Nigel Farage would have burst a blood vessel, had he only had the chance to listen in. What could be more metropolitan liberal elite than last week’s Guardian Christmas telethon, as readers called in to journalists to make a donation for child refugees? Just imagine it, all those Islington luvvies and bleeding hearts, ringing in from one part of London N1 to another, the Bollinger chilling nicely in the fridge, as they salved their well-paid consciences and congratulated themselves on being leftier than thou. How utterly Guardianista.

Except it was nothing like that. The calls came from all over the country, with perhaps an over-representation from the north of England. In my two and a half hours on the phones, I heard from Barrow-in-Furness, Hull, Lancaster, Leeds, Swansea and a string of small towns and villages from Devon to Cumbria. Colleagues reported the same pattern. True, I took a call from my own small part of north London – but it was the only one. However else you’d want to describe this group of people, metropolitan they weren’t.

Nor were they the elite. Pensioners called to give the fiver or tenner they worked out they could spare, or, as Polly Toynbee has recounted, their entire winter fuel allowance. Gary Younge took a call from an unemployed Asian man, living with his parents in northern England, who gave £1.33: he chose that precise sum because he had £1.34 in his account. Meanwhile, and by coincidence, Stuart Heritage spoke again to Sam, the same teenager whose call he took last year. Sam isn’t old enough to have a credit card, but each year he has raised money at his school for the Guardian appeal.

Not many of these people fit the Guardianista stereotype. I wonder what Farage and his friends would make of the lifelong reader who described the recent funeral of a 94-year-old friend: a retired major and veteran of the second world war whose devotion to the Guardian was so great that a copy of the paper was placed on top of his coffin.

And yet, because of their sympathy for refugees and their presumed support for British membership of the EU – with 91% in favour, Guardian readers were the country’s most solidly pro-remain demographic, more reliably anti-Brexit than Green party voters, the young, university graduates and Scots – these people would be casually, and falsely, dismissed by the likes of Farage as the metropolitan liberal elite.

Indeed, in a year brimming with dishonesties, this phrase represents one of the great myths of 2016. In August, serving as warm-up man at a Mississippi rally for Donald Trump, the then Ukip leader hailed the Brexit result as a victory for what he called the “little people, the real people ... the ordinary, decent people”. The implication was that those who had voted remain were unreal and indecent, that they were the big people, the representatives of the mighty and powerful.

Theresa May played the same trick in her party conference speech in the autumn, casting the opponents of Brexit (forgetting, of course, that during the referendum campaign she was one) as members of an exclusive, global club, denizens of Davos comfortable in the first-class lounge and utterly devoid of national allegiance – people who were, in her memorable phrase, citizens of the world and therefore citizens of nowhere. As I wrote then, she sought to rebrand the 48% as the 1%.

But it’s an absurd lie. Of course, more Britons voted to leave the EU than to stay, but nearly half of those voting chose remain. That is not a tiny metropolitan elite. In the US, 2.9 million more people chose Hillary Clinton than chose Donald Trump. That too is not an elite. In most democratic systems, such a margin would have been hailed as a victory and a mandate; only under the arcane rules of the electoral college could such a result have brought defeat.

So enough of this fraudulent talk of elites, metropolitan or otherwise. But what of that middle word, the meat in this rhetorical sandwich? What of “liberal”?

After this year, especially, I think the word should be worn with pride. If liberal means wanting to help children fleeing a dictator’s barrel-bombs, then call me a liberal. If liberal means believing that the peoples of a continent that for centuries was torn apart by war and bloodshed have found a new, peaceful mechanism for resolving their differences, and that Britain should play its part in that, then call me a liberal.

If liberal means holding true to the values of the Enlightenment, including a belief in facts and evidence and reason, then call me a liberal. And if liberal means cherishing the norms and institutions that protect and sustain democracy, from a free press to an independent judiciary, then call me a liberal. For those values are under assault just now, in a way few of us ever imagined.

So when it comes to “liberal”, we have nothing to apologise for. Sure, the remainers’ most public faces could fairly be described as both “metropolitan” and “elite” – columnists for London-based newspapers among them. But the same is self-evidently true of the other side, too. Michael Gove and Boris Johnson are not exactly members of the lumpen proletariat, are they? There is no definition of elite or metropolitan that does not include those two.

And the same is true of that other dread phrase of 2016, “the bubble”. As if the only people who live in a bubble are liberal, anti-Trump, anti-Brexit types, while their opponents are rooted in the earthiness of the real world. What garbage. Stockbroker Farage paid homage to billionaire Trump in the latter’s gold elevator; that’s the same Farage who confessed his relief that vacating the Ukip leadership meant he no longer had to deal with “low-grade people” and who said his £85,000 MEP’s salary, excluding abundant expenses, meant he was “poor”.

Those who truly live in a bubble are those who cannot begin to imagine the lives of – still less empathise with – those outside their own first-world realm of safety, comfort and prosperity. When Tory MP and Dorset landowner Richard Drax objects to an overseas aid budget of 0.7% of national income, insisting “charity begins at home” – as if 99.3% of our “charity” isn’t already being spent at home – then it’s he who’s living in a bubble.

But in this season of goodwill, let’s not play their game – competing over which side is less detached, less metropolitan or less elite. Instead, let’s think of those people who were so moved by the plight of their fellow human beings they gave what they had, even when they could barely spare it. Call them names if you like, but they are the very best of us.