Arguing about the last night of the Proms is as much of an annual tradition as the music itself. Usually this hubbub has something to do with it being the very last place, or occasion, where people sing along with a straight face to ‘Rule, Britannia’. This year though the storm revolves around EU flags being confiscated by Proms’ security staff.
There is nobody more committed to the EU than a certain type of British Remainer
What seems to have sparked the flag crackdown at the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday was a gathering outside by a pro-EU campaign group called ‘Thank EU For The Music’. Ten thousand EU flags were dished out to lucky ticket holders. Charlie Rome, 40, from south London, who helped organise the demonstration, said the show of flags wasn’t intended to ‘spoil’ the last night of the Proms:
‘We are not trying to make a mess of things. I sing here, I don’t want to get banned. But you have to make as loud a noise as you can.’
But staff at the Albert Hall appeared to take a different view; when some Proms’ fans tried to take their EU merchandise into the venue, they were told the flags weren’t allowed. There appeared to be little agreement amongst security staff about which flags were, and weren’t, permitted. Some EU flag holders were waved through; others were told their EU flags had to go in the bin. Patriotic Union flag wavers were also fearful their flags would be confiscated, though this doesn’t seem to have been the case.
If the pictures of boggle-eyed EU fans outside the Albert Hall smothered in all their regalia are anything to go on, staff were right to take a hard line. Steve Bray, 55, the anti-Brexit activist, was, unsurprisingly, among those who turned up.
Does anyone else find it inconceivable that this lot are still at it? Will they live forever frozen in 2017, chuntering about David Davis or the ‘three baskets’ and muttering through their spittle about ‘advisory’ referendums and ‘low-information’ voters and slogans on buses? David Cameron is gone, Theresa May is gone, Boris Johnson is gone. Anna Soubry and Gina Miller – and now even Jolyon Maugham – have left the field. But, still, these hardcore Remainers remain. Can’t they at least leave the Proms alone?
The new government may be making friendly movements towards the EU, but even Keir Starmer realises the EU jig is up. Yet the pro-EU mob haven’t noticed this, or any number of other big, inconvenient truths. Adopting Schengen and the euro – as the EU might well ask Britain to do – would be insurmountable obstacles to rejoining the bloc.
The EU itself is also in a very different, much stickier, position than it was at the time of the referendum. Its economic ills are plain to see, and make Starmer’s plan for closer links to Germany seem like a policy more suitable for 1974 than 2024. The drift of European voters towards a hard line on the progressive shibboleths of immigration and multiculturalism, far more pronounced than in the UK, also doesn’t seem to have registered with the EU flag wavers. Even Michel Barnier, the former Brexit negotiator and newly-appointed French PM, has caught up. But EU diehards can’t seem to acknowledge reality.
There is nobody more committed to the EU than a certain type of British Remainer. These are people lost in time, old fans of a lost thing. Which brings me to a curious piece of timeline synchronicity that struck my social media feeds over the last night of the Proms weekend.
There was, on the very same day, a convention in London dedicated to seventies sci-fi TV show Space:1999, and some photos of this happy occasion convention wandered, courtesy of the X algorithm, on to my feed. For the uninitiated, Space:1999 was about a thankfully fictional futuristic disaster. The attendees looked to be people of my age, the few surviving actors 30 years older. They were gathered around costumes and props and model spaceships, in a tribute to a forgotten future. That fantasy future was antiseptically tidy and well ordered, very different to the future we actually got. It featured a harmonious multi-ethnic international moonbase where every problem was dealt with calmly and efficiently by technocrats and wise, qualified scientists. You can see where I’m going.
As its lead character says on one occasion, in the future ‘prejudice was wiped out. People realised if they were going to survive they would have to work together, accept each other for what they were. So we began to create a brand new, wonderful civilisation.’
Oh, what a dream! A totemic illusory future that its fans feel robbed of. The difference between Thank EU For The Music and the 1999 fans is that the latter gather to be convivial, fully aware that their hobby is quaint, and determined to escape from reality, to have a bit of fun. But the last Remainers standing take it all very seriously. Their brains seem to reject the passage of time and the souring of their vision of the EU, which, let’s face it, was always pretty shaky.
When Lib Dem leader Ed Davey asked, panto-style, for a show of hands at the party’s conference this week who wanted to rejoin the EU, a sea of arms shot up. I’m sure the convention attendees would love a third series of Space:1999. I would too. But I’ve accepted it isn’t going to happen. it’s time for the EU flag wavers – and the last remaining band of die-hard Remainers – to make that leap and face reality.
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