An evening of flag waving and old songs manages to unite people who agree on almost nothing else
The Last Night of the Proms returns again this year, that curious annual ritual of flag waving, old patriotic songs, and a genuinely warm, communal atmosphere that somehow manages to draw a broadly cheerful crowd from across a country that otherwise seems to agree on remarkably little when it comes to questions of national identity. I think it is worth asking what makes this particular tradition work when so many other attempts at shared national celebration generate genuine controversy instead.
A Ritual Built Around Music Rather Than Argument
Part of what I think makes the Proms genuinely durable, compared to more explicitly political expressions of patriotism, is that its core content, orchestral music and a handful of familiar patriotic songs performed in a concert hall setting, asks remarkably little of anyone attending in terms of explicit political commitment. You can wave a flag at the Proms while holding almost any set of views about immigration, the monarchy, or Britain’s role in the world, because the event itself is not really asking you to declare a position on any of those genuinely contested questions.
Why This Matters Given How Contested Other Symbols Have Become
Given how genuinely fraught the Union Jack itself has become in other contexts, discussed at length elsewhere in this column, it is worth noting that the same flag, waved enthusiastically inside the Royal Albert Hall during Rule Britannia, rarely generates the same controversy as a flag flown from a house or a lamppost in a residential street. Context, in other words, appears to matter considerably more than the symbol itself, a genuinely useful observation for anyone trying to understand why national symbols generate such wildly different reactions depending on precisely where and how they appear.
The Songs Themselves Are Not Without Their Own History
It would be incomplete to present the Proms as entirely apolitical, since several of its most famous songs, including Rule Britannia specifically, carry genuine historical baggage tied to Britain’s imperial past, a history that has periodically generated its own debate about whether these particular songs still belong in a modern, more critically self aware national celebration. That debate has, so far, tended to resolve in favour of keeping the traditional programme largely intact, though rarely without at least some renewed discussion each year about whether that choice still sits comfortably with contemporary sensibilities.
What The Crowd Itself Tells You
Attendees at the Last Night, in my own observation over several years of watching coverage and occasionally attending in person, tend to represent a genuinely broad cross section of the country rather than any single political tribe, suggesting the event has succeeded in creating a shared ritual space that people bring their own varied meanings to, rather than imposing a single, contested meaning onto everyone who chooses to attend.
A Useful Model For Other National Moments
I think there is a genuinely interesting lesson here for anyone thinking about how Britain might build other shared national moments capable of surviving the country’s genuine political and cultural divisions, namely that rituals built around shared, low stakes participation, music, food, sport, tend to prove considerably more durable and inclusive than rituals that require explicit agreement on more contested political questions.
Why I Will Be Watching Again This Year
Whatever my own more complicated feelings about some of the evening’s more imperially tinged musical content, I find myself, most years, genuinely moved by the sheer scale of shared, good natured participation the Last Night manages to produce, a reminder that a country capable of such fierce disagreement about what patriotism actually means can still, for one evening a year, mostly just enjoy singing the same songs together.
Further background on this year’s programme is available via the BBC Proms official site, and further discussion of contested national symbolism is available via this Hyphen essay on the flag debate.