London Socialist Historians
Media Release
24th August
Contact Dr Keith Flett 07803 167266
Historians say Blake’s Jerusalem a more appropriate end to Proms 2020 than Rule Britannia
The London Socialist Historians Group, which organises the socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, has backed calls for Rule Britannia to be dropped from this year’s Last Night of the Proms.
The historians say that the Black Lives Matters movement has rightly brought a focus on sentiments in the song about slavery that are inappropriate in 2020.
While the song was often sung in a patriotic context in the first decades of the nineteenth century it was also sung by radicals and Chartists. Their purpose was to underline the difference between the liberties and democratic rights that the song implies the ‘Freeborn Englishman’ had and the reality, where very few even had the vote.
A more appropriate song for the Proms in 2020 is one that is also a regular Last Nighter, William Blake’s Jerusalem. Blake’s poem dates from 1808 but the music was written by Sir Hubert Parry in 1916 and the orchestration is by Sir Edward Elgar.
The historians say that while even the most right-wing Tory would struggle to find fault with that pedigree, in reality as E P Thompson notes in The Making of the English Working Class, the song is about a vision of a better world, almost millenarian in intent, which relates very well to the troubled times of 2020.
London Socialist Historians Convenor Dr Keith Flett said, dropping Rule Britannia, is not about ignoring or rewriting our history. It is about acknowledging what matters to people now and looking for a song that can bring people together. William Blake’s call for a green and pleasant land is not the reality for many just now, but it is something people are fighting for.
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