A patronising Righteous git defines 'Justice'

Richard Reeves is the director of Demos, the BBC's favourite pinko-thinko-tanko.

I'm waiting for them to give a similar platform to the Adam Smith Institute but I'm not holding my breath.

Mr Reeves gave a short talk on Radio 4 tonight in which he addressed himself to the 18th century proto-socialist, radical republican pamphleteer, Mary Wollstonecraft.

He opened with a short paean of praise addressed directly to the lady's spirit, or perhaps her corpse, in which he unburdened himself of this gem of Righteous presumptuousness:

"Your name is on the lips of all who have Justice in their hearts."

No, it isn't, Mr Reeves. No, it bloody well isn't.

You are a cheeky sod, Mr Reeves. You presume to decide what Justice is. You say that it involves sharing or at least admiring the political philosophy of Miss Wollstonecraft. Any who do not share the lady's politics, which coincide so closely with your own, you deem not to have Justice in their hearts.

Do you expect these people whom you have so lazily insulted to enter into civilised dialogue with you about how, together, you might organise living together in a peaceful society? But surely you cannot wish to converse with people who do not even have justice in their hearts, not being republicans?

Presumably your fine moral sense obliges you, in Justice, to despise or at least to pity such people, and to exclude them from public and political discourse. Are these not dangerous people, who do not have republicanism and therefore no not have Justice in their hearts? Surely the opinions of people without Justice in their hearts are inimical to the public good?

Do you admit no possibility whatsoever that your concept of Justice might be partial? Or provisional? Or erroneous, or even flawed? Do you really claim an objectively higher morality than those who disagree with you in good conscience, and a superior understanding of what Justice is than all the philosophers who have preceded you over the centuries and who, despite lives of scholarly endeavour, hesitated to claim that they knew what Justice is? Are you a prophet, Mr Reeves?

But what am I saying? You do not say that you know what Justice is, do you? You say that you know what Justice is not. And what Justice is not, is whatever anyone says it is who disagrees with you.

Mr Reeves, you are arrogant. You are the epitome of the sanctimonious, the bigoted, the arrogant. And you are essentially unjust.

I diskard you.