Britons never, never, never shall be free of the culture wars

“SURRENDER!” thundered the Daily Mail, outraged by the decision of the BBC to drop two patriotic songs, “Rule, Britannia!” and “Land of Hope and Glory”, from the running order of the Last Night of the Proms, the September 12th finale of an annual series of broadcast concerts. Orchestral versions will be played, and the BBC, which was said to have deemed the anthems racist, maintains that the words are being dropped only because covid-19 means there will be no audience to belt the numbers out. Yet a choir will sing some of the other pieces, and there is a certain wokeness elsewhere in the programme. “Jerusalem” is to have a new arrangement referencing other countries of the Commonwealth; its composer, Errollyn Wallen, has dedicated it to the “Windrush generation” of Caribbean migrants caught in a bureaucratic foul-up.