Glastonbury's Political Ambitions Were Finally Realised in Corbyn's Speech

During the 1980s, Glastonbury was – at its heart – a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament festival. The pyramid stage bore a huge CND logo and most of the profits were donated to the organisation. In the height of the Cold War, with nuclear destruction on the horizon, nothing seemed more important. Since then, politics has always been central to the ethos of Glastonbury. The modern version of the festival has acres of "green fields" with stalls that promote alternatives to destroying the planet. There's also a giant Greenpeace area run by the festival that highlights their campaigns (this year, a 20-metre rave tree, a nod to deforestation) and a radical politics area, the "leftfield", curated by Billy Bragg (mostly oiky punk bands and Akala). On top of that there's huge prominence given to Oxfam and Water Aid, and hundreds of political speakers addressing crowds throughout the weekend. Still, if you asked the average 18-year-old with a bag of Motorolas in their left sock which political events were going on at the festival, they might look at you puzzled before slinking back to their gazebo to smoke a joint and wait for Nines to start their midnight set. The hope has been that Glastonbury's left-wing ethos gently percolates through to its younger attendees. They might not be explicitly aware of it, but being around so much radical politics, year after year, will eventually influence the way they think.

The model here is much the same as the liberal university. Doing, let's say, an undergraduate course in English and Film Studies at Leeds is not an inherently left-wing thing in itself. But after spending three years there, surrounded by student politics, demonstrations, vegans and people with communist "Welcome to the Party" posters in their bedroom, you're likely to leave more left-wing then when you arrived.

Glastonbury's political potential operates in much the same way. But this is an inexact science; it's hard to tell if it's working, or if a good half of the Glastonbury crowd are just showing up, watching some DJs, getting fucked and going home again. There have been some signs that the message of the festival is not getting through. The thousands of campers who leave their tents at the site, creating huge amounts of waste, don't seem particularly concerned about their environmental impact. The future of the festival has also been threatened by the number of people pissing in the streams and rivers on site, contaminating the water supply and killing fish and wildlife. Politicians have been showing up for years, trying to excite a new generation, but the crowds at speeches by the late Tony Benn, John McDonell and Caroline Lucas have normally been older and more wizened.

That was not the case this year. Jeremy Corbyn's speech on the Pyramid Stage, added to the bill too late to make the official programme, was by far the busiest moment of the festival, more jam-packed then Radiohead the night before. People came from the furthest reaches of the site to catch a glimpse of the Labour leader – and not just the dads, but the pill-swilling teens, the indie fans and the tweens in Ed Sheeran T-shirts. It was so busy it quickly became impossible to get anywhere near the stage.

The speech itself was Corbyn's normal rousing fare, but unlike when he'd performed similar hits during the election campaign, most people were recovering from two or three nights of heavy going out, which meant – by the time he was quoting Shelly and asking for a fairer society – there were hundreds of people openly weeping. In previous years the chant of the festival has been a kind of lame pub banter thing ("Alan!" "Butt scratcher!"), but throughout Corbyn's speech there were rapturous chants of "Ohhhhh, Jeremy Corbyn," which continued to be heard throughout the festival – from Stormzy's set later that day to NYC Downlow at 4AM. All you could hear is the name of the Labour leader ringing around the site. Of course, cults of personality are not the same as a sustained interest in left-wing politics. They can also smudge the details; while everyone was cheering for Corbyn they forgot that he had promised the Labour party would vote for Trident renewal, flying in the face of the original political ethos of the festival. However, for the first time in a number of years, the political element of Glastonbury felt neatly joined up with the music and sesh elements.

That's what populism can do: make politics not just an important part of life, but an intrinsic one, intimately wrapped up with your social existence. Corbyn's performance at Glastonbury felt like the moment the festival finally fulfilled what has oft-been billed as its main aim: to create activism out of hedonism.