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Tis the season to be racist...

... if you're part of our political elite, that is

Tomorrow, or today if you are reading this on Sunday, officially signals the commencement of the traditional season of goodwill and peace to all men, and you can't help feeling that the message has got lost somewhere along the way.

Ask most five-year-olds what Christmas is about and you will get a bewildering array of answers mainly revolving around chocolate and presents but with the odd bit of confused and conflated religious mythology thrown in for good measure.

But it would seem that even the least precocious child has a better grasp on the subject than we so-called grown-ups.

There are of course two main tales that perennially do the rounds at this time of year.

The first involves a weary couple, one of whom was heavy with child, who travelled from afar to the town of Bethlehem due to bureaucratic reasons only to find that there was no room at the inn.

Instead the world's first IVF mother was forced to give birth in a cattle shed surrounded not by midwives and medics but a mini-menagerie of farm animals and various groups of itinerant bearded blokes bearing gifts.

It's a good job it didn't happen in Britain in 2013 or not only would there have been no room at the inn but they'd have been forcibly deported from the country in handcuffs.

"So Mrs, er Mary, If I understand you correctly you say you are about to give birth to the son of God, is that correct? Bloody health tourists."

"And you sir, what do you do for a living? Carpenter, eh? Are you sure you're not Polish?"

In fact Christmas goodwill is thinner on the ground at the moment than stray hairs on Michael Fabricant's carpet.

All the major parties appear to be trying to outdo each other in the hate speak stakes this week, as if they're getting all the bile out of their system before pretending to be nice to people for a few weeks - like bingeing before Lent.

Thus we've had politicians of all stripes engaging in hysterically xenophobic howls of faux anguish over the claimed influx of eastern Europeans to these benighted shores.

David Blunkett got the ball rolling early doors by predicting riots in his home city of Sheffield due to tensions between the Roma community and the locals.

That presumably would have come as quite a surprise to the local populous who probably have far more pressing things on their minds than indulging in race riots. Like wondering how they're going to get through the winter without freezing to death or how they are going to be able to afford to put food on the table.

Blunkett's always been a bit of a fascist but this is pure knee-jerk Daily Mail hate-mongering. Manufacture a fake panic and then sit back and watch it come to pass.

It's a good job no-one told him about Santa Claus...

"F***ing Laplanders, coming over here, using our chimneys and eating our mince pies..."

The second narrative which in many ways has come to embody the yule season almost to the same degree as the nativity, is the tale of a curmudgeonly miser who undergoes a form of redemptive regressive hypnosis to emerge a better, more caring human being.

This, on the face of it, would be a fairly straightforward message. Basically, being a greedy bastard is a bad thing. Even the aforementioned five-year-olds could probably get their heads round that concept once you'd got them to stop putting Lego up their noses.

Not so Boris Johnson who during the annual Thatcher lecture this week issued his fawning paean to the obscenely wealthy.

Johnson defended the importance of "boardroom greed" and "some measure of inequality" as a spur to economic activity at a time when the income gap between those at the top and those at the bottom is getting ever wider.

Basically what his waffling argument came down to was that some people are too stupid to get on in life...

Yes, and then mummy and daddy pay for them to go to Eton and they become politicians.

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