Many of Britain's cultural events are unrepresentative and fail to create a set of shared values, culture minister Margaret Hodge has said.

Hodge used a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research on Tuesday to criticise the Proms for failing to attract a diverse audience.

"The audiences for many of our greatest cultural events - I'm thinking in particular of the Proms - is still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease in being part of this," she said.

"I know this is not about making every audience completely representative, but if we claim great things for our sectors in terms of their power to bring people together, then we have a right to expect they will do that wherever they can."

The Barking MP also called for citizenship ceremonies to help people "associate their new citizenship with key cultural icons" and ensure they "build a longer-term engagement" with British identity.

She warned that "mainstream parties, in their determination to capture and maintain power, have perhaps allowed a blurring of their ideological value base as they seek to attract the all-important centre ground of politics".

"In doing this, they inadvertently create a value vacuum which is then filled by fundamentalists in religion and the extremists in politics," she said.

Hodge added: "National mottos and statements of shared values have to be lived and made real if they are to fulfil their purpose.

"The riots in Paris shows the uselessness of investing solely in the grand icons of a common culture without investing in those services which are essential to secure more equal life chances."

Conservative leader David Cameron said Hodge was "completely wrong" and there were "all sorts of ways of people getting involved" in the Proms.

"I just think Margaret Hodge is wrong," he said. "I think we want more things where people actually come together and celebrate Britishness and more occasions where people think the Union Jack is a great symbol of our Britishness, rather than people sniping at it.

"So I think it's a classic example of a Labour politician not really getting some of the things that people like to do to celebrate culture and identity and a great British institution."