Here we go again: Britannia will continue to rule at the Last Night of the Proms. Unveiling a wide-ranging programme for this year’s festival, Sam Jackson, controller of BBC Radio 3 and also director of the Proms, assured audiences that the jingoistic 18th-century anthem would take its customary place at the climax, despite calls for it to be dropped.
A dignified and unhectoring case for standing the song down was made on Desert Island Discs by the cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, a soloist in last year’s Last Night. Revealing that he had left the concert early to avoid it, he said: “I think maybe some people don’t realise how uncomfortable a song like that can make a lot of people feel, even if it makes [the people singing it] feel good.”
His remarks were greeted with vicious racist online abuse, which Mr Jackson said had made him “pause and reflect”. But he added that the challenge facing the BBC was that opinion is deeply divided: “I could sit in a room full of people who feel exactly the same way as Sheku and I could sit in another room full of licence-fee payers who feel just as strongly, if not more so, that Rule, Britannia! is a crucial part of our culture and tradition ... I would argue we have to do what is morally right at the BBC. We should never do things just because it’s what other people might want.”
Supporters of the song have argued that it celebrates defending British subjects, and point out that when Thomas Arne set James Thomson’s poem to music in 1740, Britain was far from ruling the waves. But the invocation to do so, and the insistence that “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves”, can hardly be separated from the fact that the country was then the world’s largest slave-trading nation and used naval power to build and maintain its empire for two centuries more.
Some have contended that Beethoven, Wagner and Johann Strauss are among subsequent composers to have found inspiration in the music. But all works of art change their meaning with time, because this is dependent on the eyes, ears and minds of those who experience them.
The history of the BBC’s handling of the issue is unedifying. Back in 2020 it resolved to play the song without words, then U-turned to run it in full after the then prime minister Boris Johnson intervened. So there are lots of reasons why it is easier to stick with the status quo. The long-running quarrel over Rule, Britannia! is a sideshow in the much bigger crisis facing the BBC in the runup to the renegotiation of its licence, and the corporation does not want to get dragged into culture wars.
These are pragmatic reasons. The moral issue is not who to please but what is the right thing to do. At a time when desperate migrants are drowning amid a new mission to control the waves, Rule, Britannia! seems more inappropriate than ever as a statement of collective identity. The row has rumbled on for so long that it has become overfreighted with significance. There are other, and better, pieces that fit the bill, some of them played at the Proms already. Sooner or later, someone will have to step up, consign Arne’s work to history – and face the music.
