Richard Morrison

The BBC Proms has no excuse not to reform its Last Night traditions

As I write I have no idea of what the BBC is planning for the final fortnight of this summer’s strange, socially distanced Proms season – the fortnight when live concerts will apparently happen again in the Royal Albert Hall. It’s quite possible that David Pickard, the Proms director, doesn’t yet have every detail sewn up either. In a world where we still aren’t sure whether we can safely walk a metre or two metres from strangers or whether we can visit dear old granny on alternate Saturdays if we haven’t formed a bubble with two maiden aunts in the meantime, it’s no shame to say, as in effect the BBC has done, ‘Let’s wait and see’.

I do know, however, what should not be part of Pickard’s plans. With massed choirs and a packed, flag-waving audience ruled out on medical grounds, there will never be a better moment to drop that toe-curlingly embarrassing anachronistic farrago of nationalistic songs that concludes the Last Night of the Proms. And I don’t mean drop them just for this year. I mean forever.

They form a kind of unholy trinity: Jerusalem, Land of Hope and Glory and Rule, Britannia!. Jerusalem I can just about endure, though I think the questioning, almost incredulous nuances of William Blake’s words are being massively misunderstood if they are hurled out like a football chant.

But the other two? Each year I try to convince myself that they are being performed ‘ironically’ . After all, there can’t be many people in 2020 who think that Britain really does rule the waves, or that God will make us ‘mightier still’ with each passing epoch. How else could you possibly sing those words, except as history re-enacted as farce?

Yet each year, dutifully reporting the event for my newspaper, I look around me – particularly at the people sitting in the posh seats whom I’ve never seen at any other Proms – and realise that I can detect absolutely no sign of irony as they roar out these crudely jingoistic texts. On the contrary, they seem to mean every single word. And even if they don’t, what comes across to the worldwide TV audience is a stereotype of Little England that was already being lampooned when I first went to the Proms half a century ago.

It’s true that at recent Last Nights the BBC has allowed a succession of non-british singers to subvert Rule, Britannia!, even downright mock it, as they performed it. Tenor Jonas Kaufmann extracted a pair of Union Jack underpants from his trousers and tossed them into the crowd during the final chorus. The Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez delivered the song dressed as an Inca chieftain. And last year the irrepressible mezzo Jamie Barton produced a gay pride rainbow flag, which she waved vigorously as she sang.

It makes no difference. The line announcing that ‘Britons never will be slaves’ evokes associations that strike me as entirely unacceptable in 2020. Yes, historians will point out that in 1740, when James Thompson wrote those words for Thomas Arne to set in his patriotic masque Alfred, there was a real danger that the British would be enslaved by more powerful continental nations, not to mention Barbary pirates. A strong Royal Navy was a guarantee of the nation’s liberty.

But Britain’s maritime power was also being used for a much nastier purpose: to transport captive Africans, in wretched conditions, across the Atlantic to the American colonies. That was the hugely profitable outcome of Britannia ‘ruling the waves’: ensuring that hundreds of thousands of other people were turned into slaves, even if Britons weren’t. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests and the toppling of the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, it would surely be insensitive, bordering on incendiary, to roar out these hypocritical 18th-century words, with or without irony.

Back in 2001, when the Last Night occurred four days after the 9/11 atrocities, the BBC sensibly replaced both Rule, Britannia! and Land of

Hope and Glory with more reflective music. Absolutely nobody minded. Unfortunately the items were restored the following year. An opportunity was missed to give the world’s most accessible and wide-ranging classicalmusic festival a finale that reflects the attitudes of its 21st-century performers and audiences, not their Edwardian predecessors.

Now, thanks to the coronavirus, there’s a second chance to devise a feelgood finale that doesn’t provoke offence or ridicule. The BBC should have the courage to seize it.

The line announcing that ‘Britons never will be slaves’ strikes me as unacceptable in 2020