the brilliantly leaping gazelle

The main problem I have with this whole ‘virtue’ signalling epidemic is the basic foundational assumption upon which all ‘virtue’ signalling is built on. Namely, is whatever is being portrayed as the ‘virtue’ actually a ‘virtue’ and if it isn’t, then how virtuous are the people who keep on telling us that it is?

Few things in recent months have better illustrated this than the than the ongoing brouhaha that passes for reasoned debate surrounding the two child benefit cap (TCBC). I know that it may appear that I’m inordinately fixated upon this topic, but to me it is a perfect embodiment of what can happen when groupthink, social media and ambition all conspire to elevate one issue above all others.  

Not that I’m suggesting that there’s a conspiracy, but there do seem to a lot of happy accidents that surround the TCBC, its supposed unfairness and calls for its repeal. By groupthink I mean the existence of a gradually evolving consensus around one particular issue, a consensus which is only arrived at only by allowing certain opinions and views to be expressed.

The various charities, think-thanks and activist groups who all demand that something be done. Who publish ‘important’ policy documents, all ‘shocking’ facts and ‘alarming’ statistics and who bolster the unassailable righteousness of their very existence by calling upon a legion of academics to provide some scholarly heft to their claims. Which are then turned into press releases, and because of a prevalent groupthink that the charities and academics have helped create, are massively amplified by a predisposed press.   

And if done well, this can lead to a slew of stories all appearing on the same day, all quoting the same headline grabbing facts, all featuring the same supposed ‘heart-wrenching’ testimonies and all quoting various politicians all saying the same thing. This happened only the other day, in yet another attempt of the British version of the Gaste e Eshrad to propagate the idea that scrapping the TCBC is a ‘virtue’. 

But is it a ‘virtue’? Or is indicating abhorrence of the TCBC merely one of many ways that newspapers and charities, academics and politicians, and people on social media and at dinner parties can all impress each other?  Is it an easy way for a politician to hitch their wagon to, a no-cost move that can enhance their career because of wilful mis-representation of the facts which if repeated loudly and often enough, quickly become the truth.?

This headline, typical of many that have appeared over recent months, and doubtless will continue to do so until a new virtue. needs to be signalled, graced  ‘Daily Mirror’ a few days ago.

’Mum-of-five surviving on leftovers due to devastating Tory child benefit rule

Rachel, from Sheffield, has five children with her partner aged from nine months old to nine years old.

She gets more than £3,400 a year in universal credit for each of her first two children. But due to the cap, she gets no financial benefits for her three younger children.

The cap – introduced by the Conservative Party in 2017 – prevents parents from claiming universal credit or child tax credit for a third child.’ 

This is true enough, it was introduced in April 2017, but it was announced in July 2015, so sorry Rachel, but if you and your partner can’t practice proper birth control, then how is that anyone else’s fault? 

This idea that having children is somehow such an inalienable right that any government should provide financial various supports for, is socially, politically and morally unaffordable. 

It is socially unaffordable because in believing that such a ‘virtue’ exists – which in this case it doesn’t – it transfers power away from our elected representatives and into the hands of a small coterie of unelected individuals and organisations. All of whom share an increasingly prescriptive notion of the way things should be done and this article is proof of this.

It gets its statistics from the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), which is an example of this press releasing activist charity and think-thank sector I mentioned earlier. This narrative, so assiduously finessed by CPAG and others for dissemination to the wider public, is further bolstered by Professor Sir Michael Marmot, Director at the Institute of Health Equity University College London, who says the cap is “aimed at poor people” and “I don’t want public policy punishing people for having children,”.

It’s a strange equity that elevates the needs of the minority above the needs of the society in which they live. If people can’t do simple maths – announced 2015, implemented 2017 so no conception after July 2016 – again, whose fault is that? And what about the third child.? Why does their right to be born to parents who can offer them the best possible life chances somehow matter less than the imagined right to have children no matter what? Where’s the ‘virtue’ in that?

That’s what I mean when I suggest that its socially unaffordable. A groupthink made up of academia, the press, the charity sector and other actors within the social and cultural commentariat that only acts as an echo-chamber of itself, drives the ‘debate’ – such as it is – in one direction only.

It is morally unaffordable for those on benefits to have an expectation that the state will subsidise their reckless parenting and morally opportunist for others to suggest that it is. To present opposition to the TCBC as a virtue is as staggeringly obtuse as it is unforgivably self-serving. Because the corrollory of opposition to the TCBC is that the idea that such a measure should never be and essentially commits the state to an ever increasing spend in pursuit of misguided tolerance.Is that really what any society should be encouraging? I think not.

And it is also politically unaffordable because not only does it give undue influence to those members of the groupthink I mentioned previously – dissenting voices expressing contrary opinions are excluded from the groupthink – it also calls into question who exactly is deciding policy. If a government is so easily swayed into doing something because a tiny handful of charities and think tanks can adeptly use the press, academics and social media to demand that something be done, how is that democracy? 

Just because some people feel strongly about something, doesn’t make them right. It feeds into this bizarre idea that now permeates our culture of conformist absolutism. That there is only one correct way to see any issue and that any differing view is not just wrong, but believers of that wrongness should be publicly denounced and shamed.

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Mind you, the one ‘virtue’ that towers above all the other virtues is one that signifies support for the Palestinians in their war against Israel.

It is the single most defining ’virtue’ of the age, and by signalling that this is a ’virtue’ that one believes in, one also signals belief in other things that permit that this ‘virtue’ to be so considered. As numerous as they are contradictory, these are properly the subjects of other blog. But for now I want to draw your attention to one example of how this supposed ‘virtue’ is can be used to confer a diluted version of the same ‘virtue’ onto an opportunistic politician of no regard,  

‘Bournemouth Green councillor demands town drops twin link with Israeli city’ was a headline in ‘The Daily Telegraph’ last week.

‘Bournemouth should “de-twin” from an Israeli city in a bid to protect its “reputation” amid the ongoing war in Gaza, a Green Party councillor has said.

Joe Salmon put forward a motion for the seaside resort in Dorset to end its association with its sister Netanya in west central Israel, which has been twinned with Bournemouth since 1995.’

I was curious to discover what reputation it was he thought Bournemouth had that was worth protecting, so I had a quick shufti at the Bournemouth Daily Echo yesterday. 

‘Huge group descends into ‘fight’ by pier’, ‘Teen girl ‘sexually assaulted’ at seafront’ and ‘Bournemouth and Poole among worst 50 seaside towns for 2024 

The ‘Telegraph’ article added, ’ A spokesman for the Bournemouth Palestine Solidarity Movement said they will continue to campaign for Bournemouth to end its association with Israel.

Racism, anti-Semitism, apartheid, and genocide are not the principles on which the people of BCP stand.’ 

The self-important, self-righteous and self-serving attitude that this represents is indicative of a mindset that allows people who believe that there’s ‘virtue’ in being opposed to the right for Isreal to defend itself. And that being convinced by the certainty that this ‘virtue’ exists, one is also convinced that anyone holding a contrary opinion must be morally deficient.  Not only that, but the more that you manage to make this ‘virtue’ the reductive prism through which all things are judged and so loudly and so frequently declare this to be that it becomes almost a kind of situationist prank, the more of this kind of nonsense you’ll produce.

That of people of no consequence saying something of no consequence that will have no consequence. 

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