Let us put aside those tweeted greetings, online orders and Jamie-authored canapes, and acknowledge it: the British Christmas is an essentially Victorian concept, and will for ever remain so. Peel back the facade of modern consumerist flash, and it is all still there: not just the bells, carols and trees, but the season's three pillars – of family, charity and enforced jollity.
Just to heighten the sense of a season essentially unchanged in more than 150 years, we should doff our caps to a ruling clique who might have been dragged through time from the mid-19th century. Now, surely, we can confidently scoff at the coalition's claims to being somehow "progressive", and feel a shiver at so many of the Victorian fundamentals of Con-Dem politics – noblesse oblige, an updated notion of the undeserving poor and, naturally enough, fiscal exactitude.
It may be the time of year, but as all those budgets are hacked back, you really have to reach for your Dickens and either laugh or cry. I am certainly not the first this year to quote Mr Micawber: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and – and in short, you are for ever floored." If only George Osborne could put it like that.
Anyway, herein is a truth that most of the media have so far been too polite – or too frit – to mention: that as decisive proof of a return to 19th-century practices, we now find ourselves governed by people from a narrower social category than has been seen in years, and one of their motivations becomes clearer by the day – to somehow recast the country according to the ancient mores of the English upper class.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/21/con-dem-coalition-social-elite
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