The West doesn’t know best

I’d always rather liked the Finns, until I came across the conductor Dalia Stasevska. When I asked my mother what they were like, back when I was five or six and enjoyed staring at a globe of the world, she described them as ‘drunken and stupid, but very brave’. This was, by Mother’s standards, an extremely kindly benediction. Most of her descriptions of the world’s various people did not contain commendations. There were a few exceptions — Trinidadians were ‘drunken and stupid, but very cheerful’, for example. But by and large, to her the world comprised people who were drunken and stupid, apart from the Muslim world, where people were merely ‘stupid’.

Anyway, it was apparently at the behest of Ms Stasevska that the BBC decided there would be no singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ or ‘Rule, Britannia’ at the Last Night of the Proms this year. I don’t suppose the BBC needed very much in the way of persuasion, given that it loathes the Last Night of the Proms almost as much as it seems to loathe the people who pay its licence fee. Ms Stasevska is apparently ‘woke’ and a supporter of Black Lives Matter and objected to the jingoistic nature of those two anthems. Hardly surprising for a Finn, whose own national anthem was written in Swedish and composed by a German and just goes on for ages about lakes and stuff — and is called something like ‘Mammy’, but sadly lacks the charm of Al Jolson’s more famous ditty.

Except that — as her name suggests — Ms Stasevska is Finnish only by adoption and was actually born in Kiev. I’m not sure what possessed her to agree to conduct an evening of patriotic music when she despises patriotic music.