| Virtue
signalling and other moral stances |
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| We all know that being boastful is not generally regarded as being a desirable character trait, at least not in this country. This though is not a universal truth. I don’t intend to make this essay all about Mr Strumpf, but his level of boastfulness is far greater than that of anyone-else I’ve encountered in life. If his claims to be a stable genius and exceptionally handsome had some degree of truth in them, I might find them less grating, but... There are though other ways of portraying yourself as being superior to others rather than saying it out loud. Virtue signalling is a form of indirect boasting which is very common in the Woke universe. The person doing it is not directly claiming to have a level of moral purity greater than others. He is though criticising others for not acting according to criteria he apparently considers vitally important. The implication is that he’s also morally superior in general. In other words being boastful about ones own morality simply by criticising the morality of others. And very often the criticism of such actions is extreme, with the creation of offensive terms to describe the person who thinks differently. In the world of Trans, we have TERF – trans-exclusionary radical feminism and of course ‘transphobic’ - both used to describe people who believe that wishing to be of a different sex doesn’t actually make it so. I suppose that the death threats which go with it are there to give the impression that the person being criticised is in all respects bad – worthy of Old Testament retribution - and that the person criticising is in all respects a vastly more righteous person. As I’ve mentioned before however, it seems that for the last couple of years, Woke culture has been on the wane. Unfortunately however the damage caused by it lingers on. It is difficult to disentangle the reasons why the Democrats lost. No doubt it was largely because they did very little to control immigration and also because Biden stayed on as the opponent to Trump for too long. Strumpf though had a particularly lethal political advertisement which he ran intensively against Kamala Harris. The advertisement featured excerpts from an interview that Harris gave to the chief of the National Center for Transgender Equality Action. In it, she supported tax-funded gender-affirming surgery for prisoners. The ad's slogan was "Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you". It was aired more than 30,000 times in every swing state, especially during televised NFL and college football games and NASCAR races. According to an analysis by one of the polling companies, "Kamala is for they/them" was one of Trump's most effective 30-second attack ads. It shifted the polling by 2.7 percentage points in favour of Trump after viewers watched it. The Democratic Party had made the culture of Woke a defining difference between them and the Republican party - much to the delight of the Republicans. And so it was hardly surprising, particularly at a time of diminishing support for the whole idea, that the Republicans would benefit bigly. But it’s not just over the pond that virtue signalling has had unfortunate side-effects. The more extreme left-wing of the Labour party has produced a similar culture. Fortunately, however, our new Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy has recently denounced the ‘virtue signalling’ which led to boycotts of book festivals. She says that a moral puritanism is killing off the arts in this country. A number of authors and Labour politicians, including Baroness Shami Chakrabarti, said they would boycott book festivals including the Hay festival, because it received significant sponsorship from the asset management company Baillie Gifford. An activist organisation, Fossil Free Books, taking the moral high ground, organised the boycotts claiming the asset management company was making money from investments in fossil fuel companies. This was despite the fact that, of the money invested by Baillie Gifford, only about 2% of it was in companies which had some connection with fossil fuels, lower than the industry average. This though eventually led Baillie Gifford to withdraw its longstanding support for ten of the country’s literary festivals. Nandy said: “I have spent enough time at Hay and Glastonbury to know that these are the spaces, the only spaces, where precisely the moral voice and protest comes from. Boycotting sponsors and killing these events off is the equivalent of gagging society. This self-defeating virtue signalling is a feature of our times and we will stand against it with everything we have got”. Fortunately, in her speech she also announced a £270 million ‘Arts Everywhere Fund’ aimed at supporting museums, galleries and libraries across the country. Not nearly enough, but at least something. I have to confess that I’m not sure that book festivals are the ‘only spaces where precisely the moral voice and protest comes from’. I think that the churches, synagogues and mosques might have some thoughts on that question. But if Lisa Nandy is talking about what we might call a ‘secular’ morality they perhaps have some influence. They provide at least an opportunity in a non-religious space to meet others and have discussions about how the world should be ordered. But when a secular political party (Labour) starts to rely on a particular religious group (the Muslim vote) it inevitably creates tensions. In 2020, the former UK equality watchdog chief, Trevor Phillips, was briefly suspended from the Labour Party over allegations relating to that shape-shifting concept, Islamophobia. He had said that Muslims were different in their moral views. With others, he had also written to the Guardian in 2019 saying they would refuse to vote for Labour because of its association with anti-Semitism. Phillips then expressed concerns about the gangs of Pakistani Muslim men sexually abusing children in northern British towns and he had commented on the failure of some Muslims to wear poppies for Remembrance Sunday. He also highlighted the sympathy shown by some of them towards the "motives" of the Charlie Hebdo attackers. He might have added that Muslim opinion regarding the role and place of women is hardly in line with secular morality in the West. So he was supposed to ignore the facts rather than call our attention to reality. In the inverted form of morality created by the extreme right wing, however, both sexism and racism have undergone a very welcome resurgence. As we know, Trump supporters put pressure on the Romanian government to allow the Tate brothers to go to America. These are the self-declared misogynists accused of all sorts of sex offences both in Romania, where they had taken up residence, and here in the UK. They deny criminality, but are proud of their machismo and have made a lot of money out of it as on-line influencers, leading adolescent boys in totally the wrong direction. Trump, In the meantime has got it into his head that it’s to his advantage to say that whites are disadvantaged. This is part of his push-back against the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement. It’s something which goes down well with his voters and so worthy of endless repetition. Quite weirdly, however, he is now extending this to relations with South Africa. During the apartheid era, black people and non-whites were forcefully ousted from their land by racist policies, meaning that most natural resources are concentrated in the hands of the white people, some 8% of the population. It’s somewhat odd therefore that the Trump government has now decided to cut off aid to South Africa and grant refugee status to the white community there. They say that they wish to protect those persecuted whites. A Land Expropriation Act was passed by the South African government in January. It includes provision for land to be taken by the state without payment of compensation. This though can only be done if specific conditions are met – that the property is not being used and there's no intention to either develop or make money from it or when it poses a risk to the public and the owner refuses to engage in negotiation over its value. But then Trump was never a details man and, as we have seen on one or two occasions, morality is not really his strong suit. We live in a very strange world. 20 March 2025 Paul Buckingham |
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