Rule Britannia faces axe in BBC’s ‘Black Lives Matter Proms’

What i don't get it how theyve managed to pervert 'being inclusive' to mean ignoring the majority in favour of the minority. Hell not even a minority with a real grievance as its only a couple of loud mouth malcontents who seem to get uppity on such things and demand it all be binned.
Its really a shame seeing the BBC bend over backwards to rubbish its formerly sterling name these days.

And they wonder why there’s such a huge backlash?

I agree with Drewski, it’s a non-story.

As far as news goes these days most stories are in that category though. I just felt like wallowing in a bit of outrage over this for a bit though, not overly enjoying seeing high culture being dragged through the squalid blm mud.

I assume that Brexit voters will be up in arms, I’m sure these songs playing loud and clear on every radio station far and wide on the day we completely cut all ties with the EU was what they would have imagined. You know, since we’ll have the empire back...

To the issue in hand, just more left wing cancel culture. I don’t really care either way, however this left wing rubbish needs to stop. This will not be popular with the majority of voters, only your virtue signalling celebs. Interested to see what line Starmer has on this.

It must be soooo inconvenient that ppl aren’t interested in hearing an Imperial slave catching ballad 😍

How'd you arrive at this rather amusing conclusion?

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.

The bbc, which next week gets a new director-general, Tim Davie, wants to attract younger, more diverse audiences. The average bbc1 viewer is over 60. Younger people, who spend more time watching YouTube than television, balk at paying the £157.50 ($208) annual tv licence fee. But the Proms is an odd place to woo them. Only 8% of people think the songs in question should be dropped, and 9% that they should be performed without lyrics, according to YouGov. Those people will probably not tune in.

There are misunderstandings on both sides of the argument. Traditionalists exaggerate the Proms’ pedigree. Though the concerts began in 1895, the party atmosphere of the Last Night, with its boisterous crowds and Union Jacks, began only after it was regularly televised in the 1950s. Reformers have some things wrong too. “Rule, Britannia!”, which sounds like 19th-century triumphalism, dates from 1740. “The song was an exhortation to naval greatness, rather than a celebration of it,” writes Sir David Cannadine, a historian (hence Britannia “rule”, not “rules”, the waves).

This week’s skirmish, which has distracted from the government’s various covid-19-related foul-ups, is the best thing that has happened to Boris Johnson for some months. With the economy battered by the virus and facing a no-deal Brexit in January, it makes sense to focus on culture. Mr Johnson, who had a career writing liberal-baiting Daily Telegraph columns before he was prime minister, is particularly good at it.

But Labour under Sir Keir Starmer is not the sitting duck that it was when led by Jeremy Corbyn, who appeared uncomfortable even singing the national anthem. This week the party affirmed that “the pomp and pageantry of the Last Night of the Proms is a staple of British summer”. The memo did not, apparently, reach Neil Coyle, one of the party’s mps. “These fat old racists won’t stop blaming the eu when their sh*t hits the fan. Here they come blaming others,” he tweeted of the bbc’s critics.

It must be soooo inconvenient that ppl aren’t interested in hearing an Imperial slave catching ballad 😍

It's just sad to see hoe people haven't taken about three minutes to research the topic. The song is a hymn against the capture of British nationals who were then sold as slaves in Africa and the Middle East. That wasn't anything unheard of until the rise of the European colonial empires which disrupted this process. Also ignoring the author was anti-slavery. But don't let facts go against your virtue-signalling.

It's only because they aren't allowed to sing because of Covid-19. The BBC have confirmed the songs will be back with lyrics next year, so it's nothing to do with racism etc