You really need to read Kevin Arscott's essay on the Winterval Myth. It's 40+ pages long, and you have to download it as a PDF. It's long, comprehensive, detailed, doesn't contain many jokes, and gets quite angry towards the end. But it's probably the most important thing you'll read this Christmas. 

You may come to the end of it saying, like I did: "I didn't realise things had got this bad."

Oh, and it reveals a crucial and neglected piece of data. Birmingham's original Winterval lights were turned on by no less a personage than Barny the Dinosaur.

What do we want? FOLK MUSIC ON THE WIRELESS! When do we want it? NOW! What do we say? PLEASE!

Homosexual Frogs [6]

By now, everybody knows about the Winterval myth.



Local government is notoriously unpopular in the UK. While our income tax magically vanishes from our pay packet each month, we actually have to write a cheque for our Council Tax, so it feels like Real Money. So, at least since the days of Ken Livingstone, it has been prudent for councils to engage in a bit of creative PR: sticking the letters "GLC" or "The Mayor of London" on every bus, every dust-bin van, every library, every concert hall -- if possible, every boy scout hut and art class that gets council funding -- so local people are aware of how their money is actually being spent. Much harder to say "The council only cares about one legged black lesbians" if the library van that brings books to the old lady next door as "Bristol City Council" painted on the side in large, friendly letters.



And this, I take it, is what Birmingham Council did in 1998: came up with a logo and stuck it on every special event that it ran between October and December in 1998 -- not only the Carol Concert and the Christmas tree, but also Guy Fawkes Night and the Children in Need Telethon and, yes, Eid and Diwali and Hanukkah too. So that when election time came round and people said "what has the council ever done for me?" there was some chance that some of them would think "Well, they did organize the city firework display that the kids so much enjoyed."



However, the Daily Mail goes three times round the world before the Guardian has got its boots on, and there is now no chance of killing off the theory that Winterval was a new festival, invented by Herbert Marcuse and Jacques Derrida, intended to undermine the foundations of western civilisation and justified on the spurious grounds that Christmas is offensive to Muslims. (Which it isn't and it wouldn't matter if it was because this is our country and if they didn't want to join the Church of England they should go back to Iraq not that I'm one of them racists but I don't see why they should get special treatment, you never see white people getting special treatment, do you?)



Now, in previous years, when the Common Sense Brigade have tried to perpetuate the the Winterval scam, they have always pretended that Christmas had been prohibited: that Birmingham City Council, in thrall to the evil Communist Frankfurter had decreed that light-skinned people were not allowed to celebrate in the traditional, Christian way in case it offended dark skinned people. Obviously, since the September 11th terrorist attacks, the tabloids and the British National Party have started to use "Muslim" as a surrogate for "furriner". So they increasingly pretended that Birmingham City Council had cancelled Christmas "so as not to offend Muslims".



It need hardly be said that no-one has ever come up with a single credible instance of anyone ever attempting to ban Christmas, ever. Indeed, in recent years, German style Christmas markets have become popular so there are probably more Christmas trees, Santa Clauses and indeed Baby Jesi on English Streets than ever before. (The first English town to go in for Christkindlmarkts in a big way was, er, Birmingham.)



So. It was never about banning Christmas. (The original Winterval posters had bloody great Christmas trees on them, for Wotan's sake.) So what was it about?



Depressingly, the press release from Eric Pickles, picked up with gusto by the right-wing newspapers, has come very clean about the real agenda.


"I believe we should take greater pride in Britain's Christian heritage. We should celebrate the Nativity and all the traditions that have sprung up around Christmas from turkey and tree lights to tinsel and tea towels adorning the heads of infant angels and shepherds. I feel very strongly we should actively celebrate the Christian basis of Christmas, and not allow politically correct Grinches to marginalise Christianity and the importance of the birth of Christ."



Mr Pickles isn't suggesting that Christmas has been banned. Everybody knows it hasn't been. He isn't even suggesting that the Christian elements of Christmas have been banned: every chorus of the Little Drummer Boy blared out over every tannoy in every shopping Mall gives the lie to that. (Every angel on every Christmas tree, every supermarket which inexplicably runs out of tea-towels in December.) No: he is suggesting, from his pedestal as minister for local government, that Municipal Christmas should be more Christian. That elected local councils should "actively celebrate the Christian basis of Christmas".



Now, it seems to me that you can't have it both ways. Either Christmas is a Christian festival in the same way that Hanukkah is a Jewish festival, or it isn't. And either you want Municipal celebration to be inclusive, or you don't. If Christmas is a "Christian" festival, then Jews probably won't want to join in.



Jews are perfectly happy to eat mince pies at Christmas (provided they don't contain pork fat, which they usually don't.) The standard answer to the question "What do Jews do at Christmas" is "Exactly the same as you, only we don't go to church." But the more Baby Jesus works his way into Municipal Christmas, the less comfortable (I imagine) Jewish people are going to be with it.

Municipal Christmas has always involved some singing of Carols round the Christmas Tree, but Jews and Atheists probably don't might singing songs about Baby Jesus, even though they don't believe in Him. (They don't mind singing songs about Santa Claus, and they don't believe in him, either. Richard Dawkins himself claims to enjoy a bit of carol singing. He probably doesn't go to Midnight Mass, or if he does, he probably stays in his seat during the actual sacrament.) If you decide that your Carols Round the Tree are going to include some Bible readings, then you've started to identify it as a party for religious folks. If the local Bishop gives a talk, even more so. Throw in an open air Holy Communion, and it's become an exclusively Christian event. The Jews and the Atheists will mostly stay at home.



And get this: since the 1950 quite a number of people with dark skin have moved to this country, and quite a number of those dark skinned people have been Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs. (Not all of them: there are a lot of Christian churches wouldn't have a congregation if it wasn't for Afro-Caribbean communities.) So the idea that Baby Jesus should play a bigger and bigger role in Municipal Christmas means that fewer and fewer of those dark skinned people would want to join in with it.



All of these things would be complete innovations: Baby Jesus has never played that big a part in Municipal Christmas. Its always been mainly about mistletoe and wine.



"The Political Correctness Brigade Has Banned Christmas" is code for "The Common Sense Brigade Wants to Exclude People Who Aren't Cultural Christians From Christmas" which is code for "The Common Sense Brigade Wants To Exclude Dark Skinned People From Christmas" which is very probably code for the "The Common Sense Brigade Wishes That There Weren't Any Dark Skinned People Here At All".



As ever, it is left to the Nasty Express to make this explicit.


" Last week, Rochdale Council provoked anger after it decided to celebrate Eid and Diwali alongside Christmas in a display of lights."



It was never the absence of Christian symbols that the Common Sense Brigade were objecting to. It was always the presence of anything else.



Kind of like what happened during the Nazi era.

Homosexual Frogs (5)

But, of course, language is sometimes used to create a consensus were no consensus in fact exists. 

If I describe someone as "a black person" (rather than "negro" or even "n----r") you correctly infer that behind my use of the word "black" lurks the assumption that black people are just as good as white people; that skin colour and heritage don't matter very much; and that even if they did  matter it  still wouldn't be nice to use words which upset people. 

 

But it would be quite odd to describe the word "black" as Politically Correct. There really is a consensus. The word is based on a set of assumptions we really do all share. Yes, some people do routinely use the n-word. In doing so, they rule themselves outside of polite discourse. Society includes a handful of racists. It also includes a handful of nudists. We treat the guy in the pub who calls black men "n-----s" the same way as we treat the guy in the pub who gets his willy out. We ask him to leave. If he doesn't, we call the cops. Or the bobbies. Or... 

If I describe someone as "a bobby", rather than "a pig", or "the filth" then you rightly infer that behind the word lurks the assumption that police officers are rather cute, rather honourable, rather innocent, if perhaps not always terribly bright people, whose job it is to help us out when we are in trouble. And it would be quite reckless of me to assume that everyone, or even most people, agree with me about that. For all I know, you might think that so-called police officers are sinister agents who are paid by the state to coerce free people into behaving in whatever way the government of the day finds convenient. Or you may think that police officers are overwhelmingly thugs who get off on the exercise of petty power -- who get their jollies from yelling at people and telling them what to do. And handcuffs, of course. Handcuffs are sexy. Or you may think that black people are much more likely to be stopped than white people, or that the police are somehow always too busy to help when your mobile phone is nicked but thousands of them can be spared to cavalry charge harmless students complaining about government education policy. And that when one of them murders a protester, the establishment closes ranks and lets the officer get off stop free. 

To say nothing about the summary execution of innocent people outside tube stations.

But who ever described the word "bobby" as an example of Political Correctness, mad or otherwise?

If you say "serviceman" (or "our-valiant-service-men-and-women", or simply "heroes") then you are using P.C language to impose your idea that soldiers are brave, self-sacrificing individuals with a vocation to keep the world free from terrorism and safe for democracy -- rather than the worst kind of thug, little boys with nasty toys propping up the west's imperialistic enterprise in the middle east without thinking about the implications because they're not capable of getting a job in a civilized society. 

 

Never mind which side you agree with, of if you think I have possibly unduly polarized the two positions. Never mind if it's possible to oppose stupid wars but still respect soldiers.  "Bobby" and "War Hero" are ideologically loaded terms  in a way that "Chairperson" and "Lone Parent" really aren't. There is far more monolithic social pressure to wear a poppy on November 11th than there has ever been to say "Season's Greetings" rather than "Happy Christmas". 

It is the right, not the left, who assume a consensus which does not really exist. It is the right, not the left, who seek to colonize language and make it impossible to even think that "law and order" "democracy" "patriotism" "freedom" "liberty" may not be  quite as good as they're cracked up to be. It is the right who have come up with Politically Correct euphemisms like "extraordinary rendition" and "enhanced interrogation" in order to imply that everyone agrees that torture is sometimes okay, when they really, really, really don't. And it is, of course, the right who overwhelmingly control the media, mainstream or otherwise. 

I don't, in fact, think that Bill Windsor is a parasitic little shit whose gormless good looks give spurious credibility to a repressive institution which makes Britain a laughing stock in the eyes of the rest of the world and whose wedding should, at best, be given the same coverage as any other "celebrity" or "society" wedding. 

But if I did say such things the Common Sense Brigade would be be down on me like a metric tonne of bricks.