Over the past 25 years I reckon that I’ve reviewed more than 700 Proms at the Albert Hall. Many have been great; a few grisly. But usually only one concert each year makes me feel uncomfortable and embarrassed. It’s the Last Night of the Proms. Oh yes, I’ll be there tonight. An unflinching sense of journalistic duty dictates that I should report on the japes, the whimsical overture for vacuum cleaners and the Bertie Wooster blazers for Monday’s paper. Besides, there’s some decent music tucked away in the first half.

But the jingoism, flag-waving, hooray-henry singsong and Victorian imperialism? God spare us. The BBC should have been brave enough to have swept it away in the 1950s, along with announcers in dinner jackets and Muffin the Mule.

The Last Night has no connection with the superb eight-week music festival that precedes it. Worse, it has no connection with the 21st century. Yet the BBC beams it to dozens of countries, presumably to maintain the illusion that London is full of eccentric berks doing inane things in ridiculous costumes. “Britons never never never shall be slaves,” everyone roars. But we are! We’re slaves to tradition — and a geriatric one at that.

Well, that’s my view. It was how I felt when I was taken to my first Last Night, in 1963 — just as the Profumo affair was blowing the pants off the Macmillan Government (though, at the age of 9, I didn’t quite understand why). And maturity, or senility, has not changed my opinion.

But the strange thing is that I can’t work out why I feel so strongly. After all, I’m mildly patriotic. I don’t disapprove of nationalism in principle. As a music lover, how could I? Some of the greatest composers — Dvorák, Chopin, Elgar, Sibelius, Verdi, Mussorgsky, Charles Ives, Shostakovich, Irving Berlin — wrote music that glorified nations, often for overtly political purposes. National pride and international rivalry triggered (and still triggers) the building of concert halls, theatres and galleries, the creating of orchestras, the touring of productions. It’s one big reason, possibly the biggest, why governments subsidise the arts.

Nor do I mind energetic displays of nationalism in other countries. Over the summer I’ve been lucky enough to attend festivals in Scotland, America and Austria. In Edinburgh I found wailing bagpipes and chaps in kilts at every corner, and a media and arts community that is inwardly focused to an almost comic degree. Yet I loved being immersed in all that tartanophilia.

In upstate New York they played The Star-Spangled Banner at the start of a concert, and everyone, including my hosts — pacifist, joint-smoking ultra-liberals — rose to their feet, slapped hands to hearts, and roared out the words. Which, of course, drool over a humiliating British military failure. Yet I found it rather touching.

And even in Vienna, where nationalism regularly seems to curdle into a noxious poison, I was charmed by the patriotic red-and-white flags, ribbons and flowers draped over every door and window — though also bemused to see that Vienna now has a “Tel Aviv Beach”: a sandy bank created by the Danube for sunbathing, courtesy of the Israeli Embassy! What a pity that Freud isn’t still in town to unpick the tangled psychopathology behind that “let bygones be bygones” project.

England’s history isn’t exactly a textbook of humanitarianism either. But if Austria can celebrate itself without guilt, why do we English feel so self-conscious and overbearing when we do the same? One reason, perhaps, is that sensitive souls such as moi still carry a small but inhibiting smidgeon of post-imperial guilt for the general beastliness that our English ancestors inflicted on our Celtic neighbours (to say nothing of the French). I also think that the Celtic neighbours are now quite canny about exploiting that guilt to their advantage.

But there may be another reason. Whereas other countries carry off nationalism with elan, the English are at their worst in tribal mode. Think of the havoc wreaked by English football fans. Think of the crass, drunken behaviour of British tourists in so many resorts on the Med. Think how the BNP twists patriotism and the flag of St George into tools of prejudice and malice.

Who wants to be associated with all that? Yes, you can argue that the decent majority ought to reclaim their flag and their right to express pride in their Englishness without being branded as bigots. But I don’t think their hearts would be in it. After all, the two best qualities of the decent English majority are emotional reserve and ironic self-deprecation.

All of this explains why, if you switch on the telly tonight, you may see a bespectacled middle-aged chap sitting motionless in the Albert Hall stalls while everyone else is jumping up and down like demented fleas. But if you want to wave your little flag, don’t let my killjoy whinge stop you. After all, it’s a free country. How does that chorus go again? “Britons never never never . . .”

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010