Kmflett's Blog

Rule Britannia. A much disputed part of British history

After something of a media and social media furore, largely confected as a culture war by the right it might be suggested, the BBC have determined that Rule Britannia will be played at the Last Night of the Proms this year and after several policy changes the words will be sung as well.

This suggests that the BBC is still on the page of thinking that Black Lives Matter is a moment not a movement.

Objections to the song came not just because of the words but also because of the nationalistic context it is now sung in. When you get Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage backing a cause you know something is very wrong.

While the whole matter was whipped up by the right as a distraction from many more important matters-a failing Tory Government being a key one- it wasn’t entirely without substance.

The BBC website did in fact report that the appropriateness of the song was being considered before the media furore.

One striking aspect of the whole thing was an absence even in commentaries by left of centre writers was an understanding that the nature of Rule Britannia as a patriotic dirge has been disputed more or less since it was first written

The song itself has a mixed history. Written as patriotic, the tune was often played but with different words sung.

It was for example played at Peterloo on 16th August 1819 when 18 people died and hundreds were injured by the Yeomanry after peacefully protesting for the vote.

It’s not fully clear if words were also sung but one likely version included the verse:

Will ye yield to die with hunger?

Shall the dungeon hide each head?

Shall the scoundrel Borough-monger

Rob you of your hard earn’d bread?

The history of the usage of the song is certainly complex.

Radicals held to a concept of the Freeborn Englishman with a number of liberties and rights. While these in theory accorded with how Governments of the day saw things, the practice often diverged. Hence on occasion the singing of Rule Britannia could be subversive.

E P Thompson gives an example in the Making of the English Working Class.

In the Middlesex By-Election of 1804 the radical candidate was Sir Francis Burdett. He won the poll (in pre-1832 Reform Act conditions) but his opponent was declared the winner by one vote by the Sheriff who determined that the poll had  closed when his opponent was ahead after 15 days of voting.

Even so a moral victory was celebrated by Burdett’s supporters:

An exultant crowd dragged him through London ‘amidst a cavalcade, that appeared like a moving wood- the carriages and horsemen being covered with green boughs’, while the band played ‘Rule Britannia’ and a flag flew above Burdett’s coverage painted with Hercules treading on the Hydra’.

It may be however that the subversion in such cases was that by playing Rule Britannia radicals could claim they were patriotic and were simply pursuing rights and liberties which in that context they should already have had.

The song was also sung in the Chartist period from the late 1830s at radical protests, dinners and meetings.

Here the line about Britons never being slaves had more complexity. There was a link made between African slavery and the conditions of many workers in Britain. There is a significant difference between unfree and free labour although both involve exploitation. However the practice of payment in kind known as Truck was common up to the 1830s.

Rule Britannia is not a song of the left in 2020 but that doesn’t mean the right should own its history

This post originally appeared in the Morning Star