Virgin Trains banning the Daily Mail is another brick in the wall of the system of diversity


On one level Virgin Trains’ decision to stop selling the Daily Mail is quite a trivial matter. The company is a private business and can decide not to sell whatever it likes.

But there is also a serious aspect to this, for it shows how some of our major public-facing organisations (including businesses like Virgin and the retailer Paperchase) are explicitly taking the ‘progressive’, liberal-left side in our Culture Wars, and using what control they have over public space to stop the views of opponents from appearing.

According to the story in PR Week, Virgin Trains announced its decision in a memo to staff last year, saying,

“There’s been considerable concern raised by colleagues about the Mail’s editorial position on issues such as immigration, LGBT rights, and unemployment. We’ve decided that this paper is not compatible with the VT brand and our beliefs. We won’t be stocking the Daily Mail for sale or as a giveaway.”

As we can see, the statement is explicitly political, focusing on “the Mail’s editorial position” on “issues” rather than the paper’s sometimes unpleasant headlines howling about ‘MIGRANTS’ and the like. It says that the Mail’s stance on immigration, LGBT rights and unemployment are contrary to its brand and beliefs.

According to PR Week, the campaign group Stop Funding Hate seems to have had no part in this, but its influence is clear for all to see, providing a blacklisting template that anyone can pick up and follow, and for which any public-facing business is a potential target. It is the sort of thing that left-wing activists in Britain used to find themselves on the end of; but they are now in the vanguard in promoting it.

What is perhaps remarkable is how much of the private sector is only too happy to play along. But this is just another in a burgeoning list of examples of how the radical left and business interests have formed an alliance, bridged by the centre left/’centrists’ (including Blairites).

For me, this alliance is one of the political stories of our time. They are gathering principally around mass immigration, which both the left and the private sector want to continue, the left as part of its desire to maximise diversity and business in order to maximise competition and ensure a wide pool of labour (with the centrists believing in both for the most part).

On top of that, as the Virgin statement made clear, the company and its founder Richard Branson are very much in the branding business, for which virtue signalling over political issues is an increasingly popular tool. Last year for example, the retailer Jigsaw wrapped Oxford Circus Underground station in a pro-immigration ad campaign – another example of controlling public space so that the political views of this left-business alliance appear in public in a positive light while those of its opponents either do not appear or do so in a negative light.


Jigsaw's pro-immigration ad campaign, Oxford Circus station, October 2017
(photo from Tara Mulholland)

There is something systemic going on here, in the sense that the call going out from the activists is repeatedly finding a ready and enthusiastic response, not just from pro-immigration businesses but from all sorts of public institutions which are leveraging their access to public space (and their financial resources, including employment ability) to control what can appear in it.

The call and response goes both ways, dragging the two sides into a strange, and strangely comfortable, embrace. This is one thing that I explore in my book, The Tribe: the liberal-left and the systemof diversity, which is coming out later this year.

Comments

  1. And another!10 January 2018 at 22:47

    Hi Ben, this is driving me crazy but possibly for a slightly different reason to you. My problem is summed up in this quote from an article by Ian Birrell in last Saturday's i newspaper:

    Ultimately this massive row over a minor appointment (Toby Young) underlines the great divide that scars our nation. It is a wound exposed and inflamed by the wretched Brexit referendum. It is seen most starkly in this division between young and old, between those who embrace diversity, feminism and globalisation and those who favour past certainties.

    What I am being driven crazy by is this idea that good = open = no boundaries = support for women's and LGBT equaility = support for globalisation. I support women's and LGBT equality but I don't support the free unimpeded flow of money from us to a small global elite, and the trashing of people and planet which it entails. I don't see why these are being seen as somehow coming from the same value system. And yes I think I will ask Ian Birrell!

    I have recently heard the phrase greenwashing for making things acceptable by giving them an environmental facade. Is there a word for this? Virgin Media bans unions. Virgin get extremely fat on comfortable public contracts. Richard Branson lives on a paradise island and gets wheeled in to Britain every few years to tell us what we should do and Virgin sues the NHS for not awarding them a contract etc etc and they are trying to make out they are the good guys because they share values with people fighting discrimination. Like when parliament is lit up with the rainbow flag for Pride. Is there a phrase for businesses/politicians trying to clean up their image by by linking their 'brand' with our struggles? There should be. Over and out.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous11 January 2018 at 06:03

    Another clear headed insightful post.

    One which I thought juxtaposed rather nicely with this article from the Sun newspaper about Labour's hypocrisy over hateful speech:

    https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5308264/jeremy-corbyn-accused-of-encouraging-campaign-of-hate-towards-new-cabinet-minister-esther-mcvey/

    Leaving aside the various insults thrown at McVey, the article highlights John McDonnell's assertion that, 'it (is) right for politicians to use powerful language to make a point and express “honest anger”.'

    Unless of course it's powerful language that Labour doesn't like, say about mass immigration, abuse of the welfare state, public sector indolence or incompetence, or Islam inspired crimes.

    Even when Labour MPs like Yvette Cooper and Jess Phillips agree that this abuse is wrong, they are blissfully unaware of their own authoritarian hypocrisy regarding their propensity to shout people down with the words 'racist', 'sexist', 'homophobe', 'Islamophobe' etc.

    I don't believe any of the people involved in this think they are doing anything wrong nor do they realise the huge contradictions in their positions / behaviour.

    And the reason I think for that is that actually most people in public life on the Left are not that bright.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

All comments, however critical, will be accepted as long as they are not personal and/or abusive.

Popular posts from this blog

Schopenhauer on Hegel: "A flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan."

There's nothing like a good insult or two, and if you're looking for insults in philosophy, you need look no further than Arthur Schopenhauer's comments on his German contemporary, the much more popular and successful Friedrich Hegel.  Schopenhauer suggested as a motto of Hegel’s philosophy some words of Shakespeare: ‘s uch stuff as madmen tongue and brain not’. He added : " Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who thus joined into as perfect a chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in power has enabled him to ac...
Read more

Why Islamists and feminists avoid confronting each other

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of our system of diversity is the way feminists and Islamists avoid directly confronting each other. Their ideologies are utterly opposed to each other, but within the system they are allies, so maintain distance and attack others. We can see this in how feminists resolutely avoid picking up on specifically Islamic-related instances of actual misogyny and discrimination in action. They nearly always stick to generalities and abstractions about the world or society as a whole, as Fawcett Society chief executive Sam Smethers does in telling Owen Jones that , “We have a very misogynistic culture in the UK.” In this version of reality, there is a single culture – or at least all the cultures we have come from the same root - and it is ‘very misogynistic’. This is the ‘patriarchy’ theory that is remarkably popular in the upper echelons of the liberal-left, just as it is among young feminists coming out of their Gender Studies courses at universit...
Read more

Immigration: our public debate misses the main point

Our public debate on immigration in Britain almost always focuses entirely on money and thereby misses the main point, a point that our political-media class finds difficult to deal with and that many regard as almost illegitimate. This is how people feel . It is emblematic of the state of democracy in Britain that any sort of negative opinions about immigration routinely get shouted down and lambasted as ‘wrong’ by the siren voices of people and institutions, most of which are on the supposedly ‘liberal-left’ side of politics. It is particularly disturbing the way that anyone who talks about negative effects of immigration is routinely attacked (often by hordes of lefty people on Twitter) as ‘racist’. These voices have a huge and in my view poisonous impact on the debate, forcing anyone who wants to make some nuanced points about immigration and identity into defending themselves against charges of racism, which is well established as one of the the worst offences one...
Read more