In actual fact they are concerned about the people who work for them drawing conclusions about debates. The BBC, and the new Director Tim Davie, claim they are concerned about impartiality, but they are not. The guidance states employees should “avoid virtue signalling”. The term has also become central to the BBC’s new policy to ensure that its employees do not use the platform the BBC provides them with to make statements that compromise their impartiality. That is to say the term is used to ridicule rather than engage, to create enmity between tribes, to divide, to dominate and to shut down any kind of debate or discussion. It immediately, lazily and arrogantly, frames any assertion of a moral or political principle as an act of narcissism. (Perhaps, indeed, you feel on sticky ground entering that argument.) Rather, you are making a groundless and unfalsifiable presumption about their motive for doing so and using that as the supposed basis to dismiss the whole shebang. When you say somebody is ‘virtue signalling’, you’re not bothering to commit yourself to an argument about whether the position they are taking is right or wrong. The term ‘virtue signalling’ is not an argument but a sneer. In this way, then, the term ‘virtue signalling’ is a ‘sneer’. The purpose of the statement is to suggest that there can be no genuine socialist position that it is against human nature and in some sense a symptom of some kind of human perversion, with no grounding in reality. To the extent that the term is used as a weapon against anyone who attempts to argue for social justice, it is designed and used to create a sense of distrust and disbelief in anyone who campaigns socially, with the wider goal of subduing any faith in socialist politics and societal investment in the welfare state. It can be filed alongside ‘champagne socialist’ or the ‘politically correct’. He said he felt real virtue was represented by a friend who spent five years diligently caring for her ill husband, rather than people who posted about their politics online: “It indicated a certain vanity and boasting.”Īlready we see that ‘virtue signalling’ is a metaphor for ‘hypocrisy’ and can be filed along side a number of rightist terms used to mock a caricature of someone on the left, who claims to care about social issues, but actually doesn’t. “I felt there were people who felt very proud of themselves but had done nothing but say ‘racism is awful’, or had voted Labour and thought they were virtuous,” he said, reflecting on the phrase. That was when the phrase “virtue signalling” popped into his head. The conservative writer James Bartholomew was standing on an escalator in the Kensington branch of Whole Foods in 2015, trying to think of a phrase for people who, he felt, projected their values publicly rather than quietly putting them into practice. Jim Waterson provides a fuller explanation: Seems to mean accusing someone of doing an apparently virtuous thing, with secret aim of being seen as outward reflection of character rather than good in and of itself. Some have called Rashford’s actions ‘virtue-signalling’ and have demanded that he stop ‘virtue-signalling’.īut what is virtue-signalling? That is a question that Rashford himself posed on Twitter, last week, after a mid-week game against Leipzig.įaisal Islam, was said to have responded with the following: Not everyone has been happy with Rashford’s campaigning. Rashford has recently argued that the government’s scheme for providing school dinners to poor children should be extended into half-term. David Squires used it recently in his classic Marcus Rashford sketch. I’ve started to come across the phrase ‘virtue signalling’ quite a bit in the media.
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