This is a follow up to the recent thread in which a council was falsely accused of banning a carol concert for fear of offending minorities.

The UK satirical magazine Private Eye today reports a recent case from Rochdale, near Manchester (UK). A school requested that, instead of bringing to school individual Christmas cards for each of their friends, just one card, to the whole class, was enough. The school is in a poor area, and many children would have felt pressured into emulating more affluent classmates, or humiliated if they could not do so. In addition, individual cards highlighted the problems brought about by popularity, and conversely isolation, of children.

A parent went to the local paper, complaining about this policy, and the paper published an article on the predictable lines of "PC gone mad". They did however print the school's reply.

But when the Daily Express (extreme right- wing national) picked up the story, they blazed it as "school bans Christmas cards", and the Daily Star (as its name suggests, not even on this planet) claimed that the school banned Christmas to avoid offending Muslim pupils. Note the progression here- from a totally reasonable policy to a PC plot to appease Muslims, created from the whole cloth.

People may occasionally over- react (certainly not in this case); but the way certain of the national papers deal with this suggests that they want to create strife even where none exists. They irresponsibly play on the perceived prejudices of their readership - just to sell papers if I'm being charitable, or uncharitably because they want to provoke racial and inter- community conflict. This is not to be discounted- look what happened in the technologically-advanced, western oreinted, liberal- Communist society of Yugoslavia.