My ‘Glastonbury’ monologue on Times Radio today. More tomorrow 1pm @TimesRadio ‘Death, death to the IDF’ shouted moronic rapper Pascal Robinson-Foster at the Glastonbury music festival. A posh double-barrel name is perhaps not the best handle for a self-styled Rasta radical. So he goes by the name Bobbie Vylan instead.  We’ll stick to his real name.  As he strutted the stage shirtless in his white underwear mouthing his mantra — along with a generous dose of anti-semitism — the Glasto crowd dutifully repeated it, again and again.  I’m not sure what was worse. Mr Robinson-Foster’s call for the death of Israeli defence forces or a mindless audience’s brain-dead repetition of it. Since the IDF is all that stands between Israel’s survival and it being wiped out by its Islamist enemies, to call for the death of the IDF is tantamount to advocating a second Holocaust. No doubt they hadn’t quite thought that through.  But if you don’t really know what you’re talking about it’s probably best just to stay stchum. Especially in matters of life or death.  Mr Robinson-Foster also encouraged the audience to repeat the better known mantra, ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, which also implies the extinction of Israel. Though, again, among those who deploy it, it’s not always clear they have a clue what they’re talking about.  When asked what river, one pro-Palestinian demonstrator volunteered the Euphrates. Another, when asked what sea, vouchsafed the Caribbean.  Pro-Palestinian forces are sure of their righteous stance. When it comes to geography — or history for that matter — maybe not so much.  For those so challenged, the river in question is the Jordan, the sea, the Mediterranean. In between lies Israel. If that is now to be free Palestine then clearly Israel would no longer exist.  The BBC distributed Mr Robinson-Foster’s rant far and wide by streaming it live on its iPlayer. That has provoked a second row, with some demanding the BBC be charged for disseminating hate speech.  The BBC will now have to explain why it decided to stream Mr R-F live rather than as pre-recorded and suitably edited for broadcast.  Or if live, why not on a delay? And given none of that was in place, when they heard what he was saying, why did nobody pull the plug? Avon and Somerset police are investigating Mr Robinson-Foster for hate speech. Inevitably there are those saying that if people can be jailed for moronic tweets — as they have been — then he should be banged up too.  I wouldn’t hold your breath. Yesterday we learned that the Kneecap Numpties will not be charged over a November 2023 video in which they said ‘the only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP’. Maybe the Twitter Sweeney would have been more resolute if they’d tweeted it. Kneecap followed Mr Robinson-Foster at Glasto. We’ve come a long way from the summers of love in the 1960s which kicked off the modern mania for pop festivals. Now they seem more blighted by hatred than uplifted by love.  I was going to say they sometimes seem to have more in common with a Nuremberg rally. But even the Nazis did not scream ‘death to the Jews, death to the Jews’ at their rallies, even if they thought it and that was their intention.  At Glastonbury a generation which wallows in woke, never had to don a uniform to defend its country and whose idea of danger is to risk reading or seeing something that might trigger it, well that generation not only thought it. They said it out loud.

Nonsense piled upon nonsense. Before Brexit there were v few boat people because illegal migrants were coming in as stowaways on lorries. When that became much harder they turned to boats. The Dublin Convention made very little difference to illegal migration. The numbers returned were a pittance. Indeed we might even have accepted more migrants under it (the Convention was a two-way street) than we returned. As an MP you should know all that. And if you do, why are you tweeting clear untruths.

Junior doctors, who now want to be known as resident doctors, took 44 days of industrial action between March 2023 and July last year, which ended when Labour awarded them a 22% pay rise three weeks after taking office. They were awarded another above-inflation pay rise of 5.4% this year — more than nurses and the rest of the public sector. Naturally the BMA still thinks all this is not enough. Ballots for industrial action were sent to doctors on Tuesday. Now doctors are demanding a further 29% increase. How Labour handles this might well determine its future as a government. What are the odds it caves in — again?

Exactly. The Johnson government ‘was incapable of distinguishing between truth and lies’. That was bad enough. But the Starmer government knows full well when it’s lying — which is even worse. Imagine that. Even more untrustworthy than the Johnson government. Gulp.

ANDREW NEIL: In 55 years of covering politics, I’ve never accused ANY government of congenitally telling untruths. But Starmer has taken lying, gaslighting and deceit to a new level mol.im/a/14743517

‘We have nearly halved net migration’ can only mean the PM claiming Labour is responsible for fall. And if that’s what he’s claiming, it’s not misleading or an untruth or a falsehood — it’s a lie.

Britain has opened formal talks about sending failed asylum seekers to detention centres abroad, according to Keir Starmer on a trip to Albania. I understand there’s an available facility in Rwanda, if that’s really the route he wants to go, already paid for by the British taxpayer.

Oh dear

Shameless lying nonsense from you too. Don’t you understand how insurance systems work? Not the appalling US system, which is the default attack from the Left on any suggestions of NHS reform. But have a look at the German social insurance system. Or the French mutuelle system All the universal coverage regardless of income but much better health outcomes. But, heh, who cares about that when you want to defend a system designed when Stalin was in the Kremlin. That’s obviously fit for purpose today.

France succeeds in blocking spending any of a new €150 billion EU defence fund on British defence companies. The money cannot be used to buy weapons from Britain, the US or Turkey but only from EU arms companies. The fund could consider purchasing British weapons if UK signs a security pact with Brussels. But, inexplicably, France has tied this to more French fishing rights in UK waters. So even when the security of Europe is at stake, the usual French protectionism takes precedence. The UK has the only European arms industry to rival France. Excluding the UK is entirely to France’s benefit, though not to the most effective defence of the EU Starmer needs a stiff word with Macron.