Is Glastonbury creating a ‘hostile environment’?

The best of Voices delivered to your inbox every week - from controversial columns to expert analysis Sign up for our free weekly Voices newsletter for expert opinion and columns Sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. 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. 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”. 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.