Libby Purves has performed an important public service. She has given a name to something that needed to be given a name.
“The most savage, bilious, self-righteous rants are from people living affluent self-pleasing lives in comfortable homes, doing lucky and rewarding jobs with like-minded friends. What they are doing (I risk losing a friend or two) is “virtue-signalling”: competing to seem compassionate. Few are notably open-handed: St Matthew would need a rewrite of Chapter 19. “Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast and give to the poor. But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions. So he went on Twitter instead and called Michael Gove a ‘vile reptilian evil tory scumbag’, and linked to a cartoon of Iain Duncan Smith stealing a paralysed woman’s wheelchair. And lo, he felt better and went for a £3.50 caramel macchiato with some mates from the BBC”
Her article is behind a paywall, but it’s quoted here:
http://mickhartley.typepad.com/blog/2015/05/virtue-signalling.html
Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. Some are paid to have them.
No one who writes for the Daily Mail is in a position to judge anyone else for shit they post online.
I hate to break this to you Raymond but some people genuinely dislike the Tories and their policies. Not because they feel virtuous doing so but because they think they are wrong.
Their affluence perceived or actual does not preclude them from holding an opinion or giving voice to it despite it being contrary to what you or anyone else believes to be the ‘truth’.
I live on a council estate in a small council flat with my far from healthy spouse. The block of flats we live in numbers eight flats all of them occupied by a variety of middle aged people who through no fault of their own have fallen ill, are disabled or are the victims of abuse. They do not drink expensive coffee, have Sky television or have friends who work at the BBC.
They are all extremely worried about the outcome of the recent election because they know that it will be them once again who will bear the brunt of an ideology that deliberately and callously seeks to further marginalise and impoverish their lives so that some who already have very comfortable lives can have a little more at their expense.
As I mentioned on another thread I do not hate Mr. Government. Nor do I hate IDS but I loathe and detest what they stand for because it is divisive and destructive to the nation if not in intention it most certainly is in practice.
Well said, ps.
I don’t post much (if any) of the stuff the article refers to, and I barely have a social media presence these days, but people are entitled to express their views and all that Purves is really doing here is finding a way to be incredibly self righteous about the perceived self-righteousness of others. Pots and kettles.
If the author is REALLY concerned about the sort of nasty, personal, asinine stuff that gets said about politicians online, perhaps she might want to start with her erstwhile employers, who spent the last year or two laying into Ed Miliband with the sort of savagery I wouldn’t bestow upon my worst enemy.
Oops Mr Government. Bloody phone. Smarter than I am.
I just thought it was a great pun!
It’s not bad is it. Bloody phone is smarter and funnier than I am.
It’s tempting to think that the point of the above quote is to suggest that Tories are more honest because they are spared the need for compassion, false or otherwise. Maybe that should be labelled “virtue denial”.
So now you’re not allowed to aspire to a comfortable life AND be supportive of keeping in place society’s safety nets for those people and those times when it’s needed? In one fell swoop Libby Purves is trying to wipe out anyone’s ability to say anything is wrong with our society and the way it appears to be heading at the moment unless they are prepared to give up everything they have and devote themselves to a life caring for those worse off than themselves? Bollocks. It’s perfectly feasible to want both.
Do I want people to be able to CHOOSE a lifestyle supported entirely by benefits – no, not really, but I certainly want to know that those people who don’t actually have that choice but still need support, can get it without being made to feel as if they are somehow committing a crime for genuinely needing help.
Am I prepared to sacrifice everything I have? No, of course not. Am I happy to pay more tax for a more just system? Yes I am.
The crying shame of this last election isn’t that people voted to protect themselves because they perceived (or were conned into believing – you take your pick) that they were financially “safer” with another 5 years of Conservatism. Its that most of those people failed to look beyond that to what the new Government will now do justified by a “mandate” from the people for changes to society that go way beyond what’s actually necessary (and never was necessary even through the last Parliament) but will poison our society for years to come. Remember those NHS changes that weren’t in their manifesto in 2010 but have happened anyway? Well now they believe that everyone has collectively said “hell yes, keep destroying it all, keep taking benefits from everyone, whether they need them or not, keep privatising the NHS, destroy the Human Rights Act, take away all our privacy – that’s great, just what we want”.
Angry – yes I am. “Virtue Signalling” – Fuck off Libby Purves.
Actually, having read the full piece now rather than just the quote in the OP, I understand it’s not entirely the point she’s making, but I still fell better for saying it.
Guess what – Compassion is a “thing” too.
I do agree that Twitter and Facebook have been more wretched than usual in the last week, but that paragraph quoted above is just the old “champagne socialist” canard dressed up with a smartphone, isn’t it?
There is definitely something a little bit self-indulgent about writing “Osborne is a C*nt” in a political thread such as we have here, and waiting for the up arrows to flow in. What have you actually achieved by expressing this opinion without detail, balance or hope? Did it make you or anyone else feel better? I suspect not.
It’s great that people are angry, and terrible that they think the anger is an end in itself. Now is the perfect time to move on from vacuous abuse and start coming up with practical, deliverable alternatives, telling people the truth and giving them hope. Discussions not rants, because we saw in Whitehall the other day what happens when you get into ‘Look how goddam passionate I am’ grandstanding. Some idiot writes ‘Fuck Tory Scum’ on a war memorial, and we’re starting the task of healing a divided nation by heading off in exactly the wrong direction.
Yeah, I think this is right. The Purves article is silly: she does seem to be suggesting that you’re not really allowed to be a vocal Labour supporter, or vocal about the result, if you’re comfortably-off, and there are some daft stats in there (the richest 5% pay 11% of all tax: true, but it’s the richest 0.1% that are the evaders and avoiders: you need to earn about £50k pa to be above the 95th percentile).
But you’re spot on, @chiz. Nobody benefits – NOBODY benefits – from being told that it’s all a stitch-up and the scumbags at the top are powerful and unprincipled beyond your wildest dreams. Because if that’s true, then what’s the point in being angry? That situation would be beyond anyone’s power to change if it were true, so why would it spur anyone into action? It’s absolutely futile.
I genuinely believe people respond best to messages of hope for the future. There wasn’t much of that about in this election – it was all about fear. Labour’s problem was they tried to play the Tories at the fear game and lost. They were running very similar campaigns, really: it’s just that the Tories understood the electors’ fears better.
If a progressive movement can spring up that is more about pragmatic hope than futile ranting, then it will win. If lefty types can stop telling people off or yelling “BRING OUT YOUR DEAD”, and start showing 60 million people what a better society might look like, they might have a shot (and might have a shot at shutting up the likes of Libby Purves into the bargain).
The behaviour Purves is talking about is pointless but harmless, like 99% of what goes on on social media/this site. If the election taught us anything, it’s that you can’t change jack shit on Twitter.
Yes, it’s self indulgent. So is social media. So is this site, and this conversation. You might just as well ask why we’re stood around talking about Libby Purves instead of volunteering in soup kitchens. People aren’t shouting about “Tory scum” on Twitter because they think it’ll change anything. They’re doing it to vent/offer their opinion – a totally human response to events that’s been going on offline for as long as there have been people.
I also totally reject the tacit link between this and defacing a war memorial. There is absolutely no comparison between that act and writing a brief sentence on your own Twitter feed, and the issue with the war memorial incident is quite clearly the medium, rather than the message.
As I’ve said above, I’m not a fan of the “Fuck Gove” school of rhetoric personally, because it feels regressive to dehumanise the people you disagree with. But I’m fucked if I’m going to take a lesson on balance and impartiality from Libby Purves, given where she makes her money.
One of twitter’s drawbacks is that for political parties, it can act as a huge echo chamber. Labour had a huge twitter presence and won the twitter war. The Tories spent large on targetted Facebook.
I don’t know, Bingo. I think LOTS of people see social media, and signing a change.org petition, as them having done their bit. It feels like action, and isn’t.
I don’t think chiz is saying you’ve no right to be angry if you’re not helping on the front lines, but I hope the left wakes up a bit and realises that anger by itself achieves nothing.
Sorry, just realised my post reads like a rebuttal to @chiz, when it’s the article in the OP that’s got my goat.
If Purves’ analysis ended at “you may think you’re changing the world by signing a petition, but you’re not” then I wouldn’t disagree. But it doesn’t.
Firstly, she politicises the point by suggesting that the left are somehow more prone to these eruptions. This week, perhaps, but I must have imagined the several years of “send em back” UKIP bollocks and “free trade cures cancer” Adam Smith commentaries which clogger my Facebook feed before I jacked it in.
Secondly, she attempts to demean the legitimacy of an opposing political viewpoint by ascribing it to a base motive – ie making yourself feel virtuous. It’s a cheap shot and it gets us nowhere: in its own way it’s even more reductive than writing 100 characters on how you’d like IDS to catch the Ebola virus.
I agree that the quality of political discourse in this country has dropped markedly in recent years. I also feel that by personally insulting our politicians we diminish their roles, which helps no one. That said, the single most depressing moment in the entire election campaign, for me, was listening to Michael Gove call Ed Miliband a “geek” on Question Time. Partly because he was contributing to the coarsening of the dialogue, partly because he should know better but mainly because Michael Gove is in no position whatsoever to be calling anyone a geek. The incident certainly diminished my well of sympathy for the abuse Gove suffers online.
Is geek worse than nerd?
It is astonishing and slightly depressing that the ex-education minister, a flag-bearer for enthusiastic learning, should employ such a pejorative term. I’ve been called a geek and a nerd all my life. For the apparent crime of being interested in stuff.
Signing an online petition can be very effective. People should do it more:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/feb/17/forest-sell-off-victory
38 degrees have also had victories over Japanese whaling, circus animals etc.
Indeed, Chiz … I think that was the point Libby Purves was making.
Calling someone names on an ephemeral social networking platform isn’t remotely in the same ball-park as spray painting a war memorial with equally mindless graffiti.
Gosh, Vulpes, I don’t think anyone was suggesting they are of equal magnitude. Apologies if I gave that impression. The question is whether one leads to the other. I’m sure we could think of plenty of examples where would would say, yes, promulgating hatred and despair online does lead to excessive physical acts which more moderate protestors have to apologise for.
People have behaved stupidly Chiz throughout history not just since the advent of social media.
Unfortunately in any mass of people there are always some who take things too far and spill over into genuinely offensive and dreadful overreaction such as spraying graffiti onto a war memorial.
I agree with you that it should not be incumbent on perfectly peaceful protesters to defend their right to protest because of the actions of a stupid minority. They are a damn nuisance. What must not happen is the equally dreadful and potentially dangerous overreaction of seeing all protest as a bad thing because of a handful of idiots.
What is so virtuous about voting Labour? I have voted Labour all my life & never felt so bad about it as last week.
The last Labour government benignly oversaw a culture of rampant tax dodging & big bonuses, they brought in ATOS to relabel sick people as fit for work, they privatised the NHS like no other (privatising NHS estates and setting up Indepepndent Sector Treatment Centres where private companies were paid 15% more than NHS hospitals for easier work), they set stupid targets from the centre that added no value but cost a lot of manpower and, worst of all, they waged an illegal war that killed countless innocent civilians and has made the world a less safe place.
I do think that our national discourse has been coarsened to a harmful degree. As a labour voter, I’m dreading what effect another 5 years under Cameron will bring, but I also believe you have to have respect for the office of Prime Minister. Tweeting the PM calling him all sorts of names does nobody any good.
This is point that I agree with. Respect the office, if not the man.
Not sure that things have got worse really. You just see it more because of social media. In the 70s and 80s just as many mean, crude insults or violent desires were bandied about but were more easily forgotten and were not dwelt upon since they were not recorded, apart from on a few pop records (you know the ones) and in print a little or in interview – but hardly to the degree we now have.
I didn’t think you had compared them, chiz-pants old bean. It’s just this stupid “Reply” function (I was actually responding to raymondo) doesn’t make things clear when you view the thread on a mobile device, which I’m guessing you must be.
I haven’t read Libby Purves’ article, and this probably isn’t her point, but it’s the Internet, so I’ll comment anyway.
It is odd that you can meet people who express very strong political opinions, of the right or left, which they don’t seem to connect to their own lives. I started work in the eighties in the public sector and met quite a few supporters of Margaret Thatcher there who if anything thought she wasn’t going far enough in her attacks on the Civil Service. They seemed astonished when they were made redundant (fat pay-offs though), as though somehow they were immune to the politics they supported so vociferously. And more recently in the private sector, I’ve had colleagues who have loudly predicted, and hoped for, the collapse of capitalism, who were shocked when they lost their jobs in the recession. One, when he was told his job would go, was so stunned that he simply walked out and kept going until he got home twelve miles away.
I suppose it’s just that if I thought there was going to be some sweeping social or economic change, I would expect it to affect me as much as anyone else, and make some sort of contingency plan, beyond moaning in the pub.
This is Charlotte Church’s view.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/12/charlotte-church-prosecco-socialist-protest-peoples-assembly-cardiff
She’s speaking it as she finds it. How refreshing when so many speak it as they think others want to find it.
I did call Toby Young and twit on twitter last week, was I wrong?