Fireworks at New Year are the purest distillation of the spirit of frippery. All Sadiq Khan had to do was give ‘em the old razzle dazzle. There is no higher meaning to these colourful explosions, no significance to the spectacle beyond the fun of communal cries of ‘ooh!’ and ‘aah!’ Fireworks are quite enough – more than enough – in themselves. You can leave it to the bangers to do the job; adding anything else on top is not necessary. Appending a civic lecture to a firework display is like adding tripe to a trifle.
But Khan, like all the grim municipal fun sponges who run and ruin almost everything nowadays, can’t just sit back and let any harmless pleasure follow its well-established course. We were not left in any doubt as to who had granted us this spectacle, which kicked off with ‘The MAYOR OF LONDON Presents …’ in huge showbizzy letters, reminiscent of The Benny Hill Show, as if he had dug into his own pocket to grant his subjects this boon of bangs. The flashes that followed were indeed spectacular, but were interspersed with paeans to our new top-down megalopolitan touchstones: the Empire Windrush, environmentalism, the NHS (as if a public health provision was unique to Britain!), and same-sex marriage.
These things were all, not so long ago, toasty delights, little escapes at a special time of year
This was all bundled under the theme ‘London: A Place For Everyone’, which given the blind eye turned by Khan and the police to the horrific displays of mass anti-Semitism in the streets of central London over the last three months is a blatant regime lie worthy of a Second World junta. There is something grimly ironic that a 16 year old was stabbed to death while watching this display.
A soul-destroying firework display wasn’t the only example of this phenomenon over the holiday period. The fun destroyers were out in force across the board. At exactly the same time, ITV decided to ring in the New Year with a toe-curlingly sanctimonious montage of ludicrously wealthy actors, including Glenn Close and Idris Elba, lecturing its viewers about climate change.
The BBC shovelled up another of its Christmas Agatha Christie adaptations, this time about colonialism apparently. The sheer pleasure of immersing yourself in a classic ‘cosy crime’ puzzle is lost. Yes, there is a difference between the image of Christie’s work and its reality: the novels are frequently harder-edged than their media representations from the later twentieth century suggested, and only acquired their cosy patina many years after they were published. But this doesn’t invalidate the fun and the joy to be taken from that slant – properties the BBC has now sucked out completely.
These things were all, not so long ago, toasty delights, little escapes at a special time of year. But now there is to be no escape.
The presumption of it all! I can’t imagine being the kind of person who would try to impose my political world view into the world of jolly festive fun. What a rotter you would have to be.
The irony is that this is all supposed to be ‘inclusive’ and welcoming, but it is in fact the ‘progressive’ boilerplate ideology of the executive DEI class – of at best about ten to fifteen per cent of the population. Imagine it coming from the opposite end of the spectrum: a gigantic face of Nigel Farage beaming down over the capital; ITV corralling celebs to demand urgent action on stopping the boats; a retelling of Christie that extolled the virtues of pre-Blair Britain. We don’t notice how strange this is because we have been inured to this guff through endless repetition. It is the culture of psychopaths who enjoy ruining other people’s simple pleasures.
We suffer this for the rest of the year, and now we must suffer it over Christmas and New Year too. For heavens’ sake, bureaucrats and boondogglers – take a day off!
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