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A Pragmatic Christmas

The vitally important negotiations at Copenhagen seem to have produced a bit of a fudge. The green lobby will be devastated, the climate change sceptics self-righteously smug. My own pragmatic view is that if we act sensibly to limit Carbon, but global warming turns out to have been a figment of the imagination as we freeze over in 100 years time, then it really won’t matter, especially since we will have benefited our own green-technology producing economy in the meantime. If, on the other hand we do nothing but we turn out to be wrong and the Globe suffers catastrophically as a result of our inaction, then we will look pretty silly in retrospect. So let’s do what we can to prevent disaster, but not get too carried away with the whole thing.

Perhaps a similar approach is right with regard to the economy. Gordon Brown constantly claimed to have abolished Boom and Bust. It sometimes feels as if Boom is the only one he did away with! The fact is that economic cycles come and go, and all we can hope to do is to lessen their worst effects on the people. Claiming to have done away with cycles is positively King Canute-ian in its foolishness. More pragmatically sensible is the following advice: - “The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.” Sounds sensible? It was said by Cicero in 55 BC.

A similarly modest, Conservative, pragmatic approach seems to me to be sound with regard to Christmas. I am full of admiration for those people who cover their entire house and garden with flashing Santa Clauses. I’m just glad I’m not an insomniac living next door to them. I’m all in favour of a decent Christmas dinner, a few carols and mulled wine, a bit of holly here and there. But I sometimes worry that Christmas has become a massive orgy of eating and drinking and present-giving, wildly disproportionate to our religious convictions. As someone said on the radio, Christmas without Christ is M and S.

So I do hope you all have a lovely time, a goodly amount of cheer, a decent dose of sentimentality. I hope that you keep the hangovers and indigestion under control and realise that family stresses are one of the most common side-effects of Christmas. I hope that you will spare a thought for those who cannot be quite so self-indulgent, perhaps particularly at this time, our servicemen in Afghanistan, our emergency services and essential service workers, our clergy.

 To them, and to all of you, I would just say: “Have a Very Happy, if pragmatically fairly modest Christmas.”

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