On the Rule Britannia/Land of Hope and Glory controversy: I grew up going to The Proms. Rushing off from school in the summer to get a 40p bus to the Albert Hall, then to queue and see the best orchestras in the world playing great music for £2.50 or £3. As someone growing up

With not much easy access to music, it was the best experience for learning the repertory, and hearing some amazing performances. I never went to the last night because I didn’t care and wasn’t interested in flag waving or jingoism. What I cared about was music. So, while we’re

On the topic of a bunch loud white men decrying “wokeness” tearing apart our “culture” let’s remember that these same fuckers are the ones who have spent the last decade systematically defunding the arts. Orchestras and concert halls are on their knees. And the situation has been

Made significantly worse by policies that let the virus run wild. Musicians are struggling to make ends meet. Concert halls have increasing responded to lack of funding by making programming less diverse. Ticket prices are up everywhere. So if we’re gonna talk about the wrecking

Of culture then let’s talk about this. But frankly there are some people who just want to wave their flags and sing their idiotic tunes in that burnt out husk at the end of the world. Great. Frankly Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory don’t mean shit. I don’t mind if they

Get played and some people wave their flags. What I do want is a culture that shows how irrelevant and idiotic such a performance is, so people don’t feel the need to cling to it. But any possibility of that has been - and continues to be - destroyed by this government.

Just think about it: we’re living in a world in which people’s only access to pride is to remember their forbears dominating some foreign people. I think we should make people proud again for proper reasons, like, y’know partaking in history, redeeming past wrongs, and not just

Projecting themselves into the great procession of the victors. Anyway the thing is a non-story. Nobody cares about your shit songs. Nobody is trying to take them away from you. The whole thing is just a sham cooked up to make you believe “the left” or “woke kids” or “cultural

Marxists” are taking your culture away when in truth it is the Tories who have spent a decade demolishing it.