the ongoing carnival of intergenerational finger-pointing that I have, with a certain grim relish, christened Generation Games, we reach the fourth instalment. Previous rounds have seen the Millennials decry the Boomers for hoarding houses, the Zoomers lament that even a degree in grievance studies no longer guarantees a living wage, and everyone under fifty unite in the cheerful conviction that anyone drawing a state pension is essentially a fiscal vampire sucking the lifeblood from the young. Now the spotlight swings once more onto the pensioners themselves, those silver-haired relics who, according to the latest bout of synthetic outrage, are not merely comfortable but positively plutocratic. 

Twenty-five per cent of them, we are solemnly informed, are millionaires. Fifty-five per cent of all welfare spending, apparently, sloshes their way. The solution, naturally, is as elegant as it is equitable: means-test the state pension, shovel a bit more towards the genuinely skint ones, and scrap the triple lock before the whole edifice collapses under the weight of all those audacious OAPs who refuse to shuffle off quietly. One can only admire the rhetorical sleight of hand. It is the sort of statistical prestidigitation that would have made a Victorian fairground conjurer blush. Take a cohort that spent fifty years paying National Insurance stamps on wages that would today barely cover a Deliveroo order, add the modest fruits of thrift and a housing market that once rewarded people for not setting fire to their own sofas, and suddenly they are recast as a cabal of Croesuses lounging in their winter fuel allowances like Roman emperors on heated marble. 

The pensioners I know – and I suspect the ones Emma from X knows too – did not “sit on their arses claiming welfare.” They clocked in at factories that have long since been turned into luxury flats for people who write think-pieces about “intergenerational fairness.” They worked Saturdays, bank holidays, and double shifts in the rain. Their idea of a luxury holiday was a week in a caravan in Skegness, not an all-inclusive fortnight in the Maldives funded by the taxpayer. They raised families on one-and-a-half incomes and still found time to pay into a system they were promised would look after them when the time came. Now the time has come, and the system is looking for someone to blame. Let us, for a moment, dispense with the polite fictions. The welfare state was never designed to be a perpetual motion machine of handouts. It was meant to be an insurance policy: you paid in during your working life, you drew out in old age, and the books balanced because the native population kept roughly the same size, worked roughly the same hours, and reproduced at a rate that didn’t require importing entire villages from abroad to keep the dependency ratio from collapsing like a poorly built tower block. 

The triple lock – that quaint mechanism linking pensions to earnings, inflation, or 2.5 per cent, whichever is highest – is not unsustainable because pensioners are greedy. It is unsustainable because the number of people drawing benefits has ballooned while the number of people paying the bills has not kept pace. And here, dear reader, we arrive at the part of the discussion that polite society prefers to conduct in whispers behind the potting shed. The real pressure on the public purse does not come from the retired steelworker in Dudley who once grafted for British Leyland and now enjoys a modest state pension and the occasional packet of Werther’s Originals. It comes from the swelling ranks of those who treat the welfare system as a lifestyle choice rather than a safety net. 

Large families – often from cultural backgrounds where having five, six, or more children is not merely a personal decision but a demographic strategy – arrive, settle, and reproduce at rates that make the native white working class look positively monastic by comparison. The native stock, that stubborn breed who once filled the shipyards and the potteries, tended to stop at two or three, send the kids to school, and hope they might one day own a semi-detached with a gnome in the front garden. Their reward, in the great cosmic joke of modern Britain, is to be lectured about “intergenerational theft” while the system quietly recalibrates itself to accommodate new client groups whose voting patterns are rather more reliably left-leaning on the question of generous benefits.

One does not need a conspiracy theorist’s tinfoil hat to notice the pattern. Politicians of a certain stripe have long understood that a shrinking, ageing native population – prudent, small-family, increasingly sceptical of open-ended welfare – makes for unreliable electoral mathematics. Far better, then, to encourage the arrival of communities whose larger households and higher fertility rates provide a ready-made constituency for the politics of redistribution. Mass immigration, legal and otherwise, has not merely added numbers; it has altered the very shape of the welfare ledger. The same system that once sustained the post-war generation now groans under the weight of extended families housed in former council semis, claiming every entitlement while the pensioners who built those houses are told they are the problem. It is rather like inviting the fox into the henhouse and then complaining that the surviving chickens are eating too much corn.

The proposed remedies – means-testing the pension, “boosting” the poorest pensioners, scrapping the triple lock – are the classic bureaucratic sleight of hand. They sound compassionate. They allow ministers to pose as champions of the deserving poor while quietly eroding the one universal benefit that still commands broad public support. But they do nothing to address the structural reality: a welfare state engineered for a homogeneous, working-class Britain of the 1950s cannot indefinitely subsidise the demographic transformation of the 2020s without someone, somewhere, picking up the tab. And that someone is increasingly the native taxpayer who has already paid his dues and now finds himself competing with newcomers for the same finite pot.

The pensioners’ crime, it seems, is not that they are rich. It is that they are inconvenient. They remember a Britain that functioned without the constant administrative wheeze of “enrichment” initiatives and integration strategies that never quite integrate. They remember when “working class” meant people who worked, not people who claimed. They remember a time when the welfare system was a backstop, not a career. In the great generational gameshow, they are the last contestants who actually read the rules before playing. The rest of us, it appears, have simply rewritten them to suit the new audience.

And so the rhetoric rolls on: pensioner hate dressed up as fiscal prudence, intergenerational envy marketed as social justice. Meanwhile, the real conversation – about numbers, about incentives, about who exactly is being replaced and why – remains firmly off-limits. One can only hope that the grey army, those stubborn veterans of low wages and high principles, continue to remind us, in their quiet, uncomplaining way, that a society which turns on those who built it has already lost the plot. The triple lock may be expensive. But the alternative – a benefits system that rewards non-contributors while punishing contributors – is not merely unsustainable. It is, in the driest and most sardonic sense, suicidal.

THE KING WHO FORGOT TO DEFEND THE FAITH

In the great British tradition of royal discretion, King Charles III has lately elevated silence to an art form. Christmas broadcasts remain de rigueur, of course—nothing quite says “constitutional monarchy” like a velvet-voiced sovereign murmuring platitudes about hope and hedgehogs while the nation nurses its hangover. But Easter? Apparently not. On Maundy Thursday 2026, with His Majesty performing the ancient ritual of handing out purses of specially minted coins to pensioners at the Royal Maundy Service—less a ceremony than a polite redistribution of small change—the palace quietly confirmed there would be no Easter message. Tradition, they explained with the straightest of faces, does not demand it. One almost admires the brass neck: last year, in 2025, the King somehow found the time. This year the calendar proved mysteriously inflexible.

Dan Wootton, that indefatigable scourge of royal fence-sitting, has called the omission “wrong.” One suspects he is exercising heroic restraint. The real scandal is not the missing press release but the spectacle of a Defender of the Faith who appears to have misplaced the faith somewhere between the mosque and the organic allotment. Charles III remains, on paper, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, a title Henry VIII once prised from the Pope with all the tenderness of a Tudor divorce. Easter, that inconvenient festival of resurrection, might have been thought to warrant at least a courteous footnote. Instead the monarch offered the verbal equivalent of turning up to evensong in full regalia and then refusing to take communion on grounds of dietary sensitivity.

The palace line—delivered with the weary sigh of a civil servant who has seen this memo before—is that an Easter address is not an annual fixture like the Christmas broadcast. Quite so. One does not expect the King to materialise every April like some ecclesiastical jack-in-the-box. Yet the timing is exquisite: on the very day he is photographed performing a rite soaked in Christian symbolism, the official record falls eloquently blank. It is the sort of studied neutrality that makes one wonder whether the coronation oath has been quietly rewritten in invisible ink.

Step forward Rudy Giuliani, late of New York and still in robust voice on Piers Morgan’s sofa, who has obligingly labelled the King the “Muslim Monarch.” Crude? Undoubtedly. Accurate in the way only tabloid bluntness can be? One fears so. For decades Charles has cultivated the persona of the enlightened pluralist—visiting mosques with the enthusiasm of a man discovering a superior brand of incense, quoting Sufi poets as though they were the new Betjeman, and once airily rebranding himself “Defender of Faith” rather than “the Faith,” a grammatical slip that caused more ecclesiastical apoplexy than any number of royal indiscretions. Tolerance is all very well, but when it reaches the point where Easter Sunday passes without a murmur while the royal garden receives its annual documentary, one begins to detect the faint aroma of selective piety.

The comedy—dry, one trusts, rather than hysterical—resides in the constitutional contortion. The coronation vows still bind the monarch to the Protestant reformed religion “established by law,” yet the King’s personal enthusiasms have always tilted towards the ecumenical buffet. Britain in 2026 specialises in this sort of institutional embarrassment: a Church of England that no longer quite believes in itself, a monarchy desperate to appear “relevant” without quite knowing what relevance entails, and a commentariat that treats any defence of the old order as faintly gauche. Wootton’s objection is not, one gathers, that Charles secretly harbours a prayer mat in the Buckingham Palace linen cupboard. It is that the King’s public reticence feels less like magnanimity than a tactical withdrawal. Tolerance is a splendid virtue until it becomes the only one on offer, at which point the faithful are left staring at an empty throne on the one day the calendar actually requires it to be occupied.

The replies to Wootton’s post supply their own grim amusement: Cromwell invoked as though the Lord Protector might return to demand a properly Puritan Easter; Prince William summoned like a dynastic understudy; the inevitable cries of treason. The palace, one imagines, reads them with the expression of a man who has just discovered a dead mouse in the corgi biscuits. Yet the question refuses to dissolve: what, precisely, is the purpose of a Defender of the Faith who prefers not to defend it when the cameras are rolling? The role was never meant to be theological—monarchs have long been spared the indignity of genuine belief—but symbolic. Symbols, unlike Easter messages, are rather harder to cancel without someone noticing.

And so we return to the image of Charles at the Maundy Service: robes impeccable, smile dutiful, alms duly distributed. Everything is performed to perfection. The absence is quieter, more damning. It is the sound of a man who has concluded that, in modern Britain, the safest course is to say nothing, do the bare liturgical minimum, and trust that the faithful will supply their own commentary. Happy Easter, one is tempted to add. Or not, as the case may be. The choice, it seems, has already been made—elsewhere.