Like most people who aren’t wrestlers or photocopier manufacturers, I don’t have a theme tune. Never needed one, never felt it would add to my personal brand. Sure, if I’m at a party I’ll drink and force everyone to listen to Play With Fire until I’m dragged kicking and screaming on to the street, but I’m not going to start demanding it when I enter rooms or when I disembark from aircraft.
My ringtone may be the soundtrack to Bojack Horseman, but that’s only so I know when it’s my phone ringing, and not the dozen other iPhones you’ll find within five metres anywhere in London. Even the rats have iPhones now, such is Apple’s market saturation.
We have songs for different moods and different times of day, and to achieve different objectives. I write to Bach, I run to Martin Solveig, maybe you sort the recycling to Senagalese pop music, or polish antique silverware to Nicky Minaj’s Anaconda. The limitations of one song could never define even a single life, so the idea of trying to define a country with reference to just one song is laughably simplistic. Those calling for an English national anthem should give up now: it’s a pointless, fruitless, unnecessary task.
Chesterfield’s Labour MP, Toby Perkins, apparently thinks a debate on what England fans sing at Wembley is where the political ballgame lies. Maybe, as the great-grandson of the celebrated humourist AP Herbert, this is Mr Perkins’ idea of a joke.
It might surprise you that MPs feel like they have the time to debate a national anthem for England, between the junior doctors’ strikes, the flood defences, Russian military aggression and the constant threat of terrorism. I suppose I missed the announcement of world peace while trying to remember in which month the shadow cabinet reshuffle began, or reading about an East Hampton wedding that made me despair for the future of our species. Perhaps this is the realisation of a young Toby’s dreams to grow up, win public office, and tinker with ceremonial aspects of English public life. Whatever the reason, he should give it up.
God Save the Queen was adopted within four decades of the Acts of Union, the Scottish and Welsh national songs came much later, as the less populous parts of the union felt the need to differentiate themselves.
God Save the Queen might once have been a unifying anthem for a newly minted Great Britain, but it is now a quaint relic of a time when men and women concerned themselves with forging a new identity for this union. Are we still so unsure of ourselves, so uncertain about what we stand for, that we need to have a navel-gazing debate about replacing an old-fashioned song with a new one? It would never please everyone, and the very debate seems like a sort of constitutional mid-life crisis.
Rather than accepting God Save the Queen as a historical relic, part of the furniture in the great palace of our common history, the argument to replace it stirs up questions about the very purpose of the song. Is it an outdated celebration of nationalism, a musical identifier of England, or an embodiment of our collective values? The path of least resistance is to stick with innocuous tradition rather than suffer the slings and arrows of that debate. It is an anthem you can grumble about, but it is certainly preferable to the argument over what replaces it.
There would be tedious debate over whether Jerusalem is the musical embodiment of the quintessence of Englishness, or satire lapped up by the unthinking masses. William Blake suffers the same fate as Steve Wilhite. Wilhite, who invented the gif file, will go to his grave begging people to say “jif”. Similarly, Blake has been overruled. Millions of us love Jerusalem, and a battalion of thinkpieces on Blake’s skewering of English nationalism won’t do a thing to change that. Jif indeed. If we can’t all agree on what Jerusalem means, we won’t be able to agree that it should be our anthem.
As for Elgar, in England people apologise for playing poor shots in games of tennis, make self-deprecating jokes and expect that it will rain later. Giving us Land of Hope and Glory as an anthem would be like America replacing the Star Spangled Banner with a song celebrating the consumption of food in moderation and the value of ironic understatement.
To be English is to be part of the biggest group of people in the union, to cherish the uniqueness of Wales and Scotland, to celebrate their differences, but above all else to be the middle crew, the engine room in Team GB. We don’t need to reassert our culture, and we can ill afford a tedious argument with ourselves over an identity crisis. We won’t agree on a replacement anthem, but we can agree that there is no urgency, and no good reason to try.
Lastly, I worry that if parliament does vote to consider a change and we have an anthem chosen by committee, it will inevitably be a song by Emili Sandé, or Ed Sheeran, so stop it, all of you.
