By PETER HITCHENS FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY
Why are arguments about the love of country always held between BBC-type Britain-hating pinkoes, embarrassed by their own nation, and shouty jingoes, who never think about what patriotism really means?
Here we all are in a state of rage about whether the words of Rule, Britannia should be sung at the Last Night Of The Proms.
Yet the same people who claim to be exercised about this meekly submit to compulsory masks, house arrest, the suppression of Parliament, compulsory family separation and a catalogue of outrages against our liberty that only a slavish mind would accept.
For months, jingoes put up with being treated like cattle or serfs. Then they get cross because of a song? What is wrong with them?
Here we all are in a state of rage about whether the words of Rule, Britannia should be sung at the Last Night Of The Proms (pictured above)
A proper patriot knows that what makes us great above all is centuries of liberty, and a state that is beneath our feet, not over our heads.
All they needed to do was to say ‘We’re not putting up with this’ as our ancestors so frequently did. But they gave in without a whimper.
When Britain actually did rule the waves, my late father helped it to do so. In peacetime this involved years of rigorous training, harsh discomfort and long months of separation from home. In wartime, well, you probably know what it involved if you think about it.
That’s why we did not become the slaves of Hitler in the 1940s – because we still controlled the seas that surround us.
By my guess, 40 well-handled destroyers, commanded and crewed by serious, well-trained fighting men, probably made the crucial difference when it mattered. But my father, like most of those who actually do the hard work which defends the freedoms of both pinkoes and jingoes, was not much given to bombast.
The Russian convoys he took part in were grisly, exhausting, sleepless slog, not glorious. He’d lost too many friends in war. He preferred sad sea songs like Tom Bowling to any amount of Rule, Britannia.
Around 1960, not long after an ungrateful government had dumped my father on the beach in post-Suez defence cuts, I first heard Rule, Britannia, sung in a wonderful old-fashioned way by the contralto Constance Shacklock.
Around 1960, I first heard Rule, Britannia, sung in a wonderful old-fashioned way by the contralto Constance Shacklock (pictured, Last Night of the Proms in 2014)
It was a few years before the BBC fell under the spell of the cultural revolutionaries, who have been trying to get rid of such things since 1969. So she was still able to get as far as the verse containing the words ‘Thee haughty tyrants ne’er shall tame’.
I suspect everyone listening, from my eight-year-old self to the most ancient retired Admiral nodding over his grog, pictured those haughty tyrants as foreigners in strange uniforms or silly hats, Bonaparte, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin.
We never thought that – when it came to it – our painfully acquired freedoms would be strangled by a jolly, obese, blond Etonian.
Or that a people once famed for their fierceness and independence would be tamed into muzzled, mumbling submissives by a little well-orchestrated fear propaganda.
Never shall be slaves, indeed. What right do we now have to sing it at all, whether the BBC lets us or not?
From Daily Mail