Matthew d’Ancona
While the proms row rages a young black woman dies in poverty with her child by her side
THIS is the week in which we should all — in collective shame — commit to memory the name of Mercy Baguma. On Saturday, this 34-year-old asylum seeker, originally from Uganda, was found dead in her flat in Govan, south Glasgow, beside her malnourished baby, who was immediately hospitalised. It appears that, in the sixth richest country in the world, a desperate young woman died of nothing more complex than extreme poverty, and that her one-year-old son would have met the same appalling fate had the sound of his crying not been heard. It is hard to imagine a more scandalous failure of collective care for the most vulnerable. When it counted, how much did their black lives matter?
Meanwhile, the papers and social media have been devoting their energies to the row over the Last Night of the Proms, following a report in the Sunday Times that Dalia Stasevska, the Finnish conductor of the concert, and a strong supporter of BLM, was considering whether or not to include the traditional performance of Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory.
On Monday, the Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden, weighed in to say that he had raised “concerns” with the BBC about the potential exclusion of the two songs. It was then announced that orchestral versions of both would indeed be played as part of the event on September 12 — which will, of course, be performed without an audience to join in.
Yesterday, Boris Johnson declared himself dissatisfied that the lyrics of the songs will not be heard this year. “I think it’s time we stopped our cringing embarrassment about our history,” the PM said.
The air waves have buzzed with historians and musical experts arguing over the extent to which Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory are horrendously outdated musical propaganda from an age of imperialism — and should therefore, axiomatically, be dropped from the Last Night of the Proms. For what it’s worth, I think the tradition exemplifies Orwell’s famous distinction between patriotism and nationalism. The former, he wrote, was a “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people”. Nationalism, in contrast, “is inseparable from the desire for power”.
Using these definitions, both songs were written in a nationalist age but — in the post-colonial era — have softened into folksy patriotic tradition. One of the besetting sins of our age is a tendency towards excessive literalism. I don’t believe for a moment that the Prommers who belt out James Thomson’s claim, set to music by Thomas Arne in 1740, that “Britannia rules the waves” really think that the United Kingdom is, or should be, the dominant global maritime power of the 21st century; any more than they believe, as A.C. Benson’s lyrics to Land of Hope and Glory assert, that this country’s sovereign territory is going to extend “wider still and wider”.
These words were written in 1901. What they communicate now, 119 years later, is nothing more sinister than a sense of patriotic solidarity, optimism and joy. Those who sing them at the Last Night of the Proms are no more making a literal defence of past British colonialism than those who sing “Good King Wenceslas” at Christmas are commemorating 10th-century Czech philanthropy.
In the great social discussion about
It is hard to imagine a more scandalous failure of collective care. How did their black lives matter?
racial justice and the need for an honest historical reckoning about imperialism and slavery, there is certainly an important place for debate about cultural symbols, traditions and the artefacts with which we fill our public spaces. Nobody worth listening to mourns the statue of the slave-trader Edward Colston, toppled and hurled into Bristol Harbour on June 7.
Yet such campaigns can be a slippery slope: a means of replacing the hard yards of practical reform with performative outrage. Only weeks after the murder of George Floyd on May 25, the initial — and much-needed — discussion of police brutality and structural racism was being eclipsed by secondary arguments about the content of episodes of Fawlty Towers and whether or not Hamilton should be “cancelled”.
The wisest response by a UK politician in those first, intense weeks of global protest was David Lammy’s. As the shadow justice secretary said in June, the absolute priority had to be action, not gestures or new commissions: there were dozens of recommendations by past review bodies — including Lammy’s own into the treatment of BAME individuals in the criminal justice system — sitting in Whitehall’s in-tray. As he said: “Implement them.”
Here are a few statistics to bear in mind. Between 1990 and 2017, one-third of those stopped by the police in England and Wales under “stop and search” were from ethnic minority backgrounds. BAME Britons were more than twice as likely to die from coronavirus.
White pupils are more than three times as likely to achieve high grades than Afro-Caribbeans. One third of FTSE-100 companies still do not have a single ethnic minority board member. White home ownership rates are more than twice those of black Caribbean people and more than three times those of black African Britons. In 2017-18, black households were more than five times more likely to be categorised as “statutory homeless” in England.
It is these and other pathologies like them that should be our focus — not the songs we sing once a year at the Proms. Each and every one demands political will, the heavy-lifting of policy reform, resource allocation and on-the-ground enactment: the work of years, probably decades. Each and every one is a true test of patriotism. A land of hope and glory does not allow a woman to die in poverty with her child at her side.