When Hatred Calls Itself Virtue
The cruel reactions to Ann Widdecombe’s death reveal an identitarian politics that dehumanises its opponents while renaming its own bigotry, division and coercion as justice.
The cruel public reactions to Ann Widdecombe’s death were not merely an outbreak of exceptionally bad manners. They exposed something more serious: a political culture in which the person can disappear entirely behind the opinions attributed to her, and in which ordinary humanity is made conditional upon ideological approval.
One University of Aberdeen employee reportedly greeted the news as “some good news for once” and expressed the hope that Widdecombe had suffered an “extremely painful death”. The university subsequently announced an investigation and disassociated itself from the remarks.¹ This was not robust criticism of a politician’s record. It was the celebration of another human being’s suffering and death.
That distinction matters particularly because Widdecombe did not die peacefully after a long retirement. She was found dead with serious injuries at her home, and her death is the subject of a murder investigation now being led by Counter Terrorism Policing. A man has been arrested on suspicion of murder and subsequently on suspicion of terrorism-related offences. The motive remains a matter for investigation and must not be prejudged.² Yet the circumstances make the public delight in her death still more chilling.
The ugliness was also revelatory. People who habitually speak the language of compassion, dignity, tolerance and inclusion discovered that their principles had limits. Sympathy was withdrawn because the deceased had held opinions they regarded as morally unacceptable. Widdecombe’s death did not interrupt the ideological judgement already passed upon her. It merely provided an occasion to pronounce it with greater savagery.
This is more than hypocrisy, although hypocrisy is certainly involved. It is the consequence of a particular anthropology: an understanding of the human being in which politics has ceased to describe one dimension of a person’s life and has become the key by which the whole person is interpreted.
Ann Widdecombe was not merely a collection of controversial positions. She was a parliamentarian, minister, writer, broadcaster, Catholic convert, friend, colleague and member of a family. Like every human being, she possessed virtues and failings, loyalties and contradictions, public convictions and private affections. Yet, for those who rejoiced at her death, all this complexity disappeared. The person was compressed into a political symbol.
Once that reduction occurs, ordinary moral obligations begin to weaken. One is no longer contemplating a fellow human being whose death has left others bereaved. One is reacting to an abstraction: a conservative, a reactionary, a bigot, an oppressor, an enemy. The label performs the moral work. It permits contempt without examination and cruelty without remorse.
When an opinion becomes an identity
Henri Tajfel and John Turner’s work on social identity showed how individuals derive part of their self-understanding from the groups to which they belong, dividing the social world into an “in-group” and an “out-group”.³ Political allegiance can therefore become more than a judgement about policy or government. It can answer not merely the question “What do I believe?” but “Who am I?”
Once politics performs that function, disagreement becomes existential. The opponent does not merely hold a mistaken opinion; she threatens the moral identity of the group. Her existence appears to embody everything against which its members define themselves. Hostility towards her then reinforces their solidarity with one another.
The result is not the disappearance of compassion but its tribalisation.
Those within the approved moral community are treated as complete persons. Their motives are contextualised, their errors mitigated, their weaknesses explained and their suffering acknowledged. Those outside it are denied the same interpretative charity. They are reduced to their most objectionable statement or belief and judged as though it disclosed their entire moral essence.
Political psychologists describe a related development as “affective polarisation”. Opponents come to be disliked not merely because their ideas are considered wrong, but because they themselves are regarded as immoral, threatening and contemptible.⁴ Politics ceases to be a contest between rival judgements about the common good and becomes a struggle between rival kinds of people.
This is why an opponent’s death can be treated as a victory. The deceased is not encountered first as a person who has died, but as an enemy identity that has been defeated.
The process is a form of dehumanisation, although not necessarily its crudest form. Dehumanisation does not always involve explicitly comparing people to vermin or denying that they are biologically human. It can consist in withholding those qualities by which we ordinarily recognise full personhood: individuality, emotional depth, moral complexity, warmth, agency and the possibility of repentance or change.⁵
Widdecombe thus ceases to be a woman with friends, faith, memories, sorrows and people who loved her. She becomes simply “the bigot”, “the homophobe”, “the reactionary” or whichever totalising designation places her beyond sympathy.
Once the individual has been transformed into a category, mockery of her death no longer feels like cruelty towards a human being. It feels like repudiation of the category.
Cruelty experienced as justice
Albert Bandura described the related phenomenon of “moral disengagement”: the mechanisms by which people suspend the moral restraints that would ordinarily inhibit cruelty. Harm is morally justified; language is sanitised; responsibility is dispersed through the group; the victim is blamed for what happens to her; and her humanity is obscured.⁶
This explains why those celebrating an opponent’s death may not experience themselves as cruel. They believe themselves to be expressing a moral verdict. The deceased has already been classified as an agent of harm, and normal sympathy therefore appears not merely unnecessary but morally suspect.
Compassion becomes complicity. Courtesy becomes weakness. Restraint becomes cowardice. To acknowledge the humanity of the condemned person risks appearing to minimise the supposed harm represented by her beliefs.
Cruelty is no longer experienced as cruelty. It is experienced as justice.
Yet there is a further and especially revealing dimension to this ideological mentality. Movements that organise themselves around opposition to bigotry, division, authoritarianism and fascism can become extraordinarily adept at reproducing those tendencies while locating them exclusively in their opponents.
Those who divide society relentlessly into morally opposed identities accuse others of being divisive. Those who judge whole classes of people according to political, religious or demographic categories accuse others of bigotry. Those who demand censorship, professional exclusion and institutional blacklisting accuse others of authoritarianism. Those who treat dissent as contamination declare that fascism is advancing everywhere except within their own conduct.
The accusation becomes a means of avoiding self-recognition.
This is sometimes described loosely as projection, but the more demonstrable mechanism is partisan moral asymmetry. The ideologue need not consciously recognise a vice within himself and deliberately transfer it to another. Instead, group identity determines the moral description of conduct in advance. Structurally similar actions are given opposite names according to who performs them.
When our side excludes a person, it is safeguarding; when the other side does so, it is discrimination.
When our side suppresses speech, it is preventing harm; when the other side does so, it is censorship.
When our side mobilises anger, it is resistance; when the other side does so, it is incitement.
When our side imposes ideological conformity, it is inclusion; when the other side does so, it is oppression.
When our side treats opponents as morally contaminated, it is accountability; when the other side does so, it is persecution.
The behaviour may be structurally comparable. What changes is the identity of the actor and therefore the morally flattering vocabulary applied to it.
Research into partisan judgement repeatedly demonstrates that people assess evidence and conduct more charitably when they favour their own political group and more severely when equivalent conduct is attributed to an opponent. The tendency is not confined to either Left or Right.⁷ It belongs to fallen human nature, but ideological moral certainty magnifies it.
The partisan may sincerely believe that his own side’s coercion is protective while his opponent’s is oppressive. He may regard the aggression of his allies as an understandable response to injustice while taking the aggression of his adversaries as evidence of their inherent wickedness. Identity determines interpretation before detached judgement has begun.
Our side behaves badly because circumstances compelled it. Their side behaves badly because badness is what they are.
The greater a movement’s investment in its own righteousness, the harder self-recognition becomes. A movement that defines itself as anti-bigotry cannot easily admit that it has become bigoted towards disfavoured groups. A movement that identifies itself with inclusion cannot acknowledge its appetite for exclusion without imperilling its moral legitimacy. A movement that proclaims itself the final barrier against fascism cannot readily contemplate the authoritarian character of its own methods.
The vice must therefore be found elsewhere.
The ideology that cannot see itself
This produces one of the defining inversions of contemporary political language. The accusation directed at the opponent becomes a licence to practise the very conduct being condemned.
“Anti-fascism” becomes permission for intimidation.
“Inclusion” becomes the exclusion of dissenters.
“Tolerance” becomes compulsory assent to approved beliefs.
“Kindness” becomes the justification for cruelty towards anyone declared unkind.
“Safety” becomes a reason to silence lawful disagreement.
The ideology never says openly, “We intend to be intolerant.” It argues that true tolerance requires intolerance towards the intolerant. It does not announce, “We intend to censor dissent.” It declares that harmful expression is not really speech. It does not say, “Our opponents should possess fewer rights.” It contends that those accused of threatening rights cannot safely be permitted to exercise their own.
There are, of course, circumstances in which society must restrain genuinely unlawful conduct. Incitement, threats, harassment and violence are not protected merely by calling them opinions. But the exceptional argument becomes dangerous when it is expanded until ordinary disagreement is classified as harm and every ideological opponent becomes a threat to the existence of others.
Once that threshold has been crossed, almost any act of exclusion or coercion can be represented as compassion.
The ideology therefore achieves something more formidable than ordinary hypocrisy. The hypocrite knows the standard and fails to observe it. The ideologue changes the meaning of the standard so that his failure becomes proof of his virtue.
He does not admit to hatred. He calls his hatred solidarity.
He does not admit to bigotry. He calls his bigotry moral clarity.
He does not admit to division. He divides humanity in the name of overcoming division.
He does not admit to dehumanisation. He declares that his victim’s alleged dehumanisation of others has placed her beyond the reach of ordinary human sympathy.
Thus the self-appointed enemy of hatred becomes hateful without ever having to recognise the transformation.
The Pharisee in the Gospel did not consider himself wicked. He thanked God that he was unlike other men.⁸ His blindness arose not from lacking a moral vocabulary but from using morality chiefly to establish his superiority. He could enumerate the publican’s faults because he had ceased to examine his own.
Our Lord’s warning is exact: “Why seest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye; and seest not the beam that is in thy own eye?”⁹ This is not merely advice about private humility. It is a profound account of the human propensity to detect sin readily in an opponent while translating our own sin into necessity, virtue or justice.
Ideology intensifies that temptation by attaching moral innocence to group membership. If our faction represents justice, then injustice must belong essentially to the other faction. Cruelty among the righteous becomes an aberration, a provoked response or a regrettable excess. Cruelty among opponents becomes proof of what they fundamentally are.
This is why indiscriminate accusations such as “bigot” and “fascist” have become so politically useful. They do not always function as descriptions of specific conduct. They are employed to remove the accused from the sphere of legitimate disagreement. Once the label is accepted, ordinary obligations of fairness may be suspended. The “fascist” need not be heard. The “bigot” need not be treated charitably. The “hater” may safely be hated.
Language becomes the preliminary instrument of dehumanisation.
George Orwell understood that corrupted political language does not merely conceal unpleasant conduct; it makes coercion appear humane and renders honest thought increasingly difficult.¹⁰ Hannah Arendt likewise warned that ideology forces the irreducible plurality of human life into a single explanatory logic.¹¹ Actual persons, being inconveniently complex, must be simplified until they conform to the theory.
The public performance of hatred
Social media accelerates the process. Its incentives favour brevity, certainty, outrage and visible demonstrations of allegiance. Nuance performs poorly because it complicates the emotional simplicity upon which tribal mobilisation depends. Condemnation, by contrast, proves membership. The more merciless the insult, the more unmistakable the loyalty.
Research into group polarisation has shown that like-minded groups can move towards more extreme positions when their members chiefly deliberate among themselves.¹² Social media adds instant approval and public visibility to that tendency. A vicious comment may be rewarded precisely because it signals that the author belongs securely within the approved moral community.
The death of a public figure then becomes an opportunity for ritualised denunciation. Participants do not merely express private hostility. They perform their ideological identity before an audience. The dead person becomes the material through which the living exhibit their virtue.
Émile Durkheim observed that communities maintain solidarity through shared symbols, collective rituals and distinctions between the sacred and the profane.¹³ Politics can assume a comparable role when it supplies ultimate meaning, communal belonging, doctrines of innocence and guilt, purity codes, acts of confession and procedures of excommunication.
Eric Voegelin described ideological movements as “political religions” when they transferred hopes of salvation, redemption and final judgement into the temporal sphere.¹⁴ Raymond Aron similarly wrote of “secular religions” that supplied comprehensive explanations of history and demanded corresponding fidelity.¹⁵
When politics assumes the functions of religion, political opponents cease to be merely wrong. They become heretics. Their punishment affirms the faith of the community.
The response to Widdecombe’s death displayed elements of precisely this moral universe. Her opinions were not treated simply as arguments to be assessed, criticised or refuted. They were represented as a stain upon her person. Her death therefore became an opportunity to celebrate the removal of the contaminated identity and to reaffirm the moral boundaries of the group.
The irony is that this occurred within a culture saturated with the vocabulary of universal dignity.
Progressive politics often presents itself as uniquely attentive to exclusion, vulnerability and dehumanisation. Yet it can become remarkably merciless towards those whom it identifies as enemies of those principles. A movement that condemns reducing people to labels may reduce an opponent entirely to hers. A politics that denounces collective judgement may judge whole classes of people by their presumed privilege or beliefs. A culture that declares every identity deserving of respect may decide that certain political or religious identities cancel the right to human sympathy.
This contradiction is not accidental. It follows from making politics morally exhaustive.
If a person is treated primarily as the bearer of oppressive beliefs, the person and the alleged oppression become indistinguishable. Compassion towards the person then appears to be indulgence towards the oppression. The possibility that a human being may be right in some matters and wrong in others, virtuous in one sphere and culpable in another, is lost.
Yet that complexity is the very substance of personhood.
The person before the category
Christian anthropology begins from the opposite direction.
The human person is made in the image and likeness of God.¹⁶ His dignity is therefore not conferred by the state, constructed by social agreement or earned through political correctness. It does not depend upon usefulness, popularity, identity or allegiance.
That dignity does not render every belief true or every action permissible. Christianity commands moral judgement, correction and repentance. But it distinguishes the person from his error and refuses to reduce the sinner to his sin.
A person may commit grave wrongs without ceasing to be human. He may hold false or destructive beliefs without losing the divine image. His conduct may merit condemnation, resistance or lawful punishment, but his personhood cannot be revoked by an ideological tribunal.
Identitarian politics asks first which category a person inhabits and then determines the compassion to which that person is entitled. Christianity encounters the person first and judges his beliefs and actions afterwards.
The former makes humanity conditional upon politics. The latter makes politics answerable to the permanent dignity of the human person.
This is why the command to love one’s enemies is not a sentimental addition to Christianity. It is the direct repudiation of every ideology that identifies another person entirely with his opposition to us.
Christ said: “Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you.”¹⁷ The command assumes that the enemy remains a neighbour, the persecutor remains a person and hatred cannot cancel the obligations of charity.
At Calvary, Christ did not deny the guilt of those responsible for His Crucifixion. Neither did He reduce them to their guilt. He prayed: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”¹⁸
Christian mercy is not the refusal to distinguish truth from falsehood. It is the refusal to believe that falsehood exhausts the person who holds it.
There is no obligation to pretend that Ann Widdecombe’s politics were beyond criticism. Her public record and arguments may be scrutinised like those of any political figure. Death does not canonise the deceased, and respect for the dead does not require historical amnesia.
But there remains an essential distinction between criticism and malice, between assessing a public legacy and rejoicing that its author is dead. A civilised culture must be capable of maintaining it.
For centuries, death imposed a degree of restraint even upon political enmity. Christians prayed for the departed because final judgement belongs to God. Others observed silence out of respect for bereavement, mortality and the common human condition.
That instinct depended upon the recognition that something in the person transcends politics.
Its disappearance indicates that politics has become totalising.
The treatment of the dead is therefore a test of moral seriousness. It reveals whether our belief in human dignity survives contact with someone we despise. It is easy to affirm the humanity of those who share our convictions and validate our identities. The true test is whether we can recognise it in those whose opinions offend us.
This temptation is not confined to the Left. The Right can also reduce people to categories, excuse cruelty by allies and delight in the suffering of opponents. Christians must resist it wherever it appears, and most vigilantly within their own ranks.
Nevertheless, the reactions to Ann Widdecombe exposed a particular contradiction within contemporary progressive identitarianism. A culture claiming special authority to speak of dignity and inclusion revealed how rapidly both could be withdrawn from a political adversary. It opposed bigotry while judging the whole person by a despised identity. It condemned division while separating humanity into morally elect and morally untouchable classes. It warned against fascism while insisting that certain dissenters should be silenced, excluded and treated as contaminants.
The final triumph of ideology is not merely that it persuades us to hate our opponents. It is that it renders us incapable of recognising our hatred as hatred.
Whenever we see only an ideology and no longer a person, we repeat the ancient political temptation to decide whose humanity counts. Whenever we attribute every vice to our enemies while inventing virtuous names for the same tendencies in ourselves, we repeat the ancient spiritual temptation to believe that evil belongs exclusively to other people.
The victim changes from generation to generation. The mechanism does not.
Ann Widdecombe’s death should therefore prompt more than disapproval of tasteless remarks. It should force an examination of the anthropology and moral inversion that made them possible. A society that recognises only identities will eventually lose sight of persons. A culture that makes compassion dependent upon ideological approval will become cruel while congratulating itself upon its virtue.
The measure of a civilisation is not how vehemently it condemns those it believes to be wrong, but whether it can still recognise their humanity.
The moment we can no longer mourn the killing of an opponent, politics has become an idol. The moment we practise hatred in the name of opposing hate, bigotry in the name of inclusion, division in the name of solidarity and coercion in the name of liberation, ideology has not merely defeated our opponents.
It has made us into precisely what we claimed to oppose.
Footnotes
Marc Horne, “Aberdeen University investigates ‘painful death’ wish for Ann Widdecombe,” The Times, 14 July 2026.
Home Secretary, “Statement about the death of Ann Widdecombe,” House of Commons, 13 July 2026; “Ann Widdecombe death: counter-terrorism police take over investigation,” The Guardian, 13 July 2026. At the time of publication, the investigation remained active and no political or ideological motive had been judicially established.
Henri Tajfel, “Social Identity and Intergroup Behaviour,” Social Science Information, vol. 13, no. 2, 1974, pp. 65–93; Henri Tajfel and John C. Turner, “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict,” in William G. Austin and Stephen Worchel, eds, The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, Brooks/Cole, 1979, pp. 33–47.
Shanto Iyengar, Gaurav Sood and Yphtach Lelkes, “Affect, Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization,” Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 76, no. 3, 2012, pp. 405–431; Shanto Iyengar et al., “The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States,” Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 22, 2019, pp. 129–146.
Nick Haslam, “Dehumanization: An Integrative Review,” Personality and Social Psychology Review, vol. 10, no. 3, 2006, pp. 252–264.
Albert Bandura, “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities,” Personality and Social Psychology Review, vol. 3, no. 3, 1999, pp. 193–209; Albert Bandura et al., “Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement in the Exercise of Moral Agency,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 71, no. 2, 1996, pp. 364–374.
Peter H. Ditto et al., “At Least Bias Is Bipartisan: A Meta-Analytic Comparison of Partisan Bias in Liberals and Conservatives,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 14, no. 2, 2019, pp. 273–291; Ziva Kunda, “The Case for Motivated Reasoning,” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 108, no. 3, 1990, pp. 480–498.
Luke 18:9–14, Douay-Rheims.
Matthew 7:3–5, Douay-Rheims.
George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” Horizon, April 1946.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951, especially Part III, chapter 13.
Cass R. Sunstein, “The Law of Group Polarization,” Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 10, no. 2, 2002, pp. 175–195.
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields, Free Press, 1995, particularly Book II.
Eric Voegelin, The Political Religions, trans. T. J. DiNapoli and E. S. Easterly III, University of Missouri Press, 2000.
Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, trans. Terence Kilmartin, Transaction Publishers, 2001, especially Part III.
Genesis 1:26–27; Pius XII, Encyclical Letter Summi Pontificatus, 20 October 1939, §§35–48; Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, 7 December 1965, §§12, 24 and 27; John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation Christifideles Laici, 30 December 1988, §37.
Matthew 5:44, Douay-Rheims.
Luke 23:34, Douay-Rheims.