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Savitri Hensman in the Guardian - a response

Private morality is not public morality.

 Savitri Hensman

The personal doesn't intersect perfectly with the public. What is personal and experienced by you is not a guide to what is injustice for the whole of society.

Some Pakistani men in Leicester groom young white girls as prostitutes.But this localised truth about a criminal gang in Leicester, whether it is recounted heartbreakingly by a young girl in care in Leicester really doesn't give us a sense of what is going on on society. That is why what Jack Straw said was reprehensible.

A woman I knew was raped by a black man. She hated men, but she also hated black men as a result.

Where is the intersection of the personal and the public here? If she challenged black men would she be challenging rapists? If the girl in Leicester challenged Pakistani men would she be challenging gangs of pimps?

Take the example of an errant father not accepting his son because he is gay as an example of a public injustice. It isn't.

Confusing a personal problem someone has with their father it with public injustice is too pat. Who are you against here? Unreconstructed males born in the 60s and 70s? Whose your public enemy? Fathers? Old fashioned fathers? Fathers who hoped for grandchildren? Fathers who gay bashing?

What a mess of histories we have when we try and make our private concerns the public concerns of others. When someone like Savitri Hensman in the Guardian tries to make her private concerns the public concerns of others.

What we need to do is have a vision of a good society before we can assign public culpabilities to private conflicts. And although Rowan Williams may be against the more monolithic and excluding ideas about 'good societies' I am sure he believes in the need for an inclusive good society.

Is Savitri arguing that being inclusive weakens the ability to challenge?

In my good society we contain vampirism and those who predate on society. The financial speculators. We would not allow Philip Green to finance a Tory Party that, in turn, will introduce measures that benefit the very rich. We don't allow people like him to play such a prominent role in society then and to hide their money in offshore nontaxable accounts.

Now this may have implications for the private morality of the mass of people and the way they behave. But if your your moral logic doesn't much extend beyond the private as public, you are stumped. At the private level, realistically you are often limited to asking you to make better consumer choices. Public, concerted  action as a citizen as a human to change a system that allows the fat cats to have their way for the sake of trickle down is another matter.

The morality of the market place and bloody consumer decisions. Going into a supermarket. Being a jolly nice all round good egg to everyone; and leaving the Philip Greens and the Bankers and the Murdochs of this world to do what the fuck they like

Because these actions don't touch us indirectly, they are disguised and made covert with PR and propaganda.  And most people can't understand and challenge the Philip Greens and Murdochs at a private level.

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