Richard Tice: art critic, and chicken

If the politics doesn’t work out for Richard Tice, the deputy leader of Reform UK could always fall back on arts criticism after penning a piece on his new-found specialist subject: Glastonbury.

Tice has written a piece for the Conservative Woman website decrying the festival for allowing artists such as Kneecap and Bob Vylan to perform, claiming it “was not and is not free speech”.

“Just before Kneecap’s performance, the BBC aired the set of a lesser-known duo, Bob Vylan, with a troubling legal background and a documented history of anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric,” wrote Tice knowledgeably of a band he almost certainly had not heard of until four days ago.

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Bob Vylan were “known associates of Kneecap”, he said, whatever that means, and were “given a prime broadcast slot”, despite the fact that their set did not go out on TV but on an iPlayer stream with an audience that was almost certainly minuscule.

“Then there’s the rhetoric itself. Chants of ‘Death to the IDF’ echoed throughout the festival grounds,” added Tice, even though such chants were limited to a small area around one stage at a festival which has a population similar to that of Norwich.

Tice has certainly changed his, er, tune on free speech. Just last month he was using it to defend one of his MPs, Sarah Pochin, who was calling for the burkha to be banned. Only last week he was being hailed by the Free Speech Union for introducing a Ten-Minute Rule Bill in the House of Commons “aimed at tackling the kind of disproportionate sentencing that resulted in [Lucy Connolly] receiving a 31-month jail term for a single tweet”. Chanting at a festival “was not and is not free speech” while calling for arson attacks on hostels hosting asylum seekers is fine!

Tice’s criticism of Glastonbury appears to have come from what he has read. But he did have the chance to attend the festival – Green Party deputy leader Zack Polanski invited him to a debate on stage, but the Reform man chickened out, claiming “my team concluded that it would not be safe”.