Father Christmas is a Euro-enthusiast

Posted: Thu 18 Jun 2009 8 10 am

To believe in the EU, you have to close your eyes to a lot of what it does. The EU described by its supporters is all about human rights, democracy and brotherhood. You'd have to be pretty mean-spirited not to approve of it.

The trouble, as you can hear me telling an unsympathetic chamber in my allotted 60 seconds, is that this virtual EU bears no relation to the actual EU: the EU whose budget goes unapproved, whose Common Fisheries Policy has created an ecological calamity in the North Sea, whose aid programmes are riddled with fraud and waste, whose foreign policy is anything but ethical, whose bureaucracy keeps expanding in order to service its own needs.

Let me adapt the great P J O'Rourke. If God is a Euro-sceptic, Father Christmas is a Euro-enthusiast.

God comes across a pretty stiff sort, a stickler for rules. He disapproves of waste and extravagance. He dislikes idleness. He has little time for the Utopian schemes and overblown ambitions of His creatures. In fact, when a previous generation of men united behind a presumptuous plan for regional integration, He took a very dim view indeed: "And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city."

Now Father Christmas is a very different proposition. He's jolly and generous and likeable. He might know who's been good and who naughty, but he never does anything about it. Everyone gets the goodies, regardless of desert.

Father Christmas, in short, is preferable to God in every way. Except one. There is no such thing as Father Christmas.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/daniel_hannan/blog/2009/06/17/father_christmas_is_a_euroenthusiast

Joined: 13 Aug 2005 Posts: 2902

I'm sure I'm not alone in having guessed that this is was work of Daniel Hannan from the first line alone...absolutely right, of course.