How have we got to this?

3:39pm Friday 4th January 2008

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THIS Christmas I didn't get to attend a school nativity play.

I have always found that the sight of little shepherds and angels re-enacting the Bethlehem story does more to produce a feeling of the true spirit of Christmas than all the other festivities that accompany Christmas.

I was therefore saddened to read that "fear of offending people of other faiths" has been trotted out again as the ludicrous excuse for not performing a nativity play at many schools.

A recent poll revealed that only six schools out of ten were performing traditional nativity plays this Christmas. The rest were either putting on secular productions or simply avoiding offence by doing nothing at all. If you don't raise your head above the parapet - you can't get shot.

What appals me is the implication that devout Muslims, Hindus and Jews would be offended by the national celebration of Christmas in a country where the established church is Christian any more than the latter are by their celebration of Eid, Diwali or Passover. Why are so many people determined to create divides where there are none? If a school has a significant proportion of children of other faiths, then, at the appropriate times, their faith stories and traditions can be similarly celebrated too.

I have never met a member of our many ethnic minority communities who objects to the celebration of Christmas and am at a loss to understand how we have arrived at a point where those in a position to make these decisions seem to have achieved their status without acquiring a little common sense commensurate with their power along the way.

Let us hope too that common sense and decency intervene in the case of Bristol's Julie Lake, the grand-daughter of a World War One victim and daughter of a World War Two RAF pilot, who is alleged to have cuffed the ear of one of a group of yobs who had regularly vandalised her local war memorial. Naturally, as is the case with all 15 year old thugs, when confronted they seek recourse from the law they so sneeringly flout.

It would mean nothing to them that many of the young men whose deaths are honoured by that memorial would have been only a couple of years older than the morons who desecrated it.

If Julie is prosecuted, the world has gone mad and we must all man the barricades.