With Glastonbury taking place over the same weekend that see the EU Referendum being polled, Emily Eavis has written an open letter asking the festival goers to still take the time to vote.
Glastonbury festival hosts around 200,000 people over that weekend and Eavis believes that the festival-goers not voting could massively skew the results.
The issue was first raised when the date for the referendum vote was announced, but until now, the Glastonbury camp has been relatively quiet. Eavis states that this Thursday of Glastonbury will be a very different Thursday to the others, as this is one of the most important votes that British people will ever cast.
Eavis also stated how she and the other members of the Glastonbury team are very proud of the way the festival engages people in politics. She also noted how the festival has always been a great way of showing ways that the world could be.
You can read Eavis’s letter below:
“It’s now exactly three months until we welcome 200,000 people back to Worthy Farm for this year’s Glastonbury festival. This is the point in the year where the office at the farm is alive at all hours with fantastic plans and a constant flow of meetings. We are very lucky to have such a special team to make it happen, coming through every day with even more ideas than last year: more ambitious, more fire, more metal, bigger sculptures, more music and more campaigning.
But it’s also going to be a rather different year. On the Thursday of this year’s festival – the day after the gates open and at a point when almost all our ticket holders will have arrived – the UK will decide whether or not it wants to remain as part of the European Union. It is, without question, one of the most important votes we’ll ever have to cast. And the result is likely to be announced the following day, around the time that the first acts perform on the Pyramid Stage. We will, it’s fair to say, be paying close attention. As, no doubt, will our audience.
At Glastonbury we are very proud of our long history of engaging our audience in politics and activism. We say it every year, but we really do try to make Glastonbury festival a beacon of how things can be better, opening hearts and minds to different ways of seeing the world: greener, cleaner, fairer, kinder, a lot more peaceful and a lot more fun.
So, we weren’t too surprised when ticketholders began to get in touch with us about the referendum, long before its date had even been announced. They wanted to know whether they’d be able to vote at the festival if it did clash with the referendum. We checked with the Electoral Commission and they confirmed that, no, it will not be possible, as people must vote in the constituency they’re registered in.
But, of course, that certainly does not mean that the people coming can’t – or shouldn’t – vote on 23 June. The day that the referendum date was announced, we began our campaign to encourage everyone coming to the festival to register for either a postal vote (which is what I’ve done) or a proxy vote (where you nominate someone to do it for you). And we’ll be continuing that right up until the cut-off dates, including emailing every ticketholder with the information on how to vote. Those details are also at the bottom of this blog.
Registering to vote and then registering for your postal or proxy vote isn’t complicated or time-consuming. And this is a decision that really will affect the lives of everyone in the UK. It would, frankly, be a bit daft not to have your say. How you vote is a huge decision, and one which I think we all need to make for ourselves. To me, that means reading and listening and talking about it until you’ve made an informed choice. Clearly this campaign is going to be emotive and divisive, but I hope people will take the time to consider the arguments properly, rather than resorting to knee-jerk reactions.
It’s strange to think that, on that Friday morning of this year’s Glastonbury, so many people will awake in these fields to discover the result of the referendum. Whichever way it goes, many thousands of those people will be very unhappy with the decision that the nation has made. But imagine how much worse they’ll feel if they realise they could have made a difference, yet didn’t make use of their vote.”
