Sorry if you’ve missed the advent calendar but I suddenly remembered I bloody hate Christmas. However, the thought that calling Christmas ‘Winterval’ might annoy the small-minded cheered me up a bit, so the calendar’s back.

Today’s door (possibly Not Safe For Work) comes courtesy of Not Saussure, who you really should be reading if you aren’t already.

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More festive cheer courtesy of Tim Ireland.

You are cordially invited to a public carol service in Parliament Square at 7pm on Wednesday the 20th of December 2006.

This inclusive service will contain both Christian and secular verse, and is expected to last no more than an hour.

Candles and song sheets will be made available, with donations going to Medical Aid for Iraqi Children.

Please note that if you attend this carol service, it will classify as a spontaneous demonstration (of faith, hope, joy and/or religious tolerance) and there is a possibility that you will be cautioned or arrested under Section 132 of the Serious and Organised Crimes and Police Act (2005).

Click here for more information.

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This can’t be said enough when ‘embattled’ Christians/Jews/Muslims/A N Other Faith start banging on about how their religion is under threat/attack/a cloud: Isn’t your God supposed to be, like, omnipotent. If he’s as all powerful as you claim he is, won’t he be able to shrug off a few people calling Christmas ‘Winterval’ (if such persons exist)?

You know, if he’s the one true God and all that.

If you’re so sure of your facts, why worry? (’the facts are always more interesting,’ as religious rent-a-gob Ann Atkins said on Radio 4 this morning.)

Facts. If being a good Christian (in the current instance of ‘Christmas Under Attack’ faux-hysteria) is about being honest and truthful, why try to further your agenda via lies and right-wing demagoguery?

Or is this more about one’s personal vanity rather than God’s delicate sensibilities? ‘Oh, look at me ostentatiously defending my faith. Aren’t I a good Christian? Watch me spend money I haven’t got on crap I don’t need in order to honour the baby Jesus’. If that’s the case, somebody needs to go back to Sunday School.

And what the hell was Jack Straw, thinking about:

If I may speak on [the angel] Gabriel’s behalf, I’m very clear on his view for 2006. Put the tinsel in the office.

You know, I’ve looked everywhere and I can’t find tinsel mentioned anywhere in Nativity story. This guy used to be Foreign Secretary and now he’s claiming to speak on behalf of an angel. Did he ask Gabriel’s advice on the eve of the Iraq war, do you think? Let’s hope not because it would put the whole notion of divine omniscience into question. That’d shake your faith rather more than a bout of fictional political correctness gone mad, wouldn’t it?

What is wrong with this country?

(The always excellent Oliver Burkeman has yet more. The poor sod deserves a medal.)

Update: Jeff Randall, on the other hand, is hysterical. And I don’t mean synonymous with ‘hilarious’. Don’t forget, he got paid for what looks like an article inspired by urban myths he found on Google. Had he been a blogger he’d probably now be considering retirement after the deluge of abuse that he would have doubtlessly received (and indeed does receive, of a fashion, in the comments under his piece - the comments agreeing with him are another matter and yet further evidence of how squalid white middle-class people are when they try to fool themselves that they are oppressed).

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“We’re not going to have a war, we’re going to have the appearance of a war,” says the cynical spin doctor in David Mamet’s screenplay for the 1997 movie Wag The Dog, about an imaginary conflict created to whip up support for an ailing president. But he might equally have been talking about the 2006 war on Christmas - a war that tells us much about the growing politicisation and sense of entitlement among religious groups in Britain, but which turns out to have been almost entirely invented.

read the rest

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I am a big fan of the “intelligent design” teaching packs that the god-botherers are sending out to our schools. I hope the government makes them compulsory. They will be incredibly useful in teaching kids the single most important lesson that anyone learns in school.

That lesson is, obviously, that adults in positions of power and responsibility often talk the most extraordinary bullshit.

read the rest…

On the matter of Alan Johnson whirling on a six-pence over the issue of faith schools and their (non-)admittance of heathen students, we have this from the Education Secretary:

We’ve made enough progress through the voluntary route that we don’t need the blunt instrument of legislation.

We don’t need the blunt instrument of legislation? If you’ll permit me, that’s a bit fucking rich.

Many will be saddened to hear of the death of Faith School Quotas, killed whilst travelling in a government vehicle last night.

read the rest…

I’m a big fan of small acts of unsolicited kindness to and from strangers. I like good manners and, being an old fashioned sort, I also enjoy chivalry and not just because I fancy having a natty suit of armour and a warcharger. In short, I despise beastliness.

So, being of good breeding and while dropping my daughter off at school the other day, I held the gate open for one of the mothers. I didn’t catch a thank you from her which isn’t unusual - 90% of the parents with children at the school are pig ignorant after all.

What was different, however, is that the mother was wearing the niqab. And do you know, like Jack Straw, I realised that the garment can be a barrier to communication; the mother may well have smiled gratefully and said an unostentatious ‘thank you’, both niceties being disguised by the niqab.

Where Jack, a man with evidently such thin skin and delicate sensibilities that it remains a wonder how he ever summoned the courage to shake the hand of Robert Mugabe or flog weapons across the globe, evidently frets about this kind of thing, on further consideration I realised there is in fact an upside. Whereas I would have mentally added a non-niqab wearing parent displaying such behaviour to my list of enemies, on this occasion I didn’t.

The mother may have said thank you, she may not have. That being the case, I’d like to posit a new theory based on the famous thought experiment, Schrödinger’s cat.

I know for a fact that 90% of the non-niqab wearing parents in the schoolyard, knowing neither the cost nor value of civility (low and high, respectively), are ill-bred boors deserving of a size nine up the backside and capable of spoiling my mood. Under the terms of McKeating’s Niqab, however, just as the physicist’s feline was simultaneously both alive and dead, so a niqab-wearing mother is both polite and friendly and rude and stand offish. Or, for those readers of lower intelligence, much like a box that could be holding either £50,000 or one penny.

In this state of uncertainty, I am neither able to condemn the mother along with the rest nor gather her to my bosom as I have those showing themselves worthy of my esteem. My mood is neither spoiled nor elevated and a sense of benign ambivalence is maintained until further evidence is presented. A synthesis - a Third Way, if you will - is reached, while achieving a state of being that is quintessentially British.

What could be more modern than that? The conclusion that this new theory arrives at is surely, in Britain today, we should decide to refuse The Banker’s* offer.

*Popular rhyming slang.

Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

(Via Pond.)

I believe these are the correct positions for progressive politics in the modern era. But if others feel they’re not the right policies, and some clearly do, let us debate them openly and candidly.

Tony Blair, ‘No more coded critiques - let’s have an open debate on where we go next‘

This is not an abstract discussion. It is one which touches upon the preservation of the values and freedoms. I look forward to that debate with you.

John Reid, ‘Security, freedom and the protection of our values‘.

I believe it is time now to engage in a new and honest debate about integration and cohesion in the UK.

Ruth Kelly, launching the Commission on Integration and Cohesion.

I’ve asked this before, but where is the forum for these debates? What are the formal mechanisms? Can I join in? I’m not the only one to notice.

(more…)