Much of the media – and much of the government, including a Prime Minister who didn’t appear to give a shit about the exams catastrophe or anything else that’s actually important – is huffing and puffing about the Wokerati Thought Police Black Lives Matter Political Correctness Cancel Culture Gone Mad “ban” on singing Land of Hope And Glory at the Last Night of the Proms.
There’s no ban. We can’t have entire venues full of people singing because there’s a bloody pandemic.
We’re somehow now on day three of #Promgate, and the Daily Mail, Express and Telegraph – as well as about half of the government – are raging about what the Sunday Times in its headline gently refers to as the “BBC’s ‘Black Lives Matter Proms’â€.
…I hate to be the one saying “you know we’re in a pandemic, right?â€, but you know we’re in a pandemic, right? If I didn’t know better, I’d think the political right was deftly exploiting our national inability to ignore culture-war bait in order to obfuscate bigger stories, like, I don’t know, the fact that things are going badly for the government, literally all of the time. How many more times do we have to watch this happen? What do four more years of this government have in store for us? Five hundred children somehow catch the plague due to government negligence and the Express front page is “EU demands hungry Brits RENAME Cornish pastiesâ€? After the 2022 banking crash, Boris Johnson stands behind a podium and vows that, despite the rumours, “the woke left will never make poppies illegalâ€?