Man, I am on fire. A day after I blog about holidays/multiculturalism, this happens.

First of all, the report mentioned isn't yet available to the public, so those reporting on it have a moral responsibility to truthfully represent it. Despite the Mail and others' (il)liberal use of the word downgrade, it's notable that none can actually offer a contextualised statement from the report containing it. Certainly they can site recommendations wherein it is suggested that other holidays receive greater levels of attention/observance, but none that actually say Christmas should get less. Indeed, the report is quoted as saying that no government could "expunge" Christmas "even if we wanted to". From that we can infer that there exists no such motive, and so using the word downgrade, especially in quotation marks, represents a willful, sensationalist distortion on the part of James Chapman, his editor, and everyone else who has followed their lead.

Of course, neither has the Mail considered the numbers of Eastern European and African immigrants among the cultures described who are professed Christians. Ask any inner-city priest, vicar or minister in the UK what multiculturalism has done for attendance figures and they'll paint a rosy picture of the immigration flood/deluge/swamp/aquatic metaphor de jour. But I forget; we live in a country where Far and Centre Right will happily use any old set of statistics to back up their preconceived arguments whilst damning the other for the very same practice, engage in an endless game of numerical one-up-manship and never think, never dare to use the subtler, but ultimately more effective, methodology of adult debate.

It's like the recent furore over the new jobs/foreign workers figures. I'm no New Labour fan: they genuinely don't have a clue how many people are in what jobs and where they were born, representing colossal incompetence; Brown's promise of "British jobs for British workers", apart from being a bit of banal rabble-rousing, was also demonstrably illegal; and it's abundantly clear that they spend entirely too much time and money over "no shit, Sherlock" reports such as the one described appears to be. But with regard to this week's rammy, would it have hurt anyone- and I mean any news outlet at all- to mention the figures of emigration from the UK since 1997 in the same breath as the confusion over immigration? I know- sight unseen- that the two don't cancel each other out but I'm damn sure it would have taken a lump out of the total, whatever the difference. You have to go digging to the very bottom of a BBC webpage to discover that while Indian and Poland are, respectively, the number one and number three top "last countries of residence" for UK immigrants, the silver medal goes to... Australia. And close runners-up are the USA and South Africa. The nature of Indian education means that the overwhelming majority of immigrants come with the essential tool for successful "integration", namely, English language skills. Hmm. Sounds like the Right's problem isn't with immigrants/foreigners nationals, but with, whisper it, the wrong sort of foreigner. Combine all this with an analysis of birth rates and and a detailed look at what the millions of new jobs in question entail (are Britons willing or qualified to fill them?) and we have a very different story from the one reported, one about ministerial mediocrity and a skills/training gap in British secondary and tertiary education. Very worthy, but not headline stuff. On with the lies!

Like I said before, I may know one or two Muslims who are bemused by the likes of Hallowe'en or Christmas, but I don't know any who are offended by it, and I know a damn site more who happily join in come the day. On the other hand, I know many, many, many whites who don't have a clue what Ramadan, Diwali or Hanukkah are, or even when they happen. Can the Mail, or anyone else for that matter, seriously argue that Britian wouldn't be a richer, more intelligent place if its population weren't made aware of (not forced to celebrate!) these things? That if religions/cultures were in some measure demystified (Christianity included), greater tolerance and understanding wouldn't be the result? That the disenfranchisement we're consistently told certain quarters of our society feels wouldn't be countered, at least a little bit, if "Eid Mubarak" played as readily on the lips of passers-by as "Merry Christmas"?