Whenever you see the phrase “political correctness gone mad” in newspapers, it’s usually a sign that you’re being lied to: a few years ago, tabloid newspapers regularly printed stories about PC madness – replacing black bin bags with green ones, that sort of thing – that they’d simply made up. It seems that the tradition is alive and well, judging by this wonderful piece in today’s Guardian: Oliver Burkeman investigates the supposed War on Christmas and discovers that it’s a load of crap.

Perhaps the most notorious of the anti-Christmas rebrandings is Winterval, in Birmingham, and when you telephone the Birmingham city council press office to ask about it, you are met first of all with a silence that might seasonably be described as frosty. “We get this every year,” a press officer sighs, eventually. “It just depends how many rogue journalists you get in any given year. We tell them it’s bollocks, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference.”