The Notting Hill Carnival is a glorious celebration of the Caribbean heritage of generations of Londoners.
It’s one of the highlights of our cultural calendar, along with Wimbledon, Royal Ascot and the British Bog Snorkelling Championships.
So imagine if someone decided it was ‘hideously black’ and had to be shorn of its steel bands, dub DJs, jerk chicken stalls and colourful costumes, on the grounds that it not only excludes the majority white population but also all those more recent arrivals from Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
There would rightly be an outcry.
Same goes for the Highland Games. What if Wee Burney and her Toytown Tartanistas decreed that tossing the caber and wearing a kilt fell foul of their exciting new ‘hate crime’ laws?
After all, Scots were the enthusiastic footsoldiers of the Empire and played a leading role in colonisation and the slave trade, as anyone who has seen Carry On Up The Khyber will attest.
I wouldn’t want to be the hapless Holyrood bureaucrat who had to inform a giant Archie Duncan lookalike, with a telegraph pole under his arm and six bottles of Stoori Midori liqueur on board, that his Caledonian pursuit is now a criminal offence.
Of course, none of this is going to happen. The Notting Hill Carnival and Highland Games are not on the Woke Brigade’s hit list.
Sadly, the same can’t be said of the Last Night of the Proms, which is the latest harmless British Institution in the crosshairs.
The BBC has come under pressure to drop Rule, Britannia and Land Of Hope And Glory from the finale of the 2020 Promenade Concerts.
Dalia Stasevska, who has the honour of being this year’s Last Night conductor, is said to be keen to ‘modernise’ the repertoire.
Someone should explain to her in words of one syllable that it was the Royal Navy that ended the slave trade on the high seas.
Depressingly, the BBC lacked the backbone to resist this madness and has relegated Rule, Britannia to a bit part in the sea shanty medley.
Land Of Hope And Glory has been shunted back from its usual starring role. And both will be orchestral versions only — no ‘offensive’ lyrics.
Those entrusted with defending our heritage have proven especially spineless in the face of the Black Lives Matter onslaught.
Revisionism is the order of the day, as the Far-Left Year Zero crowd run rampant through our institutions, tearing down statues, renaming primary schools with even the most tenuous links to slavery, and ‘decolonising’ university curriculums.
The National Trust, which exists to protect and promote our history, now prefers to airbrush the past and replace real castles with bouncy castles and ancient tapestries with fatuous touch-screen ‘experiences’ tailored to the snowflake generation.
If this Covid insanity ever passes, next year’s Promenade Concerts will almost inevitably be ‘re-purposed’ for the Age of Stupid. They could call it the Last Ever Night of the Proms!The Notting Hill Carnival is a glorious celebration of the Caribbean heritage of generations of Londoners.
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Miss Stasevska, from Finland, is reported to believe that the absence of an audience is the ideal time to drag the Proms screaming and kicking into the Summer of Stupidity.
‘Dalia is a big supporter of Black Lives Matter and thinks this is the perfect moment to bring change,’ a BBC source said.
She apparently has the support of the South African soprano Golda Schultz, who has been invited to perform as a soloist on September 12.
If they don’t fancy the traditional Last Night line-up, they don’t have to take the gig.
There are plenty of other musicians who would be grateful for the work.
Surely their very selection is evidence of the inclusivity of the Proms, which has bent over backwards, forwards and sideways to showcase music from around the world.
Far from being a jingoistic celebration of Little Englander nationalism, the concerts have become the very model of modern diversity.
In recent years, the Union flag has been outnumbered on the Last Night by those ghastly blue and yellow EU numbers, handed out at the door by recalcitrant Remainers.
We’ve had to put up with ‘Refugees Welcome Here’ banners draped ostentatiously from hospitality boxes by self-obsessed show-offs, determined to signal their virtue while having no intention of inviting an asylum seeker into their own lovely homes.
Now we’re suffering a lecture about our wicked racist history from a 35-year-old from Finland, one of the whitest countries on Earth.
Typically, her objections are steeped in ignorance about Rule, Britannia ‘celebrating’ Britain’s role in the slave trade.
