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| Photo from Palestine Action https://palestineaction.org |
Kneecap’s music is not really my thing. I am perhaps too old, or maybe my musical tastes are more conservative. But I do love their politics and their stance on Palestine. I don’t think much of Hezbollah, but I do think waving their flag is not a criminal offence. The BBC think otherwise as evidenced by their decision to not broadcast Kneecaps’s performance at the Glastonbury festival. The only reason for this was their support for Palestine. There was no other reason. Though, it didn’t work out well for the BBC as Bob Vylan who was broadcast live got the crowd to chant Death to the IDF, one of the noblest of chants ever to be heard at Glastonbury.
But there is a long history to the BBC and other British media censoring musicians. The BBC in its statement said:
Whilst the BBC doesn’t ban artists, our plans ensure that our programming meets our editorial guidelines.
We don’t always livestream every act from the main stages and look to make an on-demand version of Kneecap’s performance available on our digital platforms, alongside more than 90 other sets.[1]
In other words, the BBC does ban artists. It is not like this is the first time they have banned some of them. Following the Bloody Sunday massacre by the British Army in Derry in 1972, Paul McCartney, penned a song titled Give Ireland Back to the Irish.[2] It was the debut single of Wings. It was instantly banned in Britain by the BBC but managed to get to No. 16 in the British charts nonetheless and got to No. 1 in Ireland. They banned songs that mentioned sex, even Shirley Bassie’s Burn My Candle[3] and they banned songs that were considered more political such as The Sex Pistols, Anarchy in the UK,[4] a song that wasn’t really political at all. And not surprisingly they banned the then relatively unknown Heaven 17’s debut (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang,[5] over concerns it might upset the then recently elected US president Ronald Reagan, a man whose government through the CIA went on to support deaths squads in Latin America and set up cocaine smuggling networks to finance them through his loyal servant Oliver North.[6] Reagan of course is referred to in the song.
Democrats are out of power
Across that great wide ocean
Reagan's president elect
Fascist god in motion
That wasn’t the last of it either. The BBC went on to ban a song by The Police, Invisible Sun[7] because of a possible slight on the British Army contained in the lyrics and of course the official video to the song.
I don't want to spend the rest of my life
Looking at the barrel of an Armalite
I don't want to spend the rest of my days
Keeping out of trouble like the soldiers say
I don't want to spend my time in hell
Looking at the walls of a prison cell
I don't ever want to play the part
Of a statistic on a government chart
The BBC would, during the 1st Gulf War ban a total of 67 songs for the duration of the war, amongst them songs by such establishment figures as Elton John whose song Act of War [8] recorded in 1985 with Millie Jackson was put on the list as was Pat Benatar’s Love is a Battlefield,[9] recorded even earlier in 1983. It takes little to upset the BBC it would seem.
The former Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar criticised Keir Starmer’s call for Kneecap to be not allowed play at Glastonbury stating that:
It’s not great for politicians to get into deciding which artists should be allowed to perform where or not.
To me, that’s illiberalism. Part of the whole point of art and music and literature is to be inappropriate, is to be challenging, is often to be anti-establishment,” he said.
We’ve had a situation now for quite some time in Ireland and in Europe and Britain, where politicians didn’t get into the space of saying who should be allowed to perform, who shouldn’t, what books you should be allowed to read, and I hope we don’t slip back into doing that under the guise of national security and anti-terrorism when it isn’t really about that.[10]
Varadkar tut tuts the BBC and Starmer. Sounds great, except his party and the Irish state in general does not have a great record in the matter. The state broadcaster took an insidious approach to censorship with songs rarely being banned outright. Rather, they were just not simply played on the radio station. Hint hint, nudge nudge. A very Irish way of doing things. The Irish group The Wolfe Tones released many songs over the years about the conflict in the north of Ireland and got little to no airtime. Such was the situation that they even recorded a song about it, called Radio Toor I Li Ay (sometimes called They Don’t Play Our Songs on the Radio) [11]. The lyrics are pertinent to Kneecap and Starmer and sum up exactly what the Establishment are about.
You don't play our songs on radio
You say they're too political!
Who controls the mind, where's the mind's control?
For the music on the airwaves
Follows empty minds, those empty heads
Play songs of sex and drugs instead
Don't tell them how it really is
Won't MI5 look after you, control your thoughts
Feed information to your hearts and minds
To save you all from thinkin', thinkin', thinkin', thinkin'
It is a fact that RTE didn’t give them much airtime and still don’t. So much so that in 2024, Derek Warfield the lead singer with the group said it was time to end the ban on them.[12] It still hasn’t happened, nor will it. In fact, the Irish women’s football team got into trouble for singing one of their songs, Celtic Melody,[13] and were excoriated by British sports journalists, who are not renowned for their knowledge of music, politics, history or much else aside from who ran how fast and where. Not exactly intellectual heavyweights. Nonetheless these idiots led to the Irish women’s team being eventually fined €20,000 for singing the song.[14]
The Irish singer Christy Moore found himself on the wrong end of state repression in Ireland on many occasions and his songs, like those of The Wolfe Tones were not banned per se, but they never received much airplay, except those that were considered to be humorous and non-political, such as Don’t Forget Your Shovel.[15] But other songs of his were censored on the radio without the need for an official ban, such as Ninety Miles From Dublin,[16] which was about the IRA and INLA prisoners on the Blanket and Dirty Protests in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh. Likewise, other songs he recorded about the prisoners and later on about the Hunger Strikers equally received no airplay. There was one brief exception to this.
Patsy O’ Hara (INLA) died on hunger strike on May 21st 1981 after 61 days. His mother Peggy O’Hara was initially adamant that she would not let her son die and that when he lapsed into a coma she would intervene and give the doctors the order to break his strike with an intravenous drip. However, in her last conversation with her son, he said to her that he was sorry they had not won and asked her to let the fight go on, before lapsing back into unconsciousness. Christy Moore wrote a song about that exchange called The Time Has Come.[17] It was well received and got airplay and praise. Then someone informed the ignorant and arrogant mandarins at RTE what the song was about and suddenly it got no more airplay. Listening to the song, it is obvious what it is about.
The gentle clasp that holds my hand
Must loosen and let go
Please help me through the door
Though instinct tells you no
Our vow it is eternal
And will bring you dreadful pain
But if our demands aren't recognized
Don't call me back again
Ironically Christy Moore would record another song that got no airplay. It was called Section 31,[18] a reference to the article of the Broadcasting Authority Act (1960) that gave the minister power to ban interviews with members of Sinn Féin and proscribed organisations such as the IRA, but in effect led to RTE’s scant reporting of or carrying out of few interviews that were critical of state policy on the conflict. The song explained exactly why some issues are censored.
Who are they to decide what we should hear?
Who are they to decide what we should see?
What do they think we can’t comprehend here?
What do they fear that our reaction might be, might be?
It is always about silencing the opposition and preventing a reaction to their repression and in this case genocide.
So back to Kneecap. They stand in a long line of artists who have put their money where their mouths are. They stand side by side with giants from other musical genres such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger who were repressed by the McCarthyite wave in the US in the 1950s. The BBC for its part continues to be the propaganda arm of the British Empire, or what is left of it, covering up, lying about or justifying murder, massacre, torture and plunder from India to Kenya, Ireland and now Palestine.
Woody Guthrie had the words This Machine Kills Fascists carved into his guitar, a slogan that might earn him a jail sentence nowadays. It was meant more in the sense that his music was part of the struggle against fascism, carrying political messages to workers, dustbowl refugees and migrants. It didn’t literally kill anyone, though in his song Ludlow Massacre,[19] Guthrie celebrated the workers taking up arms to kill the scab thugs that came to shoot them. Scabs at the behest of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, owned by the infamous Rockefeller family, murdered 26 people, mainly the wives and children of the striking miners. However, the massacre was just one large incident, the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency had harried and harassed the striking miners, murdering them in ones and twos. The detective agencies celebrated in comics and films were what would later become known in Latin America and elsewhere as death squads. The miners fought back and Guthrie celebrated this in his song. Resistance, including armed resistance was legitimate.
The state soldiers jumped us in a wire fence corners,
They did not know we had these guns,
And the Red-neck Miners mowed down these troopers,
You should have seen those poor boys run.
The press, at the time, described the striking miners as savages. Any similarity to the current media onslaught on Palestine is not a coincidence, it shows the class interests of the media moguls and the western states. Working class people, foreign resistance movements will always be savages to the media. And the use of armed masked thugs by the state is not new either. Before ICE, there were the detective agencies. Most of the dead at Ludlow were migrant workers. The final death toll according to Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the US was sixty six men women and children.
Kneecap have contributed to the fight against fascism and Bob Vylan’s chant Death to the IDF should be on everyone’s lips. There is no reforming the IDF, just like there was no reforming Hitler’s SS. Only the complete destruction of the IDF will bring any change.
Can their music, like Guthrie’s be said to kill fascists? I don’t know, time will tell, but from the reception they got at Glastonbury it is looking good.[20] What I do know is Keir Starmer and Trump finance fascists. Starmer like a fascist wants to ban Palestine Action. The BBC covers up for fascists, praises them and censors those who stand up to fascists. I know who is on the right side of history.
References
[1] The Guardian (28/06/2025) Kneecap’s Glastonbury set Will not be broadcast live, BBC confirms.
[2] See.
[3] See.
[4] See.
[5] See.
[6] Jacobin (12/11/2021) What We Really Know About the CIA and Crack. Daniel Finn.
[7] See.
[8] See.
[9] See.
[10] The Journal (27/06/2025) Varadkar on Kneecap row: Terrorism is bombs and guns, not music.
[11] See.
[12] Newstalk (11/09/2024) ‘Systemic ban’ on The Wolfe Tones should be lifted – Warfield. Jack Quann.
[13] See.
[14] Sky News (08/12/2022) Ireland women footballers fined €20,000 for singing song referencing IRA in World Cup celebration.
[15] See.
[16] See.
[17] See.
[18] See.
[19] See.
[20] See alburujpress.
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⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.
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