The stupidity of good intentions

I have been scouring the internet trying to find a right-wing festival to take the family to this summer. I don’t necessarily mean a kind of Nuremberg affair; just some sort of gathering where we won’t be hectored about the refugees and the NHS by simpering millennials with falafel between their ears. A place where you can be sure that the next act on won’t be bloody Corbyn, backed by a mass of lobotomised sheep chanting his name to that dirge by the White Stripes.

Mind you, I wish I’d been at the Eden Sessions, a hugely right-on shindig held at the UK’s most stridently eco–friendly venue, the Eden Project in Cornwall. It’s all about sustainable living and not damaging the environment — if only someone had told the headline act, the dunderheaded Gary Barlow. The climax to his performance featured a cannon shooting hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of tiny pieces of non-biodegradable plastic confetti over the crowd. As an act of conspicuous eco-sabotage it would have been bettered only if he had dragged a live whale on stage and tried to see how many Sainsbury’s carrier bags he could ram down its throat.

Festivals are about as environmentally hostile as it is possible to get — just look at Glastonbury once the middle-aged revellers have departed. A million gypsies, celebrating the annual advent of their income tax returns with bare-knuckle fist fights, inter-familial sexual intercourse and copious quantities of cheap alcohol, would keep the place sprucer. Festivals tend to be leftist because, one supposes, they are a kind of expression of mindless communitarianism, from Woodstock ever onwards (but conveniently forgetting Altamont, which seemed to me a truer expression of the human disposition). Festivals mean well, but the front driveway to Hell is tarmacadamed, probably by gypsies, with good intentions.