What complicates the matter further is the issue raised by Dalia Stasevska, who will conduct the concert (and who is incidentally, only the second woman to do so). She is a keen supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement and she regards this as the perfect moment to bring change presumably because she believes that lyrics endorsing imperial values associated with slavery and persecution need to be eliminated.

This needs unpicking. Every arts organization, including the BBC, has been put in a flat spin by the challenge of Black Lives Matter. Terrified of being caught out or denounced as unconsciously racist, they are all frantically trying to improve their diversity and inclusion policies, shortcomings in which would leave them ineligible for grants and vulnerable to denunciation on social media.

Without for a second doubting that black lives do matter very much and that the black population has been subject to much terrible injustice, it needs to be said that on the arts front, the instant surrender to all BLMs demands and insistences has been moving too fast, to nobodys benefit. Substantial change is desperately needed, but it needs to come slowly and steadily, from within the educational system. Instead it is being forced through via a series of empty gestures and virtue signals, from taking the knee to engaging board members on the grounds of their ethnicity rather than their skills or experience.

Dropping a venerable tradition such as the Last Night of the Proms at a time of national crisis and high emotion, would be just such a move, playing into the hands of the illiberalism of the cancel culture and its contempt for the principles of free speech. The traditions of the Last Night of the Proms may embody attitudes that some of us dont approve of, but so do Wagners operas and Shakespeares history plays. Singing Rule, Britannia!and waving a flag may be as silly in left-liberal eyes as rolling cheese down a hill or Morris dancing, but many people enjoy it and they have a right to do so. The BBC serves the whole nation, and the Proms is a broad church, welcoming all forms and styles of music: purging the Last Night will upset more people than it pleases.

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The Proms' patriotic songs are harmless, silly tradition we should leave them well alone - Telegraph.co.uk