Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why Virgin Trains really wanted to stop selling the Daily Mail

Is it really ‘censorship’ that Virgin Trains won’t be stocking the Daily Mail any more? An internal company memo to staff this week announced that ‘we’ve decided that this paper is not compatible with the VT brand and our beliefs’ and that staff had raised ‘considerable concern’ about the Mail’s stance on ‘issues such as immigration, LGBT rights and unemployment’. This has prompted accusations that the train company is cracking down on free speech and therefore censoring views that it doesn’t like.

Is this true? Many have argued that as Virgin is a private company and not a newsagents, it has no obligation to give every newspaper a platform. This isn’t the state or a university stopping free debate, it’s just one company deciding not to sell another company’s products. Virgin Trains did say as an aside that they were only selling one copy of the Mail for every four trains that stocked it, which suggests that this might even be a commercial decision dressed up as a virtuous statement.

It’s worth pointing out that censorship can come from a mob as well as from the state or other powerful organisations. It’s probably not quite right to say that the Mail is being crushed by the mob, though: it’s a powerful newspaper in its own right that espouses views which, though controversial, are also held by a significant section of the UK population. Not being stocked on Virgin Trains, along with a number of other newspapers that the company doesn’t sell either, isn’t the newspaper being silenced.

People who disagree with a publication’s views can reasonably respond in two ways: either by not buying it or by trying to take those views to task. This might sound like a David and Goliath battle between one angry newspaper reader and the might of High Street Kensington, but newspapers tend to adopt certain views to reflect their readers, and so if you don’t like the views, try to persuading the readers you know that yours are better (preferably without shouting or insulting them).

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