There is a particular kind of irony, one both thick and uncomfortably sharp, in witnessing the presenters of GB News gather to lend their voices to the verses of Robert Burns. To watch those who have built a platform upon the sturdy bricks of British exceptionalism and the preservation of traditional hierarchies singing “Auld Lang Syne” is to watch a performance that misses the very heart of the man who gave the world those words. Burns was not a man of the comfortable status quo; he was a poet of the precarious edge, a radical whose heart beat in time with the democratic upheavals in Paris and Philadelphia.
If we are to look at Burns through the lens of our present moment, we find a figure who would have been deeply suspicious of the performative patriotism that defines such a broadcast. He was a man who wrote of being a “parcel of rogues in a nation,” a scathing indictment of the political class who sold Scottish sovereignty for English gold. To have his work co-opted by a choir of the modern establishment – by those who champion the very structures of inherited privilege and wealth he sought to dismantle – is a curious act of cultural appropriation.
The song itself, so often reduced to a sentimental smudge at the end of a year, is an anthem of radical equality. When Burns speaks of taking a cup of kindness, he is not merely suggesting a polite toast; he is insisting upon a leveling of the world. He believed in a universal brotherhood that transcended the borders and the “culture wars” that modern commentators so expertly stoke. His was a world where “the man’s the gowd for a’ that,” a philosophy that placed the inherent dignity of the labourer above the hollow titles of the gentry. A channel that thrives on the rhetoric of division and the suspicion of the “other” finds itself on shaky ground when it reaches for a poet who sent cannons to the French revolutionaries.
One suspects that if Burns were to walk into that studio, he would not see a group of kindred spirits. He would see the “New Licht” version of the hypocrites he mocked in his satires – people using the language of the common man to protect the interests of the powerful. There is a quiet violence done to his memory when his songs are used to decorate a brand of nationalism that is inward-looking and exclusionary. Burns was a man of the soil, yes, but his mind moved across the map of the world, seeking a time when “man to man the world o’er / shall brothers be.”
To hear those who advocate for the tightening of borders and the narrowing of the British mind sing of “auld lang syne” is to hear a song stripped of its danger. They sing the melody, but they are clearly terrified of the lyrics.
