WHAT exactly is the Proms?

Culture minister Margaret Hodge thinks that she knows. According to her comments on Tuesday the annual classical music event is a bunch of snot-nosed musicians who simply don't attract a wide enough section of society.

Conservative leader David Cameron think he knows, too. According to him, the Proms are a great opportunity to promote flag waving and Britishness, which of course he is all in favour of, thinking that the first will inevitably lead to the second.

Hodge appears to believe that cultural events should be on a par with Big Brother - lose the intellectual content so as not to scare away the chavs and the thugs. And Cameron must still live in an idyllic, if fictional, Britain where it's all tea and scones, sun at Wimbledon and stirring renditions of Land of Hope Of Glory.

Oddly, neither have thought to mention the music. If 2007's programme was anything to go by, last year's Proms not only showcased the pinnacle of British composing but was also wide-ranging, boundary-breaking and - with a night of "Music from Great British Films" - unashamedly populist. It featured Ravi Shankar, the Bollywood Brass Band and the London Symphony Orchestra. It didn't feature any street kids who had appeared on reality TV, though, which is probably why Hodge believed her comments to be fair.

Call me paranoid, but I sometimes feel that this government, and perhaps the majority of the country, has a vendetta against anything that could be defined as "highbrow". The Proms present challenging works from the likes of Prokofiev and Jean Sibelius, pieces of music which might not be found on any CDs given away with Sunday papers, but which are intensely moving pieces of art. Just because they're not played on pots and pans by one-legged refugees doesn't mean that they have no cultural worth.

If we were a truly open-minded and equal society, we would welcome excellence in every form. Even if it does come from posh, white men.