How did knitting become a battleground for morality?
Ilove knitting. It’s satisfying and fun and I get warm clothes at the end of it. I don’t tend to find it gives me a deep inner sense of moral righteousness – at least, I don’t think so, though I did once knit a particularly cosy scarf, which I imagine feels similar. And yet, as the journalist Gavin Haynes explored in The Purity Spiral
(Radio 4, Sunday), for some people, knitting can be a route to either moral triumph or ruin. This thoughtprovoking documentary was all about how groundless accusations of racism in the online knitting community have led to people’s livelihoods being ruined. One prolific knitter, Nathan Taylor, was shamed by the knitting community for writing a poem encouraging people to have more respect for one another. He was accused of telling people of colour to be nicer to white people, though he says he was doing nothing of the sort. He was shunned as a secret Nazi apologiser and subject to a tirade of cyber abuse that consumed his life. Taylor, who is gay and living with HIV, is married to a Jewish man. He became suicidal and was admitted to hospital.
This was a purity spiral, in which members of a community compete to smoke out anyone who is deemed to be morally deficient, demanding that offenders admit their shortcomings in full, and then grovel and repent.
Haynes illustrated his argument with a further example from young adult literature, where authors can be “cancelled”, with their books boycotted and their publishers pressured to remove them from sale if a blurb for an as-yet-unpublished book is deemed to be “problematic”. A book can be subject to outrage before anyone has actually read it.
The programme gave some truly eye-opening accounts of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a moral firestorm from a community that had previously embraced you. It’s tempting to tut and laugh at the ridiculousness of all this furore over knitting and teen lit, of all things, and this was pretty much what Haynes did. He described knitting as a “jolly middle-class hobby”, and online knitting communities as “the most innocuous of spaces”.
Which didn’t feel quite right. Tellingly, none of the activists from the knitting community that Haynes approached was willing to come on the programme to defend their accusations of racism (although one did serve Haynes a cease and desist letter). The unfortunate thing about this was that the programme ended up feeling unbalanced and even a bit sneering. By describing knitting as “genteel” and “jolly”, Haynes sounded baffled that knitters should care about anything other than their latest shawl.
But knitting and sewing have a long history of being political, from spy messages hidden in balls of wool during the American Revolution to the creation of elaborate suffragette banners and flags a century later, and most recently the irreverent knitted pink “pussyhats” worn at public protests against President Trump. Some knitters have always had strong opinions; they’re not so genteel after all.
Similarly, YA literature is constantly tackling thorny subjects, because teenage readers do tend to be quite interested in reading about power and the powerless as well as sex and violence and complex issues of identity. So to describe YA fiction as “even less macho than knitting”, as Haynes did, was silly all round.
But this whole subject is fascinating and the programme was a sound exploration of a perennial moral feeding frenzy, something that crops up throughout history and could potentially affect any community.
Far more genteel, in fact, was 11pm on Friday, Brexit Day, when we didn’t hear the bongs of Big Ben as the UK left the EU but we did hear the dependable sound of the Radio 4 pips. James Coomarasamy wrapped up the concluding headlines of The
World Tonight (Radio 4, Friday) with a plea to “stay with us here on Radio 4 as we begin a new chapter of our national story,” before introducing a live edition of Brexitcast, the wildly successful Brexit podcast which is due to continue in essentially the same form except for being renamed Newscast. “Hello,” said presenter Adam Fleming, “especially if you’re a historian listening to this in 2053.” And yet it all felt like a bit of an anticlimax.
Radio hasn’t really known how to report on the run-up to Brexit, but Brexitcast has been the best at it: a mix of humour and in-depth political nerdery that has reflected all the best idiosyncrasies of British broadcasting. I’m not sure I’ll ever forget the time that Fleming lovingly, whisperingly caressed the printed-out Brexit deal as an exercise in ASMR. It feels like the end of a radio era as well as a political one.