“We know of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.” – Thomas Babington Macaulay, English historian
Back in October 2008, while the global economy was disintegrating and the conditions for this fash-inflected shitshow we find ourselves in today were beginning to form, the British tabloid press had its collective hive mind on other matters. The tasteless broadcasters Russell Brand and Jonathon Ross had just played a mean prank on the Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs, calling him up during Brand’s BBC radio show and saying nasty things about his granddaughter. It was a cruel and misogynistic segment, revealing the immature pettiness of the men who’d done it, but, really, it should quickly have been forgotten. It was not.
The next few days were quiet. The world kept spinning on its axis, albeit with the financial crisis sending things a bit haywire for the people on the ground, and, all in all, not much notice was taken of Brand or Ross. But then an article about their prank appeared in The Mail on Sunday. Britain, all of a sudden, spasmed. The article gained traction quickly, and one of the country’s “periodical fits of morality,” as the grandly named historian Thomas Babington Macaulay termed them in the 19th century, was induced. Outrage swept the nation, and a record-breaking number of complaints about Brand and Ross were sent to the BBC. Hefty fines were issued. Resignations were tendered. Many, many hands were wrung. It became the country’s biggest scandal and it stayed that way for some weeks. It is difficult to overstate how pervasive the story was.
Fast forward 15 years, and Russell Brand was again at the center of another, much more serious scandal. Multiple women have accused Brand of sexual assault, which he has denied, and court proceedings about the matter are ongoing. There has, of course, been a great deal of interest in the case, owing to Brand’s level of fame and the appalling nature of the allegations, but it is difficult to escape the feeling that the press have been less concerned about this story than they had been about the prank phone call he made a decade and a half earlier. This is, perhaps, entirely appropriate. These recent allegations are very serious and a conclusion to the court case is yet to arrive, so gossip and speculation are not what’s needed. But comparing the media reactions to the two scandals does illustrate something. There was a frenzied sense of righteous revulsion about the prank calls that, really, isn’t there in this more serious case. This is because a true moral convulsion in Britain must be provoked by something relatively trivial. It is no good to fret over genuine issues, but to inflate minor scandals and to ceaselessly fixate on them—that’s a grand national tradition.
A British fit of morality, though often self-consciously created by the press and politicians, can be a dangerous thing when wielded with purpose. It effectively destroyed Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, after he was relentlessly smeared as an antisemite, and it has recently pushed one of the BBC’s most popular broadcasters out of the institution. Gary Lineker, an English footballing legend, has for the last quarter-century or so been the leading figure in the BBC’s football coverage, and he is, by any reasonable standard, a political moderate by nature. But the man has a conscience, and he has proven that by his refusal to be silent about Israel’s crimes in Gaza. For that he has been hectored and smeared.
This has been going on for some time now, but things, finally, have come to a head. Lineker recently shared an Instagram post which purported to explain what Zionism is, but the clip featured an emoticon of a rat, which had been added by the post’s original author. This naturally garnered a lot of negative reaction, given that the rat has long been deployed as an antisemitic trope. Lineker claimed he hadn’t noticed the emoticon, apologized, and took down the video, but the damage was done. It was soon announced he would be leaving his role in the BBC earlier than had been previously expected.
Lineker should have known better than to post that video with the rat emoticon. The associations should have been clear. But he did, and all the people who have sought to silence him on Gaza can now point towards this episode and declare him an antisemite. In reality, there is no genuine reason to believe this claim. Lineker has, until this point, been very clear that he simply opposes the Israeli military’s mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians. But the British establishment, subject to the whims of a strong Israel lobby, can’t accept that. So he has been smeared, and, the moment he slipped up, he was pounced upon and weakened. All the while, the public conversation is focused on the rights and wrongs of a TV personality, rather than on this grinding genocide that is being directly supported by the British state.
Lineker is probably the highest-profile casualty of this British culture war surrounding Gaza, but he has not been subjected to quite the most vicious public attacks. That has been reserved for Kneecap, a Northern Irish hip-hop group with a well-earned reputation for pissing off the British elite. Just over a month ago Kneecap played at Coachella, where, on stage, they displayed pro-Palestinian messages and led the crowd in chants of “Free Palestine.” It did not go down well with the British establishment, which duly kicked its outrage machine into gear. Footage from past Kneecap gigs began to be dug up, and, when the clips were reported on, shorn of context, they did not look especially good. One video from a gig in 2024 seemed to show one of the band members saying to the crowd, “The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP.” Kneecap have previously written songs about popping pills and snorting lines alongside some of Northern Ireland’s leading pro-Britain and wildly right-wing politicians. It feels banal to point out that this was not intended to be taken at face value, but here we are.
The archive-digging didn’t stop there. Old footage from a gig in 2023 also resurfaced, allegedly presenting one of the band’s members shouting “up Hamas, up Hezbollah”—both of which are considered to be terrorist organizations in the U.K. And, last week, another video did the rounds apparently showing a member waving a Hezbollah flag onstage in London. For this he has been charged with a terror offense. The police had already been investigating the other videos.
The band have denied that they support Hamas and Hezbollah, and they have apologized to the families of two British MPs who were murdered in 2016 and 2021 respectively. But the consequences of the scandal have been heavy. Countless news stories have been written about the band and politicians have been feverishly discussing them, while they have been kicked off the bills of several festivals they’d been due to play. There will soon be a day in court for one of them.
If Kneecap did, indeed, drape themselves in a Hezbollah flag and shout out Hamas and Hezbollah, that was a stupid thing to do. But, as they themselves have pointed out in a statement, they should not be the story here. Genocide and war crimes against the people of Palestine and Lebanon should be the focus. “Instead of defending innocent people, or the principles of international law they claim to uphold,” the band wrote on X, “the powerful in Britain have abetted slaughter and famine in Gaza, just as they did in Ireland for centuries. Then, like now, they claim justification.”
People are perfectly entitled to hate Kneecap, but this self-righteous fretting about the dangers they pose to civilized society is confected bollocks. It is manufactured outrage, designed to silence a group with a growing platform who speak out against a genocide the British establishment actively plays a part in, and it is illustrative of the gradual slide into authoritarianism the U.K. is presently experiencing. Protest has become an increasingly dangerous thing to do in Britain in recent years after new legislation was introduced to stamp it out. Climate activists have since been thrown into jail for years, all for planning to block a motorway. A Jewish man, whose parents literally survived the Holocaust, has been arrested for speaking at a pro-Palestinian protest in London. A Quaker meeting house has been raided by police and several young women arrested there, on suspicion of “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance”—they were apparently planning to protest the genocide. Where is the moral outrage for any of that?
It can be easy to laugh at the pomposity and smugness of the British establishment, but, when they want to, these people can destroy lives. They know they are widely despised for their support of Israel’s genocide, so they will come down hard on those who call them out for it. It may start out with a series of tuts and a holier-than-thou shakes of the head, but, if necessary, they will attack. They will arrest people. They will change laws. They will use violence. In their own strange, distinctly British way, the establishment will fight to defend their interests, twisted as they may be. And, even as the blood drips from their hands, they will always claim moral superiority for it.
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