Brexiters should back off Last Night of the Proms

“Brexiters outraged after crowds wave EU flag at Last Night of the Proms”, screams a headline on The Guardian website this morning.

You have to weep at the ignorance and stupidity of these brain-dead Brexiters. They pretend to care about freedom but when people exercise their own individual freedom of choice over which flag to wave at a concert they foam at the mouth with outrage.

Nobody was forced to take a flag. It was a matter of personal choice. I think it says a lot for the sort of world these right-wing fanatics want us to live in that this offends them so much. Perhaps they ought to contemplate what “Britons never shall be slaves” or “Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free” really mean.

They also profoundly misunderstand the Last Night of the Proms. It is a party at the end of a two-month long season of music concerts, the longest, and widely acknowledged as the greatest, classical music festival in the world. For many years I went to the Proms every summer and you make some great friends there – indeed, it is where I met Mariette, my wife of over 40 years. The Last Night is a farewell to many of those friends for another year, an opportunity to let one’s hair down and have a sing-song together with people you have shared the most wonderful musical experiences with night-after-night for those two months. Even in the 1970s it was never, for the Promenaders, a festival of patriotism, beyond the pride of being part of a great music festival.

Even back then flags of other nations were mixed in with the Union Flags, and EU flags have been growing in number over the last decade. The fact that so many people took them when given the opportunity yesterday is a commentary on where music lovers, always internationalists, now stand on one of the great debates of our time. I expect many people were waving both an EU flag and a Union Flag: I know I would have been.

The trouble is that those now so upset about one concert in a season of over 80 events see it in isolation, having no understanding of its context. They are also no defenders of the sort of freedom I treasure.

• (Of course, there are some flags that you would not expect see there and which would be antithetical to the values of an international and increasingly diverse music festival. The EU flag is certainly not one of those. That is a wider debate for another day)