Is Glastonbury creating a ‘hostile environment’?

The world’s most liberal music festival is in hot water after Home Office agents were spotted skulking at its fringes — it is striking, if not suprising, that their presence created uproar

Glastonbury is a good place that brings out the best in people (PA)

Not since Jay Z playedWonderwall at the Pyramid stage has anyone looked so out of place as the two immigration officers staking out Castle Cary station as bemused Glastonbury goers trudged past.

Flak jackets and uniforms on, the two agents of Suella Breverman’s “deport first, appeal later” agenda were given some puzzled looks by wellie-clad festival goers. No wonder. This is the world’s most liberal music festival, now with added Home Office agents sprinkled around the fringes. At least people love Jay Z.

What an utterly shameful look. Glastonbury is not for everyone –  it’s incredibly expensive and always too hot, too wet or both – but it does pride itself on welcoming, worthy principles. For the next few days it will be the largest concentration of happy people in Britain – if Elton John can’t croon away your mortgage worries, nothing can. Yet this is where the long arm of the law now overreaches: to a festival that prides itself on inclusivity and tolerance

The police usually get the memo. I’ve seen Bristol & Avon bobbies popping flower necklaces around their horses at the festival. Dancing to disco at Shangri La. Cycling around in their little shorts enjoying the festival as much as the rest of us. Michael Eavis, the festival’s founder, says he believes the annual blowout to be about “social responsibility and social holiness”, about “being good to society”. And the principle of “being good to society” usually drives everything the festival does.

So it is hard to take the immigration officers’ presence as anything other than sinister. The police never seem to be there when you actually want them – ​​some 80 robberies a day were closed last year without a suspect being identified – and even the police admit that trust in their work is at rock bottom. So why risk this PR disaster?

The Home Office later insisted that the officers were engaged in a “multi-agency operation” – that they’d simply stationed officers there on the festival’s opening day “to tackle gangs who use the railway to transport gang members and vulnerable persons, including foreign nationals who may be in the UK illegally, to run criminal operations”. That didn’t stop a festival goer on Twitter alleging that the officers had said they were present monitoring for “adverse reactions” to them, as justification to speak to people. “The hostile environment extends everywhere.”

It is striking – if not surprising – that their presence provoked uproar. There are few populations as privileged as the wellie-wearing, cider-swilling, tent-dancing middle-classes of Somerset’s temporary residents, but if their relationship with you is broken, what of the rest of Britain? It should send a message: your work is not welcome: take off your uniforms, stand down and join the party, or go away and rethink.

Glastonbury is a good place that brings out the best in people; an oasis of good-naturedness even in febrile referendum days; an alternative way of living. As officers stationed there have shown time and time again, policing does not have to be heavy handed. It can be conducted by consent and with the goodwill of merry festival goers. Be good to society. Why don’t we all start there?