Thursday, August 10, 2023

Is social justice left-wing?

I just saw a piece in the Daily Express about the AHRC's plans to fund a Centre for Law and Social Justice. The angle is very much that this is a waste of taxpayer money. They quote an unnamed academic, who says it is shameful "to be using public money to create a research centre with an explicitly left-wing equality, diversity and inclusion agenda."

Of course, the AHRC has been criticised for its political agenda before (see here and here), when it included the 'Big Society' among potential funding topics. In this case, the suggestion is that they are going against the government agenda. As the Daily Express refers to the AHRC doing this "Despite the Conservative Government's concerted war on woke..."

One thing that's not clear to me, though, is why they assume social justice to be a left-wing agenda. The Centre for Social Justice describes itself as independent, but was co-founded by former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith. It's described by Wikipedia as 'centre-right' and, according to ConservativeHome, it was influential on Cameron's Conservative government.

Wednesday, August 09, 2023

JME blog

I've just had a post, about strike ballots, published on the Journal of Medical Ethics blog. You can find it here

Readers may recall that I've written about similar themes before. The latest piece is indeed similar, but applied to a new issue (strikes by healthcare workers, rather than UCU).