It’s funny, is it not, that after watching Frank Capra’s A Wonderful Life, one feels tremendously cheered: somewhere in the world, one thinks, there really are honest men, Potters brought to book, small towns with minimal crime, and happy endings. But the movie was made in 1946, and the sad truth is that the raucous scenes shown during Clarence the Angel’s ‘you never lived’ sequence are disturbingly similar to any London bar on a Friday night…or the centre of Bristol every evening.

In 1946, the immediate enemies had been defeated, and for reasons right or wrong, the West was an overwhelmingly tolerant, Christian bloc of many different cultures – but with remarkably similar ideas about families, communities, social advance, a fair crack for everyone, and individual freedom.

There are a million reasons why the Potters, Mullahs, harpies and killjoys are winning today – and far more dangerous people are in power than one bitter mill-owner. But the one thing common to every reason is that, at some point in the process of approaching the slippery slope to Hell, a Useful Idiot was persuaded by a propagandist to believe a load of old bollocks.

‘Useful Idiots’ was the term invented by Lenin to describe bourgeois intellectuals  who viewed Bolshevik ideas favourably. I tried manfully for a couple of years after 2005 to get the term ‘WUT’ off the ground. It stands for Wishful Unthinking Tendency, and was probably far too clever for its own good. But either way, it’s the same idea.

So as we don’t exchange Christmas presents here any more, this year my chimney wishlist was for, in some way, a change of heart and mind among those from all political viewpoints who believe….despite a mountain of evidence challenging their assumptions.

As they say at Private Eye, ‘that Christmas Chimney Wishlist in full’:

1. David Cameron to admit that Britain has no important role to play in the world, and most of the things he says about a leg up and all pulling together really offend people who know he is a privileged twit with no experience of lives like ours.

2. Harriet Harman to confess that she hasn’t read a single piece of gender neuroscience, social anthropology, or single mother survey data published since 1973.

3. A Tory flogger to admit that prison doesn’t work, but ‘tough love’ anti-reoffending courses can and do.

4. Tom Watson to come out and say that the hypocrites at Trinity Mirror were every bit as hackophile as the reptiles at Newscorp.

5. Somebody in Camerlot to put up his hand in Cabinet and say the EU is a disaster area now, and a trading zone with no visible future.

6. A cabal of senior officers in the Met Police to publicly admit we’ve all heard enough risible lies from journalists and their management, and the time had now arrived to charge fifty or more depraved lowlife with privacy invasion and misuse of communications equipment.

7. A Labour MP to say in public that being a member of an ethnic or religious minority does not bestow sainthood upon that person.

8. Sally Bercow and Louise Mensch to admit that they are mentally ill, have nothing useful to say, and thus wish to shut the f**k up forever.

9. The Daily Telegraph to stop arguing that banker-bashing is a bad thing.

10. Mario Draghi to accept that the cost of forgiving bad lending and bad debts would save trillions in future propping up of over-leveraged eurobanks.

11. Herman van Rompuy to make a keynote speech admitting that EU bureaucracy is corrupt, its practitioners sub-standard anti-democrats with no respect for the ordinary citizen, and the euro an idea built upon their uncommercial hubris.

12. Barack Obama to say something interesting, original or inspirational about something without having to have his arm twisted, or hoping for a response in the opinion polls.

13. A bishop somewhere in the British clergy to give a sermon saying our society is indeed greedy and decadent, but there is no way he will defend a mysogynist hotch-potch of superstitious Arabian bigotry masquerading as a harmless force for good in society as if it might be some kind of serious  alternative.

14. A Thatcherite to cut the crap, and say that neocon theory is based on avarice, the theory of trickle-down wealth is piffle, floating off the mutual sector of banking was a catastrophic error, and handing the entire economy over to a bunch of megalomanic liars with the ethics of a dingo was perhaps the worst decision made by a political class in the history of the world.

15. A US Democrat or UK Labour MP to admit that not everyone in the unemployment lines is the victim of racism, sexism, ageism, childhood abuse, disability, chronic ME, or government cuts.

16. Fred Goodwin to admit that yes, he is a star-struck nonentity with a minute prick and an even smaller brain who wishes he had never been born, and ought to crawl back under the slimey stone from which he undeservedly emerged.

17. A senior civil servant to stand up before retirement and observe that the British political system is a dysfunctional stitch-up being run for the benefit of an unrepresentative minority of losers with a dangerous courage, imagination, morality and discernment deficit.

18. A senior UK professional football official to admit that Newscorp money being sprayed all over the game has been disastrous for indigenous soccer standards, and made the chances of England ever winning the World Cup again remote in the extreme.

19. An X-Factor judge to join the panel, and tell every untalented contestant that they can’t sing, dance, compose, or indeed offer anything to the performing arts; that instead, they should go home and regard bread-making as the likely pinnacle of their life achievement.

20. A person under 40 to stand up, having read these wishes, and say, “Yes, our culture is in the mire, most of what I’ve been taught is drivel, and I want to help organise a movement to clear out every last scoundrel you have identified, God Bless you sir”. As opposed to “Yeh….whatever” or – even worse – “Yehbutseedefingizzloike, wharritizis….”.