In my Christmas message this year (if it’s good enough for the Queen…), I will remember it is a time for family and friends, those still with us in the land of the living and those long departed. I know how lucky I have been over the years and it is only because of the love of family and friends (you know who you are) that I am here at all. I love each and every one of you.
It is important, too, to cast our eyes further than our front door. In Britain, there are 120,000 children with nowhere to call home, there are hundreds of thousands of lonely people, especially though not solely senior citizens and there are unpaid carers who save us, our fellow citizens, the equivalent of what we spend on the NHS, which is to say well over one hundred billion quid every single year. I have seen a cross-section of all these people and I won’t forget them.
Casting our eyes beyond the white cliffs of Dover is important too. My heart aches for the victims of islamic fascists, often backed by more conventional fascists like Vladimir Putin. Whilst we have a major issue with islamist terrorists, it remains true that the vast majority of muslims are not terrorists. It is at this time of year where I think of them, ask them to have a good think about the religions they subscribe to and instead consider free thought, reason, science, secularism and even atheism. I do not believe we can look forward to a brighter, safer future until reason triumphs over superstition. We do not ban religion of course but we do encourage people to think about it more.
My own lack of faith brings me sadness in only one way, in that there is no hell for bad people to go to. I would no more welcome the existence of heaven or hell and the existence of a supernatural creator and his equivalent bad guy character, Satan, but I cannot help but think my life be a little more satisfying if I knew that the truly bad people would eventually get their comeuppance. I suppose it will have to be enough for us to know that the likes of Nigel Farage, Putin, Assad, Paul Dacre, Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump are and will be uniformly loathed as time goes by and they will know it.
But mostly I wish everyone well at this festive season, which for me has everything to do with family and friends, absent or otherwise and nothing to do with religion. For those who have faith, I wish them nothing but peace and love too. That is how a secular society is supposed to work.
These days, I cannot look away from people in crisis. It goes against who I work for and the person I have become. My family and friends are not British or foreign, white or of colour, straight or gay and every either or you could possibly think of. They’re human beings. Everything else doesn’t matter so much.
On top of my pompous Christmas message, I have one for the New Year, too. On a wider scale, 2016 was in so many ways the worst year of my life. Hate won through in our own EU referendum and it won through in the USA, too. People railed against the establishment and put in place and even worse establishment, for angry, bitter and bigoted than the previous one. A bright young politician was murdered by a fascist white supremacist in the weeks leading to the EU referendum, race hate crimes have soared ever since. 2017 just has to be better than this.
Our country is now more divided than ever and it will require exceptional leadership to unite us. Sadly, we have politicians from all parties who are not up to the job and politicians like Nigel Farage, who is not going away, sadly, striding the political stage having achieved everything he wanted in life, to turn us into Little Britain and away from mainland and mainstream Europe.
2017 has to be when ordinary people strike back and stand up against hate and for hope. This means rejecting the Ukip/Hard Tory right attempts to lead us over the cliff in the form of a hard Brexit and embracing a new inclusive, tolerant and secular nation, with people turning their back on Murdoch, Dacre’s evil Daily Mail and the equally nasty Express, Farage and the post referendum rise of the far right and the general loathing we seem to have for so many of our fellow human beings.
Peace and love, everyone. Hope not hate.
