Christ was born in a barn. This proves that he came for all humankind, as well as reducing his parents’ options for witty off-the-peg verbal critiques of him should he leave their front door open. Bearing Christ’s universality in mind, on Christmas Day at lunchtime I made my guests stand to listen to a few hours of festive recordings I had sourced via a bent Prison Service contact. A choir of people convicted of offences relating to the summer riots performed a selection of seasonal songs as my guests listened, hands on their hearts. The man who took a brick in the testicles in Southport added a particularly effective descant on the closing verse of Feed the World. Auntie Gladys was in tears and the old man from next door soiled himself in woe.
In the run-up to Christmas, I pondered all those less fortunate than me who would perhaps have to spend the season in prison; or worse still, those who will have to make polite conversation over the turkey with elderly Reform-voting relatives who still think Brexit was a great idea but it just wasn’t done right, and that Nigel Farage is “a character”.
Meanwhile, 19 environmental protesters, soon to be lauded as martyrs in the planet’s last line of defence, celebrated Christmas in British jails this year, doubtless eating artificially fertilised food and opening wasteful cards, like the trust fund-funded middle-class student hypocrites they are.
One 77-year-old Quaker layabout do-gooder, Gaie Delap, initially instructed to serve her sentence at home, was also told she would spend Christmas in prison; the private company contracted to imprison the climate heroine could not find an electronic tag small enough for her, provision for Delap’s wrist circumference presumably lying outside the break-even margins deemed acceptable by its shareholders.
No privatised British incarceration service could reasonably be expected to hold so small a Quaker and still turn a profit. Criminals are usually large anyway, like that Charles Bronson bloke and the Kingpin in Daredevil. I hope the tiny Quaker gave the screws the slip through a ventilation grille and then floated away on a cocktail umbrella. Madam! History will exonerate you!! Be strong!!! We salute you… from our nice homes, admittedly.
The imprisonment of the environmental protesters is a brown stain on our nation’s history. But Elon Musk, whose purchase of the Ricky Gervais fansite and pornbot accelerant Twitter (currently X) has made him the world’s most influential horse tranquilliser consumer, thinks the throb-veined sunbed magnate and mortgage fraudster Tommy Robinson is also a political prisoner; a veritable white Nelson Mandela for the street cocaine and supa-strength cider generation.
Indeed, in November, on Twitter (currently X), Musk asked: “Why is he [currently Tommy Robinson] in prison for 18 months?” It’s telling that Musk had to openly ask this, rather than just running the question through his own social media app, as he has now degraded Twitter (currently X) so much that all that would have come up were links to porn, AI graphics of Donald Trump fighting a transgender Godzilla, and motivational quotes from Musk himself. (“It’s OK to have all your eggs in one basket, as long as you bought the eggs off me and I rented you the basket.”)
Robinson is, of course, in prison for making false claims about a young Syrian refugee in a film, and then repeatedly showing the film when he’d been asked nicely not to. Although to be fair, unlike James Mangold, the director of A Complete Unknown, at least Tommy Robinson didn’t show Bob Dylan composing Girl from the North Country a full year before he learned the Scarborough Fair melody it is based on from Martin Carthy while playing small folk clubs in London. Who is the real criminal here?
Robinson, and Musk, and Farage circulated inflammatory assumptions from the likes of the professional misogynist and self-styled “webcam pimp” Andrew Tate, and rioters were inspired by these comments. But should cruelly misled summer rioters find themselves spending Christmas in jail, for the crime of simply having tried to burn down migrant hostels full of children in good faith? I don’t know. It was for that reason that I commissioned my own Christmas choir of convicted rioters.
That, and because Trump did the same thing a week or so before Thanksgiving at Mar-a-Largo, when recordings of the convicted January 6 rioters singing the national anthem were played for guests. Later the same month, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg dined there with Trump. This is a man who has all your personal details going back decades, and photos of every fancy dress party you attended, every assignation you engineered, and every political demo you ever walked peacefully along with – and he’s desperate to be in with the new boss.
You are nothing to these people, just low-hanging fruit for whoever has the money to buy the means to mind-map you into being the voter they want you to be. Western democracy is all over bar the shouting.
But there was a strange sliver of hope on Christmas Day when, somehow, the old BBC liberal values leaked through, as if even the Tory place-people that have gerrymandered the board realised Christmas programmes need to be a little bit nice.
Oh look! A feminist ghost story from 1887 (admittedly adapted and directed by a man)! Oh look! A queer black Doctor in Doctor Who creates the star that leads the wise men to the baby Jesus! It’s the wokest Christmas TV ever! For one day, like Robert De Niro in Awakenings, the BBC was back to its old self. And that’s where I’ll be, in the darkest moments of the coming year of despair, flashing myself back into the Baileys haze where an animated dog and an Asian policewoman defeated an army of malevolent AI gnomes controlled by an evil penguin who really should have been in jail.
Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf this year, with a Royal Festival Hall run in July
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
