'Beyond silly!' Free speech chief lambasts museum for claiming Santa Claus is 'too white'

The museum made the claims in a blog post on its website, which suggested Santa should refrain from "judging" children and rewarding them based on a "Western binary of ‘naughty/nice'."

The post read: "For many children, the story of Santa Claus is as much a part of Christmas as gifts and Christmas dinner. But the tale of a white, Western Santa who judges all children’s behaviour has problems."

Delivering his verdict on the post, Lord Young told GB News: "I mean, it's almost beyond silly season. This is the kind of story that you'd expect to see in the paper on April 1st, except it almost seems a bit too broad to fool anyone on April Fool's Day.

"The Brighton and Hove Museum has decided that Father Christmas is a white supremacist and needs to be decolonised and shouldn't judge children all over the world according to the naughty nice binary. It's just too good to be true."

Host Tom Harwood then suggested the claims made by the museum itself could be perceived as "racist".

He argued: "Isn't it actually fairly racist to suggest that the naughty-nice binary would necessarily mean that non-white people would fall on the naughty side?

"I mean, if anything, if anyone needs to be suggested that they're the sort of white supremacist here, it's the person that's saying only white people are nice?"

Lord Young responded: "Well, often these zealous anti-racists stray into racism. One of the criticisms the museum has made of the naughty-nice binary is that children of other indigenous non-western cultures won't fit within that binary, because Santa Claus won't be able to judge whether their behaviour is naughty or nice.

"As you say, it's very condescending to say that it's impossible for children of non-western cultures to be either naughty or nice, and their behaviour somehow falls in between. It's like, well, no, they can be nice and they can be naughty too."

He added: "And the ridiculous thing about this is, what child realistically is going to object, even a non-western child in a non-western country, if a man dressed in red comes down their chimney bearing gifts?

"They're not going to say 'sorry, this is a decolonised fireplace, you're not welcome here white supremacist Santa, go back to a Western country'."

Tom then asked Lord Young: "It's the white saviour complex all over again! But I wonder though, this could be running contrary to what a lot of these sort of people might say, which is there are universal human rights now.

"Is Father Christmas not an expression of sort of international law in that way?"

The Free Speech Union chief responded: "Universalism only applies when it means admitting violent, convicted sexual offenders coming to our country on rubber dinghies.

"It doesn't apply to anything nice that we might care to celebrate like Father Christmas, I'm afraid."

A spokesman for the museum said in a statement: "This blog post was written in 2023 as part of our Culture Change work.

"As museum educators, our role is not to tell people what is right or wrong, but to help audiences look at history and culture from more than one point of view and to create opportunities for discussion and debate, just as we do when interpreting art, objects and historic places.

"The piece about Father Christmas was intended to prompt reflection rather than prescribe how anyone should celebrate Christmas.

"It looks at how familiar stories are shaped, whose perspectives they centre, and how they might be explored when we include viewpoints beyond a white Western perspective.

"Encouraging curiosity, critical thinking and conversation is a core part of museum education. Presenting different ways of understanding cultural stories, including festive ones, is part of that work, and people are free to agree or disagree."

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