The garden parties I don’t want to attend are those where vast crowds sway and sing-along in thrall to the same music, swept up in the frenzy of that like-minded togetherness Freud called “oceanic”. I can’t go to a football match for the same reason. A goal is scored or a penalty is missed and one half of the crowd rises as though impelled by a force beyond its control and becomes a single, unindividuated mass. Cricket doesn’t lose its mirth in this way. “Barmy Army,” cry the more vociferous of English fans, thereby making fun of fandom even while expressing it. Oh, for a Barmy Army at Glastonbury. But that would shatter the trance. The anthems that would agglomerate diverse thousands into a single mass can no more abide an ambiguity than their audiences can get a joke.

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It’s the agglomeration that should worry us more than whether or not the BBC should have pulled the plug or the police should take action. How do you take action against however many thousands were complicit — not by their silence but by their enthusiastic collaboration in Bob Vylan’s call for death to Israeli soldiers? And it’s those complicit thousands we should worry about. Is there any expression of hate they wouldn’t accede to once the festival madness is upon them?

In their submission to the authority of the performer on the stage, in their arm waving and obedient chanting, are they not reminiscent of the crowds that filled marching squares and beer halls not that many years ago? I say no more than “reminiscent”. I don’t claim that Glastonbury is Munich. And I don’t even say that what crowds will sing about euphorically one day, they will put into murderous effect the next. But music and crowds are a lethal mix, carrying us away, taking us out of our shivering individual selves into the warm arms of comrades who feel and believe as we do. Sacha Baron Cohen’s endearingly racist Borat famously persuaded a group of drinkers in an Arizona bar to join him in singing “Throw the Jews down the well”. For all the bemused discomfort some of the drinkers clearly felt, they were unable to resist Borat’s appeal. Who wants to be a party pooper? History teaches that the impulse toward individuation was a long time coming; it further teaches that it takes no time at all for that impulse to go into reverse.

Whether or not Borat’s singalong resulted in any immediate harm to Jews in Arizona, I have no idea. But then that was 20 years ago. Words like Israel, Zionist, Jew were not quite so dirty then. I have already heard it argued that no harm will come to any Israeli soldier on account of Bob Vylan’s chant. They operate too far from Glastonbury Tor. But this fails to acknowledge how lies are spread and how hate is augmented. It is said that a music festival should give voice to controversy, but in the sense of expressing new thoughts or asking us to see familiar things differently, there was nothing remotely controversial about Bob Vylan’s words. You can hear them every weekend in marches through London and every day on university campuses across the Western world. Hence, you might say, the uncomplaining assent they were given by the Glastonbury crowd. It knew the words. This version of uneducated, unthinking, received unwisdom, has been normalized to the point of being commonplace. Who doesn’t wish ill on Israel now? And so it starts. Not to join in is to put a damper on the day.

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An entertainingly lightweight weekend presenter on LBC to whom I sometime listen before bed, though not on the subject of the Middle East if I can help it, offered the view that the furore over Bob Vylan and Kneecap was a sort of snobbish denial to the populace of the artistic license unquestioningly granted to literature or the stage. Such remarks as “Death, death to the IDF” he suggested, would pass unnoticed in a West End play. Which, I wonder. Somewhere along the way, our presenter has confused the freedom to speak hate with the freedom to make art. I cannot think of a play where it would be acceptable, legally or aesthetically, for a character to walk to the front of the stage mid-action and ask the audience to join him in calling for “Death, death” to anyone.

In fact, there is a marvelous play on in London at present — Giant, in which the Jew-obsessed children’s writer Roald Dahl is given enough rope to hang himself 10 times over and manages it even more than that without trying. He delivers far more bitter diatribes against Israel than Bob Vylan and Kneecap manage because he has more words. What makes the play art as opposed to propaganda is its dramatic form, questioning, testing, playing this off against that, weighing all that’s said in the light of the speakers’ psychic compulsion to say it. When Dahl’s self-destruction reaches its apotheosis in a riff of violent Jew mania that makes the Glastonbury lot sound like kindergarten name-callers, the audience audibly gasps. Gasps.

I take great comfort from that gasp. Somewhere, what is shocking still shocks. Somewhere, the individual heart still refuses the blandishments of the mob. Unfortunately, terrifyingly, that somewhere isn’t Glastonbury.

Weather-wise, Burning Man is rarely a holiday. I went for the first time with my girlfriend in 1999. We’d been warned about the extreme heat in the day, had been told that it was best to take it easy in the afternoons, to relax in the shade in preparation for nocturnal adventures later. The day-time temperatures that year were lovely, in the mid-70s; the nights were freezing. After dark I wore everything I had (which didn’t include a pair of gloves, unfortunately).

The following year it was windy and even slightly rainy. Our bikes got briefly clogged with mud. Another year there were horrendous sandstorms. These sandstorms are part of Burning Man in that they are not only to be expected but are, to an extent, caused by the event: the winds are an unalterable fact of nature but the amount of dust blowing around is increased by all the traffic and activity. One way or another the weather is rarely perfect. You have to be prepared for it being too hot, too cold and everything else. The one thing you didn’t need to worry about is drenching rain. Except now you do.

I went to Burning Man for what I thought was the last time in 2005. I’d finished that phase of my life and was, in addition, glad to be free of the multiple hardships of Black Rock City. There was always something to contend with, often a minor thing that became a major source of discomfort like painfully cracked heels from the acidic dust of the playa. Or there was the time I took a stupid gulp of what I thought was water but was actually the paraffin my friend used for her fire-spinning. Another year my wife ended up on an IV drip because of extreme dehydration.

So I was long done with it when a friend who was directing a documentary about the festival invited me to go with him in 2018. I had visions of this being a rather luxurious return. He was in talks with the organisers who were offering some logistical support. I’d heard rumours of luxury camps that went against the spirit of Burning Man and I was, of course, strongly opposed to such things. Nevertheless I said to my friend that while he should avoid using the word “resort” in any discussions, if it were possible for us to have something as close as possible to a “resort experience”, that would be ideal.

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It turned out to be far from ideal. But it did get better after the first night when my friend, the snoring film director, agreed to move out so I could have the decrepit trailer to myself. And on a couple of occasions other friends allowed us to sneak into their endowed camp and take a shower. So my experience was more luxurious than it had ever been and, overall, every bit as great as I remembered. It was still what it had been when I went that first time in 1999: a high-water mark of civilisation.

The toilets are a good symbol of this. The portapotties at festivals are always a site of potential trauma. But the principle of leaving it as you find it holds good at Burning Man. In my experience, one could be 90% confident there wouldn’t be piss or shit on the seat at any time. And there was always toilet paper. This year I heard that the torrential rain meant the toilets couldn’t be serviced. That is the stuff of nightmares, on top of the quagmire of sucking mud that dries into something like concrete. Jeez, it’s sounded, at times, like Passchendaele in the desert, albeit without the violence. “I too saw God through mud,” wrote Wilfred Owen but while many people regard Burning Man as an ecstatic religious experience, this was a vision few would have wanted to share.

England is a rainy little country, so it’s no surprise Glastonbury regularly turns into a mud-fest. People are prepared for and wallow in it. More than 10 years ago my wife and I set off for Glade Festival. It had been raining heavily. Reports of mud proved accurate but we found our friends and pitched our tent. There were two schools of thought among our group and, I’m guessing, the festival at large about what should happen next. One was: take more drugs and carry on. The other was to squelch around for a bit, pack up the tent and get the next train back to London. That’s what we did and it was a mistake; we shouldn’t have pitched the tent at all, should have just arrived, taken a look and retreated. Or, even better, not gone to Paddington. Or even left the house. The first rule of military strategy is never reinforce failure so, overall, I regard that aborted trip to the Glade in the same way that Nasa rated the Apollo 13 mission: a successful failure.

If I’d seen the weather forecast before heading off to Burning Man this year, I would have cut my losses and decided against it. But I want to make it clear: there’s not even a hint of schadenfreude about my relief at not being stranded there. Over the years, the organisers have consistently made the right decisions about policy and development, have been able to correct previous mistakes, and remained faithful to the festival’s core values in the face of its massive expansion — both actual and hegemonic — into the most influential cultural event on the planet. (Its tentacles have spread so far into the mainstream that people often aren’t aware that Black Rock City is where they’ve extended from.)

And they have always stressed that it takes place in an extreme environment unsuited to human well-being, even when conditions are optimal. Burning Man is a long-running experiment not just in radical self-expression (fun!) but radical self-reliance. At the moment this means waiting. Not waiting for someone to come to the rescue but waiting to turn a passive and challenging idea of self-reliance into a similarly challenging active and mobile one.

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Few words these days are more over-used than community. Raymond Williams, reflecting on its inclusions in his book Keywords, recalled that it was only when he noticed that “community” was never used in a negative way that he became suspicious of it. Had he lived, though, he might have seen fit to include these words from the late Larry Harvey, co-founder of Burning Man. “Communities are not produced by sentiment or mere good will. They grow out of a shared struggle.” Well, that is certainly being put to the test now — and I remain confident (from the comfort of my living room) that it’s a test that will be passed.

The larger question is what happens to the festival after this exceptional year of unprecedented struggle. The impact on the playa is presumably going to be extreme so the clean-up — meticulous, always, to the granular level — will be more difficult than ever. But it will happen and Burning Man will be back, hopefully with sunny skies, next year. I still believe in it, absolutely. And I hope the Man, however soggy and down in the mouth he may feel right now, does what he is there for and is burned, surrounded by whoever might still be around to see it happen. As Harvey argued with irrefutable logic: we have to burn the Man, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to burn him next year.

When Our Lord Jeremy extended his messianic balm over the fields of Glastonbury that June, the crowd was higher than ever — not just on the usuals — but on pure, uncut, top-shelf New Jerusalem. The torpor and apathy and cruelty of the 2010s were over at last. Salvation was at hand: Brexit would be reversed, affordable housing would be built, borders would be abolished. Every child would receive their own mega fast broadband router, and sex workers would be free to roam the land, maligned no more.

All over the country, roses shed their thorns; at Longleat, lions lay with lambs. No more either/or distinctions, from now on the British would embrace both/and. We were going to have it all, and so would the Palestinians. “That politics that got out of the box,” he roared from the Pyramid Stage, “is not going back in any box.”

And yet here we are, barely the length of a parliament later. Corbyn’s politics is not only boxed up — it is entombed, buried deep beneath the political firmament like nuclear waste. His replacement as Labour leader has less charisma than a long video of Iain Duncan Smith doing a jigsaw puzzle.

A few weeks ago, Keir Starmer appeared on television, watched by a trifling audience, and cried. (You would be crying too if you were the leader of the Labour party.) He seemed needy and awkward, like Labour’s losing, patronising, pints n’ flags n’ chip butties strategy in the Hartlepool by-election. Another by-election loss in Batley and Spen is about to follow.

What can save them? Well, when the going gets tough, the Party gets writing books. Labour luminaries are as prolix and as prolific as the most unhinged Victorian essayists. Labour tomes have fallen from the sky all year: John Cruddas’s The Dignity of Labour, will shortly be joined by Jess Philips’s Everything You Really Need to Know about Politics, and Lisa Nandy’s Finding Our Place in A World Falling Apart. And September will be shaken to its very core by Tristram Hunt’s book about Josiah Wedgewood, who he calls — sigh — “the Steve Jobs of the 18th century”. But the most revealing Labour books this year come from Ed Miliband and Gordon Brown, because they barely mention Labour at all.

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Miliband’s is called Go Big: How to Fix Our World. In 2015, unfortunate Ed looked as if he would be the first British politician to go down to posterity notable only for his association with a sandwich since… the actual Earl of Sandwich. Then he reinvented himself as a podcaster. Co-hosting Reasons to be Cheerful with the radio presenter Geoff Lloyd, Ed revealed that beneath the dorky, robotic exterior he possessed a more dorky, less robotic interior. The podcast was rampantly downloaded, and Miliband was profiled as if he were a cross between a sexier member of the pre-Raphaelites and a knight of the Algonquin Round Table. Miliband, the nearly man, had arrived.

Brown’s is called Seven Ways to Change the World, and is clearly the harvest of a long lockdown. Shakespeare wrote King Lear during his own plague-induced quarantine; Brown found not one, but seven whole ways to change the entire world. It reads like he bookmarked the Wikipedia page of the Marshall Plan, and googled “most inspiring quotes by dead African-Americans”. Like King Lear, Seven Ways is a tragedy, albeit for different reasons

Both Go Big and Seven Ways belong to the “everything can be fixed, trust us, we’re experts” genre of political treatise, which can be traced all the way back to Plato’s Republic. (Plato is a bit more honest about what technocratic governance means for liberty, democracy and the average person than Brown and Miliband are.) Both books believe the world is there to be hacked into betterness by enlightened politicians, inventive think-tankers, and dogged activists. Both see international cooperation as preferable to “populist nationalism”.

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Both books are optimistic, in the sense that they are poached in the mental and emotional atmosphere of 1997. Both Miliband and Brown have little useful or new to say about the Labour Party, Brexit, crime, defence, migration, China, or the spectacular failure of international bodies such as the WHO during the pandemic. Both books are exactly what you would expect them to be. Who is this for, other than the authors themselves?

Miliband is, I suppose, quite self-deprecating and almost aware of his ridiculousness. (He comes dangerously close to making a joke on page 9 of Go Big.) It is possible to imagine bantering with a fleece-wearing Ed while he tries to flog you overpriced organic honey at a Sunday morning farmer’s market in the Cotswolds. Brown on the other hand, remains crashingly, breathtakingly grand. Seven Ways is played in the major keys, and Brown is frozen in “We not only saved the world” mode here. Again and again he batters the reader with his motto: global problems require global solutions.

Seven Ways leaves you with the impression that if Brown found his house on fire, he would convene a summit of global thought leaders before he called the local firemen. On a panel with Fareed Zakaria, Yuval Noah Harari, and Tedros Adhanom, Brown would discuss the best ways to put out a housefire. What temperature should the dowsing water be? How long should the firehose be? Do we have the right balance of gender, sexual and racial diversity among the firemen coming to put out the blaze? His house would be a blackened hulk long before the discussion finished. In Gordon’s world there is nothing that can’t be solved by invoking the world. It’s the view from the sky, never the view from the street. This is a social democrat’s brain after 15 years of motorcades.

What Gordon will never do again is hold real power. Powerlessness shadows both texts. There is a reason why these two ex-Labour leaders don’t want to think about Britain. Brexit. So they dredge up their global solutions to global problems, straining for relevance and produce fantasies instead. If Labour stood on a manifesto cribbed from these books, they’d be lucky to get 500 votes outside the university towns.

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When they actually had power, what did they do with it? Miliband loved gimmicks as leader of the opposition, like unconvincing visits to Greggs and wearisome conversations with Russell Brand. (“The Tories should be worried,”wrote Owen Jones in May 2015, after Miliband met Brand on YouTube.) Meanwhile Brown is lauded as one of the last true intellects in British politics. A serious, big-brained, adult. And yet, as chancellor he could barely leave a room with Tony Blair in it without slamming the door so hard it lost its hinges. For a decade Brown stalked, sulked and screamed, all but consumed by tapeworms of envy that squirmed around inside him. Has there ever been a more emotionally delicate politician? “In the aftermath of 9/11, Tony rang Gordon to ask for his advice,” recalls Blair’s old advisor Jonathan Powell. “Instead of responding Gordon used the call to demand to know when Tony was going to resign. Tony slammed the phone down in a rage.”

These are men who could barely read the mood of their colleagues, let alone the country, let alone the global community. How to fix the world? How about you start by trying to fix a pothole lads? The problem for Labour is that its members may actually read these books and take them seriously. They would be much better off reading Edmund Burke, or V.S. Naipaul. Then they might understand Britain — which is currently reverting back to its spiky, crabby, nasty “fund the NHS, hang the nonces” conservative mean at the moment.

There is almost no chance that young Labourites will do that. They don’t want to understand their enemies, so they’ll be doomed to underestimate them. This is a party whose members, or the vocally online ones, spit teeth at the sight of a Union Jack. When they try to come up with a patriotism of the Left, as the talented Dan Jarvis did in a Fabian Society pamphlet this year, they fall back on platitudes. Left patriotism, Jarvis writes, should invoke the “Britain of the Tolpuddle martyrs, the Chartists, and the miners’ strike.” I can imagine this will be really appealing to all those people who actually care who the Tolpuddle martyrs and the Chartists were. The Tories, I suspect, will be happy to keep the flag, the Queen, and the Armed Forces.

Where is Labour now? In the same place they were in 1964, when Perry Anderson wrote of the party trapped in an “isolated, spot-lit enclave, surrounded on every side by hostile territory”. It’s an enclave in a land that speaks a language foreign to the party. None of the maps makes any sense. The only road out is very dark, cold and lonely. And if the party is asking Brown and Miliband for directions, they’ll be walking it for a long while yet.

At least in 1964 Labour were prepared to fight their way out of enemy territory. “If it’s the last thing I do,” said Anthony Crosland, “I’m going to destroy every fucking Grammar School in England. And Wales. And Northern Ireland.” And he actually did it! Nobody in Labour today looks capable of destroying anything, apart from the party itself. They prattle on about their values (without saying what they are) on the morning shows, or cry like X Factor contestants, or are given the run around by George Galloway in by-elections, while the country turns away in embarrassment. No wonder these old leaders don’t write books about the party today. Writing the obituary of something you put in the ground is not for everyone.