A "Clown Of The Year" award to Birmingham City Council, which, for the second year running, has refused to celebrate Christmas and had the city bedecked with lights and decorations honouring Winterval, short for winter festival.
I was delighted to see on the television news a senior Muslim religious leader joining the chorus of critics, calling it "idiotic". "Christmas should be celebrated," he said. "We should all celebrate our own religious festivals. We do not want to be homogenised."
That Muslim would have been quite happy with the Birmingham school nativity play full of black, brown and white faces which was featured on the same programme. "We celebrate everyone's festivals", said the headmistress.
Like most people in those parts of Britain (mainly England) with many religions and ethnic backgrounds, those two sane people believe in celebrating diversity rather than seeking the lowest common denominator.
If asked to contemplate Northern Ireland, they would probably think John Hume should be cheering an Orange parade while David Trimble shouted from the sidelines for his local hurling team.
But though the majority of people living in Britain rub along together pretty well, they do so despite the race relations industry and the clowns and malcontents it feeds off.
In schools, clowns abolish nativity plays lest children of other religions feel insulted by being reminded that Britain is a Christian country. The looniest of them insist that in largely Bangladeshi schools, English children should learn Urdu so they can communicate with their classmates. That does no service to the Urdu-speaking kids, whose employment prospects depend on fluent English.
The clowns trumpet about multiculturalism, which to them means, inter alia, that no culture - even that of the country in which we live - takes precedence over any other. They therefore make it harder for immigrants to fit comfortably into the cultural context in which they will spend their lives.
The malcontents are one stage worse. Never happier than when pouncing on potential grievances, they see every group in Britain - except, of course, for the natives - as having immutable rights. From their perspective, it is the British who must make all the necessary adjustments, and where they fail to come up to scratch, they must be prosecuted with the full rigour of the law. The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), set up with the best of intentions over two decades ago, has degenerated into Malcontents' HQ.
THIS Christmas a classic example of making trouble for trouble's sake centred on the small Cornish fishing town of Padstow. For two centuries or so the locals have celebrated Darkie Day by blacking up and dancing through the streets singing minstrel songs and collecting money for charity: they believe the tradition began when a storm forced a slave ship to dock at Padstow and the slaves sang and danced on the quay.
But now Cornwall has a council for racial equality which is busying itself by creating racial disharmony where none existed before. The festival was "offensive and provocative", declared its chairwoman. "I am not black and it offends me very much."
Unimpressed by the fact that Ziggy Holder, Padstow's only black inhabitant, thinks Darkie Day is "an innocent bit of fun" which he greatly enjoys, she complained to Bernie Grant, a black London MP, who denounced the tradition as a disgrace. So now this small town, where in 10 years Trinidadian Ziggy Holder has never experienced any racism, is feeling wounded, threatened and mutinous.
The CRE came under savage attack a couple of weeks ago by Blondel Cluff, a lawyer of West Indian parentage, who had served on it as a commissioner for two years. In a submission to ministers she accused the CRE of having a "destructive and dangerous" approach to race relations.
Not only did it fail to take account of "the reasonable harmonious relationship" between different ethnic backgrounds that made Britain "relatively unique in the world", but it sought to "introduce a litigious and aggressive attitude towards race relations rather than a conciliatory one."
Blondell Cluff came up the hard way. In her youth she had plenty of experience of racial prejudice. She was fortunate in her parents, who encouraged their children to stand up for themselves, gave them a strong sense of their own worth and taught them to work hard and take advantage of the opportunities in their adopted country.
Her experience of the CRE convinced her it had become a self-perpetuating institution which could keep its many boys in jobs only by encouraging minorities to develop a victim mentality and by pursuing costly and expensive compensation claims at public expense.
It was the CRE that brought middle England out in a temporary anti-Irish rash when its lawyers won £30,000 for a college lecturer who had been called "an Irish prat" by an irritated colleague, who had afterwards apologised. It was the CRE who commissioned a study of discrimination against the Irish in Britain from the University of North London, whose Irish Studies Department is notorious for favouring the MOPE (Most Oppressed People Ever) view of the Irish experience.
Antipathetic though I am where that particular outfit is concerned, the absurdity of its report exceeded my expectations. The CRE, of course, welcomed with open arms the highly suspect evidence of "a deep sense of hurt" among the seven to 10 million people in Britain "of Irish origin" and set merrily to work notifying institutions around the country that they now had yet another category of potential victims who had to be given special consideration.
Immigration is going to be a huge social issue in Ireland. Here are a few suggestions based on 30 years of observation of the British experience.
What asylum-seekers most need is a legal system that deals fairly and speedily with their applications. What those who are allowed to stay most need is fair treatment under the law and encouragement to become economically independent. While it is not incumbent on the Irish to learn Romanian, it is reasonable that Romanian immigrants should make every effort to learn English.
Many immigrants will bring much cultural richness to their new country, but they should be left in no doubt that they have a duty to respect the customs and practices of their hosts. Tolerance and a sense of humour should be enjoined as the best way of resolving differences. And anyone who tries to push Ireland down the dreary path of homogeneity and multiculturalism should be cast into the nearest bog.