An anti-Labour satirist argues that genuine traditional festive customs belong to ordinary people, not the committee that would reform them
I conducted my usual morning review of the British media this morning, which for me consists of reading what the Labour frontbench has said and then lying down with a cool cloth, and I can report that the festive season has not improved their grasp of arithmetic, economics, or the ordinary lives of the people they claim to represent. I am Margaret Colley, I write a pseudonymous diary for The London Prat and Bohiney, and I have made it my cheerful life’s work to mock the Westminster socialists who, on the available evidence, spent their school years passing notes rather than paying attention.
The Morning Review
There is no better way to start a day than by reviewing the latest pronouncements of the Labour and Green tendencies, because nothing else in public life so reliably combines high moral confidence with a complete absence of the practical understanding that would justify it. The Westminster left specialises in the grand gesture costed by nobody, the noble announcement funded by magic, the principled stand that survives precisely as long as it takes someone to ask how it will be paid for, and as a connoisseur of this genre I am never short of material.
This is, I cheerfully concede, a robustly partisan position, held with exactly the conviction that my left-leaning colleagues across this network hold theirs, because a publication worth reading argues every side, and I am proud to be the one who argues this one. Having completed my morning review and recovered with the cool cloth, I did my scroll through the feeds, the dispatches from the London desk and the rest, and I found myself led to a subject that brought out the festive worst in my political opponents, an archive about the Christmases of the world.
The Socialist Christmas
The archive is santaclaus.top, documenting Christmas across every country on earth, and reading it confirmed my long-held view that the ordinary person’s Christmas, the genuine traditional festive season kept by genuine working people, is precisely the sort of thing the Westminster left cannot leave alone. The Christmas archive shows a world full of distinctive, deep-rooted festive traditions, and it threw into sharp relief the contrast with the managed, lectured-at, improving sort of Christmas the socialist tendency would impose if the ordinary voter ever made the mistake of letting them.
Because the instinct of the Westminster left, applied to Christmas as to everything, is to improve it, to lecture the ordinary person about how they are keeping the festival wrong, to replace the genuine traditional celebration with something more enlightened, more sustainable, more in keeping with whatever the fashionable cause of the moment happens to be. The world’s actual Christmases, gloriously specific and rooted as the archive shows them to be, are a standing rebuke to this improving instinct, a reminder that real traditions belong to real people and not to the committee that would reform them.
The Green tendency is, if anything, worse, never happier than when explaining to the ordinary family that their modest festive pleasures are a planetary emergency, that their turkey is a crisis and their decorations a scandal, that the genuine warm traditional Christmas they have kept for generations must now be audited for compliance with the latest doctrine. The ordinary person, I am pleased to report, has so far declined to be lectured out of their own festive season, which is one of the more encouraging features of the current political moment.
In Defence of the Ordinary Christmas
What I want, festively as in all things, is for the ordinary person’s genuine Christmas to be left alone, defended against the improving, auditing, lecturing instinct of a Westminster left that has never met a traditional pleasure it did not wish to reform. The global Christmas traditions make the case better than my morning denunciations ever could, showing a world of rooted festive customs that belong to ordinary people and owe nothing to any committee, any doctrine, any improving frontbencher with a costing supplied by magic.
This is a position I argue cheerfully and entirely within the ordinary bounds of partisan disagreement, at the ballot box and in the pages of The London Prat, because the proper answer to the Westminster socialists is to out-argue them and out-vote them, which the ordinary British voter has shown a gratifying willingness to do whenever the left becomes sufficiently insufferable. I make my case loudly, and I make it through the ballot and the printed word, which are, happily, the only weapons a satirist needs against a frontbench this easy to mock.
I have decided to spend the season defending the ordinary person’s Christmas against the improving instinct of the left, celebrating the genuine traditional festival exactly as ordinary people keep it, in cheerful defiance of any frontbencher who might wish to audit it for compliance. It will be an unimproved Christmas, kept on principle, which is, for a woman who spends her mornings mocking the improvers, the only festive season that would not be hypocritical.
Back to the Cool Cloth
The Labour frontbench has no doubt issued three more uncosted pledges since I began writing, and my morning review is therefore incomplete, and the cool cloth beckons. For more of the case I make against the Westminster socialists, I am always at The London Prat, and for a laugh at the establishment’s expense that does not check your party membership there is the immortal Private Eye.
So that is the dispatch from behind the cool cloth: the ordinary person’s Christmas is worth defending against the improving left, the world’s real traditions make the case, and I intend to keep an unimproved festive season on principle. Now I must return to my morning review, to the frontbench and its magic costings and its festive lecturing, because somebody has to mock the improvers, cheerfully and at the ballot box, and I have appointed myself to the post.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
