The British home secretary James Cleverly has branded Banksy’s migrant boat artwork “vile”, describing it as a “celebration of loss of life in the Channel”, after the British artist confirmed he was behind the performance at Glastonbury music festival over the weekend.
On Sunday, Banksy uploaded a video of the inflatable boat holding dummies of migrants being lifted above the heads of thousands of revellers during a set by the Bristol punk band Idles on Friday night. The raft was launched as the band performed Danny Nedelko, a song from 2018 that opens with the lyrics: “My blood brother is an immigrant, a beautiful immigrant.” A spokesman for the band said they were not aware of the stunt until after the gig had finished. The boat appeared again during rapper Little Simz’s set as she performed on the Pyramid stage on Saturday.
Seemingly missing the point of both Banksy’s and Idles’ work, Cleverly told Sky News today: “There are a bunch of people there joking and celebrating about criminal actions which costs lives. People die. People die in the Mediterranean, they die in the Channel. This is not funny. It is vile.”
Asked if the work could have been a commentary on the right-wing Conservative party’s failure to address the issue of migrant crossings, he said: “Our ability to sort that problem out has been hampered at every stage by the Labour party, who aspire to border control.”
Cleverly added: “The hypocrisy of the left on this issue is breath-taking and to joke about it, to celebrate it at a pop festival when there have been children dying in the Channel, is completely unacceptable.”
Cleverly was taking part in an interview ahead of Thursday’s general election, in which his party will lose heavily, polling predicts.
Banksy has a long history of engaging with the migrant crisis in his work. In August 2020, he financed an actual boat, named the Louise Michel after the 19th-century French feminist and anarchist, to rescue refugees making the perilous crossing to Europe from North Africa. The boat was impounded—and later released—by the Italian authorities in March 2023 as Giorgia Meloni’s government clamped down on humanitarian operations in an attempt to halt a surge in Mediterranean crossings.
In 2019, Banksy left his mark on the Venice Biennale with a stencil of a migrant child wearing a lifejacket holding aloft a fizzing neon pink flare, while, in 2015, he stencilled an image of the late Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, with a black bin bag thrown over one shoulder and an original Apple computer in his hand, in the Calais refugee camp known as “the Jungle”.
In a statement accompanying the Calais work, Banksy said: “We’re often led to believe migration is a drain on the country’s resources but Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian migrant. Apple is the world’s most profitable company, it pays over $7bn (£4.6bn) a year in taxes – and it only exists because they allowed in a young man from Homs.”
