Andrew McKie

I read about a man caught putting a brick through a newspaper office window. A swanky broadsheet newspaper, like The Herald. Do you know what The Herald will set you back? £1.30.

Good for him. I reckon the mindless, pointless vandalism was OK because he didn’t much like Catriona Stewart’s column on Friday.

All self-evident nonsense; except Ms Stewart’s column, which was only partly nonsense. Her central point – inspired by the case of a man accused of vandalising an expensive car, apparently just because it was an expensive car – was that rich people spending money on pointlessly expensive items was immoral.

That’s a defensible, possibly a popular, position. I’ll come to why I don’t share it in a moment, but I understand it. The vulgar rich, and their ostentatious purchases, often are horrible. Ms Stewart didn’t want to generalise, but generalised: “You can’t spend more than a house worth on a car and claim the moral high ground.”

Sounds reasonable, but she then praises the Fiat 500, and in July you could have bought two houses (count ’em) in Tonypandy, south Wales, for less than one of those costs. So it depends on the price of the house, and car. Which means it’s not a moral absolute, surely?

A moral absolute is that attacking someone else’s property out of disapproval, envy, or even high-minded Corbynite class spite, is wrong. All right-thinking people agree that only a fool with more money than sense would buy a solid gold Apple watch with an Hermes strap, for example. But that doesn’t give us the right to smash theirs up with a hammer.

Besides, lots of people apart from the rich spend in ways that seem bizarre. What if you live like a pauper to buy haute couture, or first editions, or Star Wars memorabilia, or expensive wine? I think those daft priorities, but that doesn’t create a moral right to tell people, even horrible rich people, what they can spend their money on.

In a free society, anyone has the right to regard other people’s priorities as selfish, obscene, or foolish. They haven’t the right to appropriate or attack their possessions, and shouldn’t draw a conclusion about the moral priorities of their owners.

By all means take the view that owners of expensive cars, as a class, are repulsive. It’s a demonstratively stupid stance – like thinking all Nationalists are racist, all Tories callous, all Liberal Democratss unprincipled, or all Labour supporters economically illiterate – but it’s your right to hold it, and to express it. That’s as far as your rights go, though.

It’s also the right of people to spend their money on what they want. As it happens, sometimes even apparently pointless ostentatious expenditure has its place: without expensive cars, there would be less research on modest cars and, without couture, no high street.

But even if it didn’t have a place, even if it offends you, it doesn’t legitimise theft or vandalism. Feel free to be offended, no matter how daft your taking offence may be, as long as you also remember there’s no right not to be offended.