Few things jar on the average British sensibility more than the limp rhyming and plodding harmonies of our national anthem. This is not because everyone in Britain is a republican, a Scot or even a rampant atonalist. Rather it is because exposure to raw, unfiltered patriotism of the kind necessarily congealed in any established national anthem tends to rub us up the wrong way. It's just not very British to be, well, openly British.
Except, of course, when the very notion of Britishness, so irksome when it finds expression in any but the most self-deprecating manner, comes under attack. Then we rise, sleepily, just as we rose up yesterday against the ill-advised comments that the culture minister, Margaret Hodge, delivered at a "breakfast event" hosted by the Institute for Public Policy Research.
What Hodge said was simply that it is in the nature of the creative arts to unify culture. They unite us, that is to say, in virtue of our sense of belonging to the culture of appreciation they create. In order for society to become cultured in this way, however, artworks must prove appealing. And the wider the social group in question, the wider the appeal they need have.
Had she left it at that, or something like it, she could have settled down to address her IPPR bacon and eggs in the satisfaction of having talked an unusual amount of sense. Instead she brought up the Proms, suggesting that its audiences are "still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease in being part of [such cultural events]".
What Hodge had in mind was of course not the Proms as a whole, which is as accessible and diversely programmed a music festival as any in existence. Rather, she had in view the noisy, gung-ho jingoism of the Proms' Last Night, which so many feel to be an unsightly thorn in the side of Britain's guiltily post-imperial identity.
The problem, however, is that it is in precisely this thorniness, in the embarrassing unsightliness of patriotic display, that the only reliable notion of British identity really consists. For the truly British sentiment on display at the Last Night of the Proms is expressed not by the flag-waving antics of an otherwise perfectly normal and well-behaved subsection of society. Rather, it is expressed negatively by the rest of us in humouring them, tacitly acknowledging that their activities are precisely what allows us, until painful duty calls, to refrain from indulging in anything quite so un-Britishly gung-ho ourselves.
The recurring arguments about the Last Night of the Proms basically all come down to deciding what is most un-British. Is it more un-British to indulge sentiments of national pride that, however fervent and sincere, tend to be directed toward a concept of the nation that is neither extant nor particularly useful? Or is it more un-British forcibly to intervene and prevent such expressions from taking place, in an attempt to replace the amorphous object of patriotic sentiment with something that would most probably prove even more unsightly?
Most people, myself included, would plump for the latter. As George Orwell pointed out as long ago as 1941, the one thing all Britons really unite in is in their dislike of nosy parkers. And presumably, the one thing they unite in disliking most of all is the kind of nosy parker that fiddles with and prods at precisely the thing that no one really wants to see out in the open, namely the concept of Britishness itself.
It is this dislike that has forever prevented us from writing a coherent political constitution. It has also presided over the formerly liberal immigration policy for which we must thank Britain's robust multicultural good health - that very same good health, it should be stressed, that politicians are so keen to incorporate into their revisionist Britishness.
For this reason, Gordon Brown's attempt to reconfigure our sense of national identity, of which his culture minister's outburst was an ill-advised part (why else would the prime minister have tried to correct Hodge's error so speedily) is bound to fail. National identity is a question of sensibility, not policy; and where, as in our case, this sensibility is wrapped in layers of self-deprecating doubletalk, it is not one that will easily find itself adjusted by party-political initiatives - at least not in the short term.
The government would be much better advised to go back to strengthening our cultural and artistic institutions and simply letting them be. For these are the real places in which sensibilities are formed and reshaped, and where questions about what it is to be British, among others, may most usefully be posed. Let the concert halls and museums, theatres and cinemas get on with doing what they do, and our recalcitrant sense of cultural identity may fall into line sooner than the political nosy-parkers may suspect. As for the Proms' notoriously jingoistic final jamboree, surely we should let bygones, where we find them in such rude health, be bygones?
