By the time you reach the end of the Daily Mail‘s latest tabloid tantrum about Kneecap, one thing becomes abundantly clear: the problem isn’t the band. It’s the Mail. In its breathless screed, drenched in the same tired Union Jack moralism that has underpinned British reaction for centuries, the paper isn’t so much offended by violence as it is by resistance. What scares the Mail isn’t a balaclava, it’s the possibility that someone, somewhere, might remember why it was worn in the first place.
The attack piece, complete with selective outrage and frothing imperial nostalgia, does not illuminate a threat to “inclusion” or “public decency”; it is itself the reactionary enforcement mechanism of a dominant class terrified that its historical narrative is slipping. This isn’t journalism. It’s cultural counterinsurgency.
Let’s be clear: Kneecap’s politics are explicitly anti-colonial. That’s their crime. Not the swearing, not the satire, not the righteous anger at British imperialism in Ireland or Palestine. The Mail brands their art “terrorist chic” not because it glamorises violence. But because it refuses to glamorise the British state. The band’s references to the Troubles, to Gaza, to dead Prime Ministers, are all uncomfortable because they reveal the deep scars of empire that British media, especially the Mail, insists must be smoothed over, paved with VE day bunting and photos of Kate Middleton in pastels.
The Mail cannot distinguish between an aesthetic of resistance and actual incitement to violence because it does not care to. It weaponises grief. Cynically invoking Jo Cox and David Amess—only when it serves a political point. Where was this concern when tabloid coverage fanned the flames of Brexit-era nationalism? Or when anti-migrant rhetoric fuelled street violence? Where was it when the same paper launched front-page assaults on judges, MPs, refugees, and striking workers? You do not get to cry wolf on political violence while pumping out anti-immigrant bile and calling judges “enemies of the people”.
Kneecap’s lyrics and performances are part of a centuries-long Irish tradition: one of insurgent poetry, rebel music, and radical satire. That tradition is inconvenient for the British state, and therefore for its favourite newspaper. What the Mail wants is not accountability but submission. An obedient Irish culture, grateful and unthreatening, preferably in English. Instead, Kneecap raps in Gaelic. Instead, they laugh at Westminster, not defer to it. They demand justice, not reconciliation on British terms.
The £1.6 million in public funding is treated by the Mail as some kind of treasonous subsidy. But art has always received state support and in fact, the real scandal is that so little of that money goes to those willing to challenge power. What Kneecap did with those funds was precisely what art should do: confront, provoke, remember.
This entire saga is a microcosm of the broader culture war strategy pursued by Britain’s right wing press. Glastonbury, the BBC, the BFI, and even the courts are all accused of aiding “terrorist sympathisers” for not toeing the line. The aim is obvious: to police the boundaries of acceptable dissent, to define what kinds of anger are allowed and which must be crushed. Unionist rage is patriotism; Irish defiance is extremism.
We’ve been here before. Every time working-class dissent breaks into mainstream culture, someone like the Daily Mail appears to sneer that it isn’t authentic enough. In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill accuses Kneecap of “larping as chavs” and offering a “bourgeois-friendly version of resistance.” But O’Neill has no real nostalgia for the working class, only contempt for it, especially when it speaks in its own voice rather than tugging its forelock. His career is built on punching down, defending the powerful by mocking any movement that unsettles them. What he can’t stomach is that Kneecap’s satire, slang, and swagger cut through in ways his culture-war sermons never could. It’s not their radicalism that’s fake, it’s his posturing as a tribune of the people while sneering at the people’s politics.
And yet, for all its pearl-clutching, the Mail can’t cancel Kneecap. Because the culture it represents. colonial, brittle, pious—is dying. The kids singing “Maggie’s in a box” weren’t radicalised by a rap group; they were radicalised by watching their futures sold off by Tory Prime Ministers. They chant “Tiocfaidh ár lá” not because they dream of paramilitarism but because the dream of a united Ireland, and of justice for Palestine, speaks more truth than any Starmer soundbite or BBC platitude.
Kneecap aren’t the threat. They’re a mirror held up to a crumbling order. The real menace is the Daily Mail—a propaganda sheet for empire in decline, hurling moral outrage like it’s still 1916. This isn’t journalism; it’s damage control for a state that can no longer control the narrative. Every scream about “terrorist chic” is the sound of a ruling class terrified of losing its grip. The only thing being incited here is memory. And that’s what the Mail fears most, that we remember who the real enemy is.
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