They ("progressive left liberals" since you ask) aren't very nice. And some are downright nasty.

It's knitting for heaven's sake. Knitting.

Comments like these set off a wave of critical voices across knitting communities on sites like Ravelry.com, the biggest source of online knitting patterns by independent designers from around the world and the home of many knitting chat forums. Most of the criticism amounted to sharing words written by knitting activists @su.krita and @thecolormustard, who posted “educational” content on their profiles for others to circulate. Instagram notes scorned Templer’s “peak whiteness,” and reminded her that “the world doesn’t owe you a patient explanation and education” and that as a “coloniser” she ought to “stay in [her] lane.” Su.krita also warned her white knitter friends that if they stayed silent and didn’t speak up against racism then they would be considered “part of the problem.”

We saw it with gamers. Then with science fiction fans. It has happened in the music business, in theatre and everywhere in politics. Seemingly - well not seemingly at all, actually literally - innocuous remarks are twisted into sins against the politics of identity: race, gender, sexuality. Back to the knitters - this is the offending phrase:

One of my closest friends [when I was 12] and her family had offered back then that if I ever wanted to go with them on one of their trips (to India), I could. To a suburban midwestern teenager with a severe anxiety disorder, that was like being offered a seat on a flight to Mars.

The result was one of those destructive pile ons where nothing, absolutely nothing, the victim can say will excuse or exonerate their sin against the gospel of social justice.

I tried to think through what sort of defence there might be for the sort of people who trawl through online communities looking for targets. I could think of none. These are deeply unpleasant people who are not remotely interested in anything that might be called "social justice" but want instead to score hits, to mount up wins - "look who I've taken down", "hey, we got them sacked".

The targeting doesn't stop with the individual sinner - here's a chilling quote from an article by someone who challenged the #MeToo narrative:

My husband was told to leave his wife or lose his business

This is what these disgusting online warriors get off on - destroying jobs and businesses in a gleeful assault on those they decide are sinners along with anyone connected to those sinners. It's the same mentality that saw communities shunned and women tortured and killed. It is the world of the witchfinder where people's worst traits are fed and exploited in the crushing of essentially innocent people. And remember that it's not enough to simply keep your head down and say nothing - if you don't endorse the gospel as defined by the witchfinder then you run the risk of being condemned for the same sins. It's safest to go along with, to quietly nod and smile in agreement with those raising the storm, and to sever any connection with the sinner they have identified.

This appalling world is not the creation of Nazis or fascists but of people who position themselves as the good guys - progressive, liberal, campaigners for social justice. We - normal people who don't set out to cause offence - have sat back and watched as the scriptures of social justice are enforced by righteous attacks on anyone who those progressive, left-liberal saints deem to be sinners. Whether there is a way back or not I don't know, but we should recognise we've a problem when the witchfinders target knitters excited about a trip to India or the husband of someone with an edgy opinion about allegations of sexual abuse.

Getting people sacked, destroying their relationships, cutting them off from friends, undermining their businesses, frightening their children...a litany of unpleasantness done in the name of a supposedly good cause: social justice. But where's the social justice in all this? Where's the goodness in gleefully whipping up a mob:

“No amount of reason will change a zealot like Tuskenknits’ mind, but we can make sure they feel their hatred reflected in their bank accounts and their follower counts until they are crying into a void.”

This isn't justice. This is what it purports to confront - hatred, unthinking and uncaring hatred. And it is the wholly owned property of the so-called "progressive liberal left". Speaking as an Englishman, I can only conclude: these progressives aren't very nice. And some are downright nasty.

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Don't give a single penny of your hard-earned, post-tax income to Oxfam

It's always a little depressing when you read something from a university - an elite university to boot - that is really dumb. And even more depressing when you discover that the author of the dumbness isn't some over-idealistic second year student but the "Director for UK Poverty" at international development charity, Oxfam.

Yes I know, I know. You all though Oxfam was all about feeding starving folk in war-torn Africa. Well think again. Oxfam's connection to its original mission of relieving famine is tenuous at best. This 'charity' (and I place it in scare quotes deliberately) has ceased to be one dedicated to such a purpose but has become instead a lobby organisation using its income to create jobs such as "Director for UK Poverty" that have precisely zero connection to the idea of relieving poverty and everything to do with promoting an odious - and discredited - political position.

Here's a taster:

So, even if it is difficult to see how people can escape from poverty without working, it is also increasingly difficult to claim with any degree of understanding that work is the route out of poverty. Lots of jobs which are essential to our society and economy – and indeed to bigger business – need wider support.

By wider support, Oxfam mean higher taxes and more welfare benefits. And the idea that there is any - even the tiniest - comparison between children growing up in the soft embrace of the UK's welfare system and children growing up in, say, Congo or Laos is utterly, criminally wrong. The life chances of UK children with access to free healthcare, free education, generous welfare payments and extensive social services is better than those for most of the world's children. Yet this man from Oxfam wants us to believe that, in global terms, what he calls poverty in Britain is comparable to actual elsewhere in the world.

The article continues for some time in this vein, presenting selected facts and gratuitously exploitative graphical comparisons all wrapped about with references to 'social justice' - as if that actually means anything. And the solution? The pathetic, risible, thoughtless, ill-informed and crass solution? The 'social justice'?

Take more money off someone else, live up to the adage, "there's always someone, somewhere not paying enough tax and it isn't me". It sickens me that the only response to inequality these people can dream up is higher taxes on an undefined group of "tax avoiders". And, in this case it reminds me why we should not give a single penny of our hard-earned, post-tax cash to Oxfam.

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Social Justice - a new authoritarianism

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I got to thinking about social justice. Partly this was because I'm doing a debate on Wednesday with someone who comes billed as a 'Social Justice Campaigner' and partly because it's a term I see used again and again but which seems to avoid clarity or definition. On the one hand we can point to a right wing version as typified by the Centre for Social Justice:

By combining hands-on experience, public involvement, academic rigour and effective political engagement, the CSJ has been able to work from a foundation that has sparked radical public policy change. Since 2004 we have set out over 800 ideas – published across more than 20 research themes – that would make a transformative difference in people’s lives. Many of these recommendations have influenced the political process significantly, revolutionising a tired debate about poverty and social justice. These include: radical welfare reform through Universal Credit; early years intervention programmes; political commitments to prevent family breakdown; pioneering education reforms; efforts to improve the rehabilitation of offenders and drug addicts; action on street gangs; and support for people with unmanageable debts.

I see this as having the same relationship to Conservatism as Methodism appears to have to English protestantism - at least in so far as I understand these things. Indeed, the CSJ does come across as drawing on a Christian conservative tradition that might be associated with 19th century 'muscular Christians', with G K Chesterton or, more recently, with Pope John Paul II. I'm being careful here because the mixing of religion and politics is always tricky. What is clear from the CSJ position on social justice is that it is about poverty and exclusion rather than inequality per se.

The other hand contains the left wing world of our social justice campaigner - the one I'm seeing on Wednesday is from this organisation:

JUST is a groundbreaking initiative set up by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust in 2003 to promote racial justice in West Yorkshire. Since its establishment JUST has become a leading voice in the North promoting racial justice, civil liberties and human rights. The fall-out from the 2001 Northern Uprisings and the introduction of draconian legislation following the 7/7 London bombings has resulted in civil liberties and human rights increasingly becoming an integral part of our work in the region.

In an era where the Community Cohesion and Prevent agendas have become the key paradigms of government policy and the Race and Institutional Racism agendas have been rolled back by the State, the adverse impact on Black and minority ethnic people has been unprecedented.

BME people continue to be over-represented in poverty, discrimination, NEETS, criminal justice, stop and search, education, poor health and other poor quality of life outcomes. Instead of investment in resources and funding to address the generational and historic systemic and structural discrimination that BME people experience, the government’s ‘war on terror’ has ‘criminalised’ BME and particularly Muslim people and its community cohesion policy has put the burden of good race relation on visible minorities.

We're in a very different place here from the CSJ. Instead of the focus on poverty we have an emphasis on inequality - the view that government and other institutions are contributors to the lack of justice faced, in this case, by BME communities. And we can encounter the same language from others advocating for LGBT, for women's rights and even for religious minorities (this is hinted at with JUST West Yorkshire saying "...particularly Muslim people....").

The question here is whether we have two entirely different definitions of social justice or whether there is a common theme between the anti-poverty positioning of the CSJ and the minority rights approach of JUST West Yorkshire. I did trawl through the philosophical underpinnings of the idea - from John Rawls backwards (always best to work backwards with philosophy) to Locke and Hobbes via Rousseau. As usual with philosophy it's about a penetrable as six-inch thick steel plate but the themes of poverty and equality (or equity) were common as was this idea of a 'social contract'. Indeed this latter concept seems to me quite the central consideration.

The problem is that this social contract is every bit as nebulous as the idea of social justice. Not only is the contract not written down but there seems to be some confusion as to whether it applies to all of humanity or merely to parts of humanity. Is the social contract something sitting at the level of the neighbourhood (say Cullingworth), region or nation? And is the General Will that Rousseau talks about essentially a vocalisation of that social contract? Finally, who interprets or enforces the social contract and how do we know that reflects the General Will?

I'm saying all this, not because I want to answer all those questions (I'm not sure we can), but rather because we need to understand that, if social justice is the enforcement of Rousseau's social contract, it can only be done through authoritarian means and through the preference for communal rights over individual rights. To do this someone - or some organisation - has to become the arbiter of what is or isn't a breach of that social contract or, in other words, is contrary to social justice.

Sometimes all this is pretty straightforward because there is no conflict between individual and communal rights - for example in arguing that it's wrong to exclude someone from employment on the basis of skin colour, gender or sexual preference. But where personal views (and our right to express them) are concerned we can only enforce social justice by denying individual rights. Thus the 'social justice right' may wish to prevent (or actively discourage) 'non-traditional' family arrangements and the 'social justice left' may want to stop the expression of support for such a traditionalist position. Both positions deny people a right - either to live in a non-traditional family or to express opposition to that idea.

The problem is that both sides invoke (at least implicitly) the idea of the social contract in defence of their position. Yet the positions are - for essentially the same reason on each side - mutually exclusive. The left says excluding the non-traditional is unfair or unequal while the right says that the non-traditional arrangements promote poverty and therefore inequality. Social justice cannot be delivered unless one or other position is rejected.

For the right this means championing stable communities, families (in the old-fashioned sense of the word) and often the fear of god. Hard work, community involvement and self-sacrifice in the interest of future generations are held as essential virtues - the social contract is an unwritten commitment to the whole community and that community is local, limited and seeks to be resilient. Social justice is served where everyone is part of secure, supportive and strong communities.

The problem is that this leads to social stasis, to paternalism and to the exclusion of people who reject (or have a different idea of) the essential community virtues. Plus, of course, someone has to define and enforce those virtues, to be the authority.

In the case of the left social justice is served by rejecting homogeneity, placing equality as the primary virtue and ensuring that no actions or speech undermines this primacy. The result is - or aims to be - a homogeneity between communities rather than within communities. Anything that questions the primacy of equality as the social contract's purpose cannot be permitted. Moreover the meaning of equality becomes fluid - it is determined by authority rather than by the reality of access to opportunity. As a result individual rights become secondary as communal rights come to dominate society. It is acceptable to 'no platform' a speaker if it is feared their words might contest the enforcement of the social contract - in ensuring social justice.

I had thought to draw the philosophical line forward down a different route to Giovanni Gentile's transition from Actualism to Fascism where the question of who interprets the General Will was answered though the idea of 'the leader'. The problem, however, is that this takes us - implicit authoritarianism aside - away from the modern position where leadership is more complex. Rather than a single identified leader, we have a sort of groupthink - a hive mind perhaps - that provides the basis on which the General Will is decided and the social contract upheld. Because this collective has market power, authorities bow to the pressure it asserts and exclude those who fail to conform with the perceived General Will.

In the end social justice is really something desired and doesn't need to be defined. The politician who proclaims he is fighting for social justice secures approval by seeming to support some sort of community betterment. The reality is that, whether from right or left, social justice is illiberal and excluding - either by enforcing an intra-communal conformity (the right) or by insisting on an inter-communal conformity (the left). The biggest loss here is, for me, individuality and the accompanying rights to speak, act and live freely.

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A Conservative social justice caucus - can we strangle this at birth please.

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The great philosopher of "it's not fair", John Rawls can, I suspect, be blamed for planting the seeds of what is now called 'social justice':

“Historically one of the main defects of constitutional government has been the failure to insure the fair value of political liberty. The necessary corrective steps have not been taken, indeed, they never seem to have been seriously entertained. Disparities in the distribution of property and wealth that far exceed what is compatible with political equality have generally been tolerated by the legal system. Public resources have not been devoted to maintaining the institutions required for the fair value of political liberty."

We haven't got a 'just society' because the stuff isn't distributed fairly. And, in the ultimate philosophical cop out, Rawls made 'fair' and 'more equal' mean the same thing. So society - which Rawls conflates with government throughout his work - must act to make things more fair in order that all can enjoy liberty.

Our problem, however, isn't with Rawls but rather with this idea of 'equality' and the way in which it plays out in our society. Indeed Rawls stressed that 'the principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance' - justice is quite literally blind to race, gender, class, ability or any other characteristic. In the real world, of course, such a practice is essentially impossible. Most obviously this is true where society has an ingrained or institutional racial, gender or other bias (think apartheid South Africa or the antebellum US south not the campus of a liberal arts college). The problem is that the advocates of social justice have set out to create, instead of that 'veil of ignorance', a sort of checklist of 'fairness' that must be completed before any rule is passed, statement made or comment spoken.

You can, I hope, see the problem here and indeed the point at which the idea of social justice runs full tilt into other important ideas like liberty, democracy and choice. If the somewhat warped interpretation of Rawls that's popular in some circles is used, the result is a sort of soft (and sometimes not so soft) authoritarianism. On top of Rawls' concern about the distribution of wealth and income is piled a host of other inequities - of race, sex, gender, ability, history and place. So even when they are among the wealthiest and highest income, in Rawls' terms the most privileged, some individuals by dint of being black or female or gay or ill remain the victims of social injustice (that must be challenged and righted).

It's in the context of this understanding that I was fascinated by this announcement:

...a private group of Tory MPs has formed to try to help develop a stronger social justice agenda in their party which might help the Prime Minister – and whoever succeeds him – develop a proper Tory plan for tackling poverty. Its members describe the group as a ‘compassionate Conservative caucus’, and it includes an interesting bunch of members, including Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Alistair Burt, David Burrowes, Stephen Crabb, Ruth Davidson, and Nadhim Zahawi. Number 10 officials also attended the group’s first meeting, which took place yesterday afternoon in Parliament, and included a talk from Bill Gates on tackling global health inequalities.

Now this, in terms of the Conservative Party, is a pretty powerful group seemingly committed to tackling 'injustices in society' and, interestingly, an ‘all-out assault on poverty’. This is, in many respects, the language of social democracy rather than conservatism. Indeed, if it is joined by the sort of agonies of language explored recently by Maria Miller, we see a significant element within the Party shifting towards a progressive 'liberal' (in the American meaning) agenda and away from what we'd more usually see as a conservative platform.

Unless that is, the agenda is to redefine the idea of 'social justice' - to escape from the straightjacket of campus identity politics, diversity top trumps and the closing down of speech for reasons of faux-offence. Perhaps this helps:

For many decades, under successive Governments, UK poverty has been defined narrowly by a measure of national income inequality. That is to say, households have been classified as living in poverty if they fall below a set income level, typically taken at 60 per cent national median income. Although this technique can be helpful in mapping low income areas, it is an arbitrary measurement of poverty, which reveals little about the reality of life in low income communities, and it offers no explanation or understanding about the root causes of poverty.

This - from the Centre for Social Justice - is a very different take on social justice. For sure, it's still about the injustice of persistent poverty but rather than seeing the problem as one of prejudice or exclusion because people belong to a group that suffers injustice, the CSJ sees the problem much more in terms of lifestyle - family breakdown, educational failure, economic dependency, addiction and debt. It's the old line rewritten - 'finish school, get a job and keep a job, get married and stay married'.

Now, while I'm not wholly convinced by the 'muscular christianity' of the CSJ's approach, it does have the merit of being a recognisably conservative agenda. The failure of some within society results from failure of institutions rather than the structure of society. Although some of the CSJ rhetoric seems quite judgemental, its core message is that the state should pay attention to stable families, better schools, job creation and the promotion of a 'good' lifestyle. This is the very antithesis of both the social justice idea derived from Rawls and also the concept of a liberal, open society. It also rejects that Thatcherite virtue - a small state serving a strong society. For the only way for politics to right the failings of those institutions (families, schools, employers, lenders) is for government to intervene.

These Tory social justice warriors with their 'compassionate conservativism' and love for state intervention represent a step back to paternalism and perhaps a worrying indulgence of the authoritarianism that has become the hallmark of left wing politics. I'm all for an all out war on poverty but we rather know how to beat it (clue - look at 200 plus years of free markets) but if this comes wrapped with the so-called 'social justice' that's crushing free speech in our universities, creating division from diversity in our cities and privileging group rights and group think above individual liberty then I really think it needs strangling at birth.

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