The Conservatives are trying to out virtue-signal the virtue-signallers. They need to stop.

There is a well-known saying: “A young man who isn’t a socialist hasn’t got a heart; an old man who is a socialist hasn’t got a head.”  No-one knows who said it first and, as with many sayings which contain a nugget of truth, there are many versions of it.

But something strange has happened in recent years.  People who have clearly got a head are going out of their way to signal loudly that they also have a heart. As if we didn’t know.

Someone coined a useful phrase for this: virtue-signalling. This is to say or do things with the primary purpose of proving your moral worth. Now virtue-signalling has infected the Conservatives. I don’t mean students or activists or armchair critics.  I mean the Conservative Party in Government who are making announcements, and running consultations, and enacting policies that can only be described as virtue-signalling.

Here are some examples:

• Gender Pay Gap Reporting: This requires employers with 250 or more employees to publish statutory calculations every year showing how large the pay gap is between male and female employees.
• The Ethnicity Pay Gap consultation: This is a live consultation on how best to introduce a system whereby employers are required to publish average pay data by different ethnicities.
• The Gender Recognition Act consultation. This is a consultation which explores whether it should be made easier for people to change their legal gender.  At its start, Equalities Minister, Penny Mordaunt, announced that “trans women are women”.
• The inaction over Stamp Duty: The higher stamp duty rates brought in by George Osborne have lowered revenues, therefore making everyone worse off. People stay in their homes when they might have moved, and we have less money to spend on education or welfare payments. Yet the Government has showed no signs of reversing out Osborne’s changes apparently because such a move would look bad.

I am sure readers can provide more examples. To qualify as virtue-signalling it has to be something that the average Conservative, hand-on-heart, down-at-the-pub, would admit probably does more harm than good to actual real live people; but on the surface sounds good.

Virtue-signaling might be okay for the odd soundbite, but is a dangerous game when you are the Government. It obscures the truth; it results in policies which actually harm people, and it leaves a gap in the political spectrum ready for someone else to fill.

Virtue-signalling obscures the truth

Take all the stuff about pay equity between men and women.  You would hardly know that it is illegal to pay men and women differently for the same job. You would hardly know that the data does not show anyone doing this. The truth slowly disappears behind the welter of virtue-signalling. It actually reaches the point that it is difficult to get to real data, hard facts, alternative explanations for things, and a range of narratives.  I mean this in an absolutely tangible way.  You know how people find information these days? Now try typing gender-pay-gap into Google and see how long it takes you to find out that there isn’t one in like-for-like jobs.

Virtue-signalling results in bad policies that harm people

The Ethnicity Pay Gap Consultation asks people to comment on how the Government could successfully pass into law a requirement for companies to publish average pay data by ethnicity.  Let’s assume that this happens – as it has with gender pay reporting. Now the reason for the consultation is that there are average pay differences between ethnic groups. So we already know that the data of individual companies will highlight this pay gap. And we already know that the way our media and social media works is that we will end up getting company bosses and entrepreneurs accused of racism.  We already know that there are people standing ready to make these accusations – those people who believe that almost all differences between people are the result of discrimination. So the Conservatives are consulting on rolling out a system which will, as night follows day, result in people being accused of racism.

And then we must ask, how does it feel to be a young person from an ethnic minority, when the only message out there is that you are a victim?  Assuming you are a victim is bad for your mental health. If you assume that you will not be treated fairly in life; that others largely determine the outcome of your life, you have what is called an external locus of control.  Having a sense of an external locus of control is bad for your mental health. It makes you feel powerless – and depressed.  We have a mental health crisis among young people. It would help if the Conservatives provided a counter-narrative of optimism and opportunity.

Virtue-signalling leaves a gap in the political spectrum that someone needs to fill

There are many people of goodwill, with kind hearts and open minds, who believe that a trans-woman is a trans-woman, but who also believe that it is incorrect, reductive and unhelpful to elide two different groups of people into one and just call them all women. My guess is that most people down at the pub could also tell you that there are fewer female company directors than male company directors, probably because lots of women want to stay home and bring up their kids for a while, before perhaps returning to work.  Is that so bad?  There are also plenty of people at the school gate, who, if you told them that the rises in stamp duty have slowed house sales and reduced tax revenues – meaning less money for education – would think that the Conservatives are actually negligent and lazy for not reversing out the changes.

When large sections of the population find that none of the main political parties are willing to represent some fairly common sense views, they will look for someone else who will. Why should people sit around, unrepresented?  This would be fine, but a first-past-the-post system makes the establishments of new parties difficult – so the established beneficiaries of the system have an extra duty to remain broadly representative.  And when people are unrepresented and say so, this seems to be called “populism” – and it is assumed that the people are the problem.

How to fix the problem?

Virtue-signalling arises when you try to prove your moral worth to other people. Conservatives did not used to virtue signal.  In fact being a Conservative involves having a deep sense of the moral equality of all of us. I came across the term Dignity Culture recently: “In a …dignity culture people are assumed to have dignity and worth regardless of what others think of them”.   You have dignity, regardless of what others think of you. You do not need to virtue-signal your moral worth – you have it.

Of course what has happened recently is that a small number of people have assumed enormous sway over our culture because they have realised that people hate being falsely accused. Conservatives believe in the moral equality of all people – so being accused of racism or sexism cuts deep. We are indignant. And, individually, when the accusations come in, we are also scared.  But it is time to move past this now.  Conservatives do not deserve to be in Government if we scare so easily. We do not deserve to be in Government if we are not prepared to stand up to bullies. We need to have courage – and we need to get out there and start speaking sense again.

We need to call a spade a spade and a woman a woman.  We need to cut stamp duty to raise revenue for education or housing or universal credit. We need to unburden employers of endless virtue-signalling regulation.

More broadly, we need to reclaim our sense of our moral worth, and stop assuming that we need to loudly signal it. We need to go back to being Conservatives again.