What do oven chips have to do with virtue signalling?

Why does virtue-signalling matter? It’s a fair question. After all, if people display virtuous behaviour, need we care about their motivation? I understand why some are irritated by the term; deployed unsparingly, it can be used to denigrate any act of decency.

Yet, if the phrase is relatively new, the concept isn’t. Several of the best-known passages of the New Testament (The Widow’s Mite; the Sermon on the Mount) deal with the contrast between sincere acts of virtue and those driven by self-advertisement.

Why is this distinction important? For one thing, cheap displays of virtue may crowd out more concrete actions. Woke discourse largely dodges practical and economic questions in favour of increasingly arcane etymological point-scoring and shaming. Worthwhile causes are hijacked by middle-class activists who use them to play status games against other white people they dislike, often through extravagant displays of what Robert Henderson calls ‘luxury beliefs’.