The real meaning of Christmas was made clear to me every Boxing Day morning, when my mum would sit down beside the pile of opened presents with a notebook, to add up the value of the gifts we had received versus the amount we had spent in return. There was always, somehow, a shortfall of a few quid and I would hear muttered spites along the lines of “Doreen was always a mean cow” and “Right, it’s socks for you next year, Uncle Albert” from the kitchen table where this terrible reckoning took place.

Christmas for you may be about agreeable, more traditional things: systematic abuse of alcohol, sexual incontinence and gluttony. For me it is about my family being materially abused by relatives; northern aunts who sent a box of orange Matchmakers from Woolies when they had been bestowed a bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream by us.

Christmas is also about the vilification of those people who do not understand the real meaning of it — the BBC, local councils, the government, the politically correct institutions that send out cards with “Season’s Greetings” on them instead of “Many Happy Returns of the Day, Jesus”.

At first we blamed the Muslims, which has led to a position where anyone called Mohammed must don tinsel and mistletoe for 20 days singing Good King Wenceslas, or risk appearing in a double-page spread in a tabloid, identified as an arriviste ingrate who deserves a kicking. Now it’s the turn of Luton council and the BBC.

In reality, though, it is not the PC institutions who subvert the “true” meaning of Christmas, whatever that is, but our private corporations. Capitalism was always based upon cowardice and a desperate wish not to offend public sensibilities. It does not matter that public sensibilities — be they Muslim, Hindu or Satanist — are not in the least offended by overt references to Christmas. It matters only that private companies are scared they might be.

And so you can search up and down Regent Street — and I dare say Princes Street and St Mary’s Street — and you won’t find any big store enticing you inside with a frieze of Jesus in his crib, or the three wise men carrying gold, frankincense and a Nintendo Wii console.

You may find farmyard animals, but they will be copulating with pouting, raven-haired mannequins rather than lowing at our Saviour in a barn. Okay, I exaggerate — but not by much (check out Selfridges).

But if there is an infraction of public sensibilities, even one more imagined than real, the government will sooner or later take a swing at it. Recently David Blunkett, John Reid and Gordon Brown have queued up to condemn the “PC Christmas brigade”; a magnificent example of tilting at windmills. Politicians attacking something which doesn’t exist and which, if it did, is none of their business.

• Immigrants to this country have a “right to be different” and a “duty to integrate”, according to Tony Blair. I think this means clear off if you don’t like it here, but one can never be entirely sure with him.

  For example, he also said multiculturalism had always been about a balance between conformity and difference, which is a breathtaking assertion — a little as if he had announced: “There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — and, y’know, we never said there were.”

  Government sponsored multiculturalism for 30 years insisted there was no imperative to share the core values of society — if there were core values of society, which there probably weren’t. People who disagreed were branded “racist”. If Blair had made his speech 10 years ago he’d have branded himself “racist”, which would have been fun to watch, I suppose.

  Then, when he turned to that silly non-issue — Muslim women wearing the veil — he got it all wrong again. Surely if there is one area where immigrant communities should be allowed do as they like it is in the clothes they choose to wear. Attack the ideology behind the veil, the Islamic attitude towards women — not the veil itself. But the PM can’t do that because he’s already attempted to force all of us, by law, to respect that ideology, regardless of its misogyny (and, one might add, homophobia, anti-semitism, etc).

  Madonna, the mammal material girl

  Only 40 or so chinchillas were electrocuted, and their skins torn off, to provide Madonna with a nice warm coat for winter. I would have thought you would need a good four or five hundred to soften successfully the edges of this self-obsessed old shrew. But perhaps there is more to this story than meets the eye.
  
  It may be that Madonna, tiring of herself as we all are, wishes to become a chinchilla and is, with typical subtlety, expressing this desire through her clothing. In which case she should surely be encouraged. Chinchillas are modest, intelligent and unassuming little mammals, never happier than when skittering across the rocky Andes, gnawing on seeds.
  
  That seems to me more socially useful than churning out third-division anodyne disco music and coffee-table soft porn, moaning about the British weather and buying small black children. Whether she will be successful in her attempt to become a chinchilla is open to question — but there is one reliable method of finding out. When threatened, chinchillas emit a curious high-pitched bark and a stream of sulphurous urine. If you bump into Madonna, threaten to electrocute her and see if she reacts the same way.

• While we’re on the subject of kicking out people who may not share our core values, how about this latest beauty from the law courts? A judge has decided that an illegal Somalian immigrant who raped a 13-year-old girl was unlawfully incarcerated after his sentence had been served, and is eligible for compensation of £50,000, which you and I — and the rape victim’s family — will have to pay.

  The man was held in prison because he did not wish to return to Somalia, it being a bit on the poor and dangerous side. So his choosing not leave meant he stayed at our expense while we tried to deport him. Social workers insist he could reoffend at any time, being possessed of psychotically violent attitudes towards women. And so he is making a mint at our expense.

  Find me a single person in the country who thinks this is a just outcome, other than Justice Calvert-Smith, the defending solicitor and the rapist — who cannot be named, because, of course, he was granted anonymity.

• Who will be first in the queue for one of those new, green, “zero carbon” homes the chancellor wants us all to live in? Each house contains a rainwater collection and filtration system, wind turbines on the roof and a unique “reed bed” sewage system within which specially trained otters empty your toilets daily and convey the ordure, by bicycle, to high-tech plants where it will be turned into earnest new junior members of the government.

  There are worries that the homes will not work. That is the way with green technology. One minute it’s the answer to all our problems, the next some scientist discovers that it gives you cancer, requires the liquidation of the world’s beaver population, or produces a new form of rain that kills toads.

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