Identifying the good guys?

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The disgraced, sacked, reappointed, and disgraced and sacked again former Home Secretary has certainly been getting into the festive spirit during the last week, with her demand that MPs should forgo their Christmas holiday and spend the time in parliament passing ever more vicious legislation against immigrants and asylum seekers. ‘Goodwill to all men’ trips off her tongue like superglue off a duck’s back.

Had she and her ilk been in power in Bethlehem a couple of thousand years ago, anyone arriving on a donkey would have been immediately detained and put on the next camel train to Egypt, innkeepers would have been subject to large penalties for using outbuildings as temporary accommodation for the desperate, and health care workers would have been banned from providing pre- or post-natal services to anyone arriving by donkey. Donkey, dinghy – much the same thing, really. In additional measures, angels would have been designated as terrorists for their role in an obvious attempt to overthrow the existing order and, using the absolute sovereignty of the local parliament, any unusual stars would have been described as fake news and banned from shining their light through local airspace. Any wise men arriving from afar would have been declared to be oxymorons (foreigners being automatically deemed unwise) and detained indefinitely for having a four-syllable descriptor. If the government proposed a cull of the first-born, the parliamentary party would set up a star chamber (although without a star, obviously) to determine whether the proposal was sufficiently cruel to act as a deterrent to procreation.

Back in the twenty-first century, the so-called ‘real world’ which we now inhabit, it really does look increasingly as though large and growing sections of the Conservative Party have become so indoctrinated by their new, improved British values that they’ve read the biblical story of the nativity and concluded that Herod was the good guy. His problem was that he was just too easy going and a bit of an old softy deep down.