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© Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.Rule, Britannia! BBC ditches singalong lyrics amid colonial rethink
By DANICA KIRKA LONDON©2024 GPlusMedia Inc.
29 Comments
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ohara
Its way past time to ditch the BBC.
Hello Kitty 321
No they have not ditched it.
Alfie Noakes
This article has been butchered. Anyone interested in reading the correct version can find it here:
https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/rule-britannia-bbc-play-song-lyrics-concert-72593261
Mickelicious
Prolefeed to distract from the dummy in Downing Street and his unelected ventriloquist.
Ego Sum Lux Mundi
Good. British (mainly English) jingoism has been a curse on the world for hundreds of years now. Even their flag is rightly known as "The Butcher's Apron"
Starbucks
@ego
And where they finished off America took over.
Sneezy
Who cares?
Maria
Oh please. They'd have to actually express embarrassment and self-recrimination first. Most Britons don't know their own history as it affected millions negatively.
Jimizo
Kehinde Andrews is a professional moaner. Boris Johnson is a waste of oxygen.
Trevor Phillips is a man worth listening to.
Luddite
Trevor Phillips is right on the money here.
Tobia
A statement coming from Boris Johnson, the big clown. He is fuelling nationalism and populism. His Brexit campaign was built on lies and misinformation and yet many people believed him. His government currently has TWO big issues to deal with - Covid and Brexit.
Jimizo
He usually is. He can usually be relied on to talk honestly about issues like this as the woke and rightist clowns immediately follow what’s on their hymn sheets.
u_s__reamer
The incompetent Tories will still be singing it when they go down with their leaking ship of state after they run onto the reef of Brexit that they are heading directly for.
Mr Kipling
Can the British not rejoice in their Britishness if only just once a year?
After all they have done for the world..... spreading manners, politeness, common sense, railways, legal systems, rule of law, parliaments, afternoon tea, crumpets and sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Not to mention cricket!!
Truly the Land of Hope and Glory!
Jimizo
We owe an apology for that.
I don’t like all this flag-waving, patriotic Rule Britannia crap, but the virtue signaling crowd isn’t an improvement on it.
Maybe we could hold a separate woke Last Night at the Proms with safe spaces.
cleo
You’re being very modest. We all know that afternoon tea is so much better with a selection of Mr Kipling’s exceedingly good cakes.
:-)
Luddite
I could just scoff a Battenberg right now.
Ken Wyatt
Whether this article is accurate or not is irrelevant.
And anyone who claims that those songs are somehow racist just proves how little they understand British culture, which often mocks itself.
One of the points of the proms is to enjoy it. People from all over the world attend and wave their own flags.
If the woke and other pathetic losers can't stand people enjoying themselves, no one is forcing them to watch.
Jimizo
Yep. A rousing ‘God save our gracious team’ at the FA Cup final and a forlorn ‘Land of dope and Tories’ after a Conservative election win.
ebisen
My version of the British history: until WWII they raped and plundered half of this world for hundreds of years. After noticing there's nothing to plunder from EU, they decided to leave it.
Toasted Heretic
Be sure and tell that to the thousands of people who rely on the BBC for their wages. The electricians, canteen staff, cleaners, drivers, postrooms, the IT staffers, the supplying companies, the production houses, the sound engineers and camera crews etc.
The Last Night is a cringefest of jingoism and flag waving. It may be watched by millions but is not representative of the proms and prom-goers. I've been to the proms on a few occasions (not Last Night) and it's been brilliant - classic and modern composers. And not a butcher's apron in sight.
Toasted Heretic
Fine with me, they'll always be welcome back. But can they leave the 6 counties for good, please?
Jimizo
Partly true, but I wonder why other notorious colonizers and plunders like the French, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgians etc. didn’t think the same way. The Germans and Italians were a touch aggressive in acquiring new real estate last century.
Europe is a bit of a rogues’ gallery all round.
Vanessa Carlisle
American, Japanese and British imperial history (and American current reality) are linked one respect: the contribution of both good and bad people playing an international game of good cop, bad cop. Many in the British Empire were all about helping, enriching, empowering and including the colonies and their people. And riding on their backs were the bigoted slime nationalists who saw all those not of the British Islands and especially non-English as barely better than livestock. It was a great failing of the decent British people that they did not get the slime under nearly enough control. And so many people were disadvantaged, down-trodden, robbed, slaved, raped and murdered. That being the case, I wonder how anyone can listen to "Rule, Britannia" and not feel a boiling rage, unless of course they are the exact type of nationalist slime that played the bad cop in yesteryear.
BBC should have cut that crap out of the program long ago.
ebisen
How self-entitled. I'm sure most of their colonies would have prefered to be left alone..
Jimizo
I’m sure if you’d been around at the time, you’d have had enlightened 21st century views.
You probably wouldn’t have known about any of the atrocities committed. The majority of the illiterate UK population in the 18th and most of the 19th centuries were fighting off malnutrition and disease. The British elites at the time had perhaps slightly more respect for the British peasants as they did for the people of the colonies.
If you knew anything about British history, you’d know that colonialism was an elitist enterprise. The plebs used as foot soldiers in this carried the uneducated, racist, ignorant views of their time, as did the people being colonized.
You very probably would have held the same uneducated views.
As for the Rule Britannia bollocks, I’ve got no time for it but the professionally outraged woke mob are fantastic recruiters for the nationalistic crap you are railing against.