Away in a manger...

Christmas is such a simple idea. Take a carpenter and his pregnant fiancée, harassed by the taxman, living under the oppression of colonial rule, strapped for cash – no question of the White Hart for the night – no NHS, no benefits and no midwife. The birth goes well. Then it dawns on people that something wonderful has happened. Farmers and philosophers arrive to check it out. The establishment is rattled. The rest is history that changed the world.

Why, then, have we turned it into a festival of spending, queues, exhaustion and debt?

In the bleak mid-winter
Partly, because Christ was born in the deep mid-winter – and the winter solstice was already the most important pagan festival of the year, including at Stonehenge. Why? Because from December 21st on, the days grew longer and warmer and fresh food became available again. The reason changed but the festivities went on.

Bring me flesh and bring me wine
Britain is the fourth largest economy in the world. There are one billion people on our planet living on less than a dollar a day. And, believe it or not, there are still nine million people in the UK living in poverty.

It takes the loss of just one weekly wage packet, one delayed benefit giro, one unexpected bill to turn a drama into a crisis for a lot of people. Even in Salisbury. In fact, last year the Trussell Trust Food Bank delivered 26 tonnes of emergency food boxes to 1747 adults and 1332 children living near you. True, 18% of it was delivered to the poorest ward in Wiltshire which, shamefully, is in our prosperous city. But 47% was taken to families in our picture-postcard villages.

I visited the Trussell Trust HQ at St. Michael’s Church on Bemerton Heath. The food warehouse, packing and distribution centre and the shop with pre-owned goods from furniture to forks and clothes to carpets is run by a tiny staff and a small army of volunteers from students to pensioners. Like the Salvation Army which is one of their partners, these good people work quietly behind the scenes on projects our busy world passes by - especially at Christmas. They are fighting a battle on our behalf.

So, when you’ve bought your turkey and trimmings, pudding and mince pies, stilton and port – please go round the supermarket again and buy long-life milk and fruit juice, tinned meat, rice and fruit, dried mashed potato, cereals, sugar and pasta sauce – and get it to the Trussell Trust or the Salvation Army.

The quest of the travellers three
For those of us who wish to travel to Southampton or Southampton Airport and would prefer to go by train, there is good news this month. South West Trains will be running a new ‘loop’ service from Salisbury to Romsey, Southampton Central, Southampton Airport Parkway, Eastleigh and back to Romsey. This will run every hour during the day, Monday to Saturday and every two hours on Sundays.

I support the Three Rivers Community Rail Partnership which aims to get more people on to trains and better local rail services. They also help voluntary and commercial groups to sponsor stations, clean them up, plant flowers and shrubs and provide a ‘Stationwatch’ service. Read all about it – and the timetables and links – on www.threeriversrail.com.

Shepherds abiding in the fields
Being English, my father brought me up to take daily weather measurements. In Salisbury’s driest year in the past decade, just 24 inches fell. So far this year we have had 41 inches. Warm, wet weather is perfect for the spread of diseases such as bluetongue (a virus carried by midges) and Lyme disease (a bacterium carried by ticks and fleas). Bluetongue kills livestock (mainly sheep). Lyme disease can lead to lethargy, paralysis and worse for humans and lameness, heart and kidney problems for pets. Last year there were 768 cases reported. Salisbury Plain is a danger area. The HPA at Porton Down estimates that across the UK there are up to 2000 cases unreported each year.

What we need now, to kill these bugs, is cold, dry weather with lots of snow this winter – deep and crisp and even!

O little town of Bethlehem
Palestine will be neither silent, still nor peaceful this Christmas. As we sing of the little town of Bethlehem, think not only of Christ’s birth but of the deprivations of over two million men, women and children stuck in the West Bank, deprived of normal trade and communication, short of food and medicine. Here in The Holy Land is the gravest situation facing the international community. As the nineteenth-century power that drew so many of the lines in the sand of the Middle East, that was responsible for the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and presided over the birth of the state of Israel in 1948, we cannot walk away from that part of the world. Let us all hope that 2008 will bring fresh thinking and peace to the region – and the return of our troops from Iraq.

Robert Key MP