As this is the last Civitas blog before the great annual Christmas shut-down, I shall endeavour as best I can to inject a festive note into today’s posting. This is harder than at first sight may appear, having just read on the ABC website that a senior US law enforcement has informed its reporters that “it will be a miracle if there isn’t a terror attack over the holidays in London”.
Pretty grim news, eh?
Well, at least the state-church separation the US Constitution’s First Amendment mandates seems not yet to have reached the idiolect of its federal officers. Doubtless, in due course, however, this will rectified by secular humanists there ensuring all federal employees attend suitable sensitivity training to expunge all religious imagery from their speech while at work.
I digress, however, from my main purpose, which was to offer up a lighter observation on the passing scene. Here then is my small contribution to the season’s festivities. The Times reports today that the police in the Lancashire town of Kirkham are giving pensioners in sheltered accommodation there this Christmas a thousand bottles of alcopops that have been confiscated from underage drinkers.
That’s what I call giving in the spirit of Christmas!
On behalf of colleagues at Civitas, may I express the hope that yours be no less full of it and no less free of terror incident, unless Al Qaeda decides to make prohibition one of its immediate objectives!
On a slightly more serious but genuinely uplifting note, it was gratifying also to read in today’s Times that, notwithstanding all the difficulties they have experienced this year, recruitment into the British army has increased by 16% over the last twelve months. It shows that, despite all the anti-patriotic and defeatist propaganda with which young people are filled these days, our boys and girls will never become slaves -- or at least not without putting up one hell of a fight first!
Merry Christmas!