A free society for Christmas

Tuesday December 20, 2011

Tom Miers looks for some Christmas presents and wonders what to wish for in 2012

Christmas is a celebration rich in the symbolism of a free society.

At its core are giving, neighbourliness, family and friendship – all the voluntary bonds that hold society together without the baleful influence of the state.

Christmas rituals cock a snook at the po-faced admonitions of government. We guzzle food and drink to excess, spend riotously, and impose, through sheer weight of numbers, an obligation on our prelates to conduct services with traditional rituals and music that people are actually familiar with.

The ministers of the church may kow-tow to the PC nostrums of the age, but its occasional adherents hark back to a more robust tradition that deals in hearty moral absolutes. At Christmas Christianity becomes Christian once more.

Yet all this leaves a male forty-something scribbler with an annual dilemma – what on earth to buy all those sons and sisters, nephews and neighbours for their presents?

So I used my position of privilege as editor of this site to ask our contributors for their ideas – what to give, and, for good measure, what to wish for in 2012. Here are a few of my favourite things.

‘Politically Correct Bedtime Stories’, by James Finn Garner, ‘the descendant of dead white Europeans’, has to be a winner with old and young. Rania Hafez tells me there’s a new edition that includes a new story ‘The Duckling That was Judged on its Personal Merits and Not its Physical Appearance’.

On the bookish theme, Dennis Hayes suggests a copy of JS Mill’s ‘On Liberty’ to be stuffed in the stockings of the various self-righteous celebrities and journalists testifying to the Leveson inquiry.

Gold is Chris Snowden’s gift of choice as a hedge in these inflationary times. A great alternative is a donation to the RNLI which, as Eamonn Butler says, is one of the few charities to reject all public money, and one of the most valuable.

As you might expect, the New Year’s wish list inspired some fine ideas from our polemicists. “An orderly break-up of the euro, so we could all get back to economic normality” was just the start. We also had a legal requirement for universities to be ‘the role of critic and conscience of society’, the abolition of speed limits on Britain’s motorways, and a plea for government to turn a deaf ear to the health lobbyists in 2012.

But my favourite gift idea comes from Rania Hafez: a week’s supply of pure Iranian tobacco for her mother’s shisha.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Tom Miers is editor of The Free Society