Sadiq Khan likes to call out bigotry, so why so weaselly about vile Bob Vylan?
Amid all the condemnation of Bob Vylan’s “death, death to the IDF” chant at Glastonbury last week, one voice was notably restrained.
Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, is not usually reticent when it comes to calling out the racists in his midst.
During the Southport riots last summer, he was quick to vow decisive action against “far-Right” groups, saying: “The disorder, racism, and violence that we have seen in towns and cities across the country in the last week have been truly shocking. I want to be very clear to anyone thinking of spreading hatred and fear in our city: If you break the law, action will be taken against you... if you commit a crime, you will be arrested and face the full force of the law.” He later said he found the disorder “triggering”.
Yet when it came to the protestations of Bob Vylan, Khan, who follows the rap duo on X, was rather more circumspect.
He told LBC that “hatred shouldn’t be amplified” and that he was “not sure” the chants help people in Gaza or the West Bank.
The grime act first encountered the London Mayor in 2022 at the Bandlab NME Awards at the O2 Academy, Brixton where they described him on stage as “bro”. They also namechecked him in their song Humble as The Sun.
It’s all rather reminiscent of the time it emerged that Khan had attended a rally in 2006 in Trafalgar Square against the publication of cartoons of the prophet Mohammad, where Dr Azzam Tamimi, a radical cleric, warned: “Fire will be throughout the world if they don’t stop.”
Khan said of the incident: “Speakers can get carried away but they are just flowery words.”
It came after the former Labour MP Louise Ellman told the Commons in 2003 that Hamas-supporting Tamimi had told a conference in Vienna that after Israel is destroyed and replaced with an Islamic state, the Jews should “sail on the sea in ships back to where they came or drown in it”.
I wonder if Khan would use the term “flowery words” to describe the deleted post that saw Lucy Connolly sent down for 31 months?
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