Allison Pearson
Who wants to live in a Land of Woke and Sorry?
Changes are afoot at the Last Night of the Proms. Not only is this classical music institution, founded in 1895, guilty of being hideously historic, it has also been accused of encouraging people to celebrate being British. (Like there’s anything to be proud of!)
The BBC doesn’t wish to cause offence to anyone – unless you’re a white, Conservative-voting licence fee payer, in which case you deserve it – so this year the hugely popular Rule, Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory singalong will be replaced by something more in tune with the times.
Why not go the full hog and get carefully adapted versions of those songs, performed by the Amalgamated Choir of Corbynist Comrades and BBC Newsroom staff? All together now!
Land of horrible histories, smothering the free,
How shall we disdain thee, who are sick of thee?
Woker still and woker shall our protests get.
God knows, we are angry, make us angrier yet!
God knows, we are angry, make us angrier yet!
Seriously, when will the selfrighteous, monstrous regiment of Leftist vandals lay off our culture and traditions?
It seems they will not be satisfied until every suspect statue, every rousing anthem and poem written by a morally reprehensible white male (sorry, that’s basically all great poets apart from Emily Dickinson) have been cancelled.
The French national anthem contains a line calling for the sang impur (filthy foreigners) to be slaughtered and I don’t remember anyone suggesting they ban that. Unlike our metropolitan elite who consider it a badge of sophistication to despise our own history and who see patriotism as a vulgar spasm of the common man, France doesn’t go in for self-loathing.
The French are still allowed to be proud to be French. La Marseillaise makes Rule, Britannia sound about as jingoistic as the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK, but that hasn’t stopped the BBC removing the well-loved ditty, along with Land of Hope and Glory, from the Proms. Well, not removing exactly. In a compromise designed to please no one, there will be orchestral versions of the two songs but no lyrics.
So, let’s get this straight, in the week that outgoing director-general Tony Hall told the online Edinburgh Television Festival that “no one is better placed than the BBC to carry Britain’s voice and values to the world” the BBC admits it is neutering one of our country’s most enduring voices because it might offend 17 woke warriors on Twitter?
What Lord Hall actually meant is “no one is better placed than the BBC to carry the BBC’S voice and values to the world”. Increasingly, the globalist ethos of the British Broadcasting Corporation bears painfully little relation to the instincts of the British themselves.
That might explain why 500 people a day are cancelling their TV licences as the Defund the BBC campaign gathers momentum.
Each year, we give the corporation over £5billion in fees with £5million going toward the Proms. Everyone who pays for a colour TV licence contributes around 19p to subsidise tickets for the relatively small number of classical music fans who can get to the Royal Albert Hall in person.
I don’t mind that. I don’t suppose you do either. In fact, it probably makes us feel happy to be supporting a remarkable British event whose legendary Last Night provides a splendidly silly, unrepentantly jubilant and heartwarming landmark in the national calendar.
Happiness turns to disgust, however, when it emerges that our money is being spent to hollow out that same institution, to strip it of its Britishness bit by bit because the BBC feels it has to bow down before people like this year’s conductor of the Last Night, Dalia Stasevska from Finland, a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement who thinks it’s time for “change”.
Alas, Covid-19 restrictions have given cultural vandals the perfect alibi. They wouldn’t dare kill off the Rule, Britannia singalong if the Promenaders were present.
Why, you might well ask, should a woman from the whitest country in the world be dictating terms to an already splendidly diverse festival beloved of Britons for 125 years?
Many of us will look back fondly to the era when Sir Andrew Davies was on the podium. His beaming, teddybear countenance perfectly embodied the Last Night spirit of musicality, mischief and sheer good fun. Unfortunately, the BBC banned fun in 2017 because a social-justice collective in Peckham complained that smiling was “cultural appropriation”.
This year, Proms organisers were said to be looking at a “more inclusive” running order because of “a perceived association of colonialism and slavery”. Funny how “more inclusive” always means excluding millions of people who enjoy having a bit of a singalong while waving the Union flag.
Despite daily lectures from the BBC, many viewers have yet to be persuaded that their country is a racist hellhole or its past purely a cause for shame.
Typifying the new breed of culture-wars commissar, Richard Morrison wrote in BBC Magazine that Land of Hope and Glory and Rule, Britannia were “an anachronistic farrago”.
It doesn’t seem to occur to Morrison that Brits are rather fond of anachronistic farragos. Look at the Royal family. They’ll be coming for them next, mark my words.
Rule, Britannia is known as the “national air”. It’s a lovely, oldfashioned term that means vocal composition but it also conveys a sense of a melody that hangs about in the ether, ready to be sung by generation after generation.
Since its composition in 1740, the song has been braided into our cultural DNA. Gilbert and Sullivan were always quoting from it. The part of the tune’s refrain containing the word “never” – altered to never, never, never (shall be slaves) to make it easier to sing – is said to have provided the theme for the most beautiful of all British works, Elgar’s Enigma Variations. Noël Coward began his Mad Dogs and Englishmen with the first 10 notes of our cheeky national signature tune.
Is there anyone who has sung along lustily with Rule, Britannia or Land of Hope and Glory in the past 50 years who had their mind on colonialism or slavery? Don’t be ridiculous. When I attended Proms in the Park a couple of years ago, the orchestra struck up Pomp and Circumstance March No 1 in D Major and every hair on the back of every arm in that crowd immediately stood to attention. It was a wonderful moment of nostalgia and unity. How rare it is to be allowed to feel happy about being us.
The BBC has made a terrible, possibly fatal, error by pandering to a shrill minority of the young woke at the expense of loyal older consumers. Conservatives who were already consulting on decriminalising non-payment of the licence fee now have an excuse to move in for the kill.
Even Sir Keir Starmer, correctly gauging the national mood, refused to back his Leftie friends at the Beeb, saying that the “pomp and pageantry” of the Proms is “a staple of British summer”. Good for him.
Thankfully, Boris was back to his best yesterday, expressing the incredulity and dismay that millions of us feel as we see our culture trashed. “I think it’s time we stopped our cringing embarrassment about our history, about our traditions, and about our culture, and we stopped this general bout of self-recrimination and wetness,” he thundered.
Plans are now afoot to assemble a great choir of the unwoke to sing Rule, Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory outside Broadcasting House during the Last Night of the Proms.
If nothing else, it will send a signal to a BBC that holds those who pay for it in contempt that Britons never never NEVER shall be slaves to dogma. Nor ashamed to be British.