I hope everyone enjoys Santa’s birthday tomorrow.

I had an idea for an updated Nativity play. The three Wise Men bring in the gifts and the Virgin Mary leaps to her feet and sings ‘Material Girl’.

The big story locally at the moment is about a tree that has been festooned with spikes to stop pigeons roosting in it. The pigeons defecate on the cars below and the car owners are not pleased. The cars are expensive because this is the wealthiest part of town. You can see more about this here.

Someone’s started a petition to get rid of the spikes and save the pigeons. Not that pigeons are popular: rats with wings, we call them. The public doesn’t like pigeons much at all, as a rule, but it likes the rich residents even less. A sign of the times, perhaps.

I wonder would the petition be at all successful if this was an ordinary street of second-hand Fords and Peugeots? Most people who have had to clean pigeon poo off their cars find it distasteful and would normally sympathize with others who had to do it daily, but not if those others are rich. In a ‘them and us’ scenario any trouble for ‘them’ is just fine by ‘us’. This is largely thanks to the unscrupulous greed of the Mega-rich like Trump and all the other tax-dodging, worker exploiting, mean-spirited billionaires.

However, not all rich people are bad. In the part of town with the tree, I would guess they are upper-middle-class professionals such as doctors, dentists, accountants, lawyers. When they come out in their suits to go to work it is no doubt an infernal nuisance to have a filthy car. The petitioners say they can wipe them every day but do you really want to do that in a suit? I wouldn’t.

Indubitably, some of the protesters are genuine fans of wildlife, even pigeons, and want to put their needs over the needs of BMW’s and Mercedes but I suspect more than a few petitioners are just anti-rich, even Richist which is a form of discrimination. But not all well-off people are bad and some of them pay a lot of taxes to keep the country going.

Who’s right? I don’t know. But if you make a society unliveable for useful, working people – even if they are rich – you’re not making it better.

P.S.  I believe one Dick Dastardly has started a counter-petition to stop the pigeons. Only one signature so far, his dog Muttley.