Stealing Christmas

The Daily Express front page today repeats a theme that is currently one of the conservative battlegrounds in the United States. The Express says there are plans to ban Christmas because it offends Muslims.

Last week on a few days holiday in New York I found on sale in Barnes and Noble two books on this theme, showing how Christmas now provides a focus for the USA's 'culture wars'. For the right, there was John Gibson's The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday is Worse Than You Thought. On the left, one of a number of books on how the Democrats had to win back the religious agenda, Bill Press's How Republicans Stole Christmas: The Republican Party's Declared Monopoly on Religion and What Democrats Can Do to Take It Back.

The UK has until recently been largely exempt from this kind of cultural politics. Unfortunately, I suspect we haven't seen the last of this kind of story. There are aspects of the new debate on multiculturalism and what it means to be British which are valuable and important - and the left in Britain needs to engage in this - but there will also be outbreaks of 'moral outrage' which add little to our understanding of the real issues and sow division.