This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.As of a few hours ago, there were only 650 sales between the current number one in the UK Christmas charts—Justin Bieber’s superb bitch-ballad “Love Yourself”—and the current number two—some kind of socially worthy yet musically bankrupt mash-up of "A Bridge Over Troubled Water" and "Fix You" by Coldplay performed by a choir of NHS staff that met on a BBC Two reality show.The chart is announced on Christmas Day, but Bieber, a well-known supporter of William Beveridge and his 1945 creation of a free health service, has made the unusual intervention of telling people to stop buying his record and plump for the NHS one instead. It is, as he points out, all for charity.
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I'm hearing this UK Christmas race is close…but the @Choir_NHS single is for charity. So…
— Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) December 23, 2015
so for 1 week it's ok not to be #1. Let's do the right thing & help them win. It's Christmas. @Choir_NHS good luck https://t.co/ORCtFY1k4i
— Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) December 23, 2015
Some would argue that it’d be both more generous and more sensible to just donate Bieber’s proceeds to the same charity, meaning that we can have both a warm Christmassy sense of goodwill and the first actually good Christmas number one since Michael Jackson’s “Earth Song” in 1995. Oh well, we guess we’ll plump for this. Thanks Justin Bieber—maybe there’s room for you in Corbyn’s cabinet.This is what it's all about. Merry Christmas :)
— Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) December 23, 2015