Andy Burnham wrote a very good piece in today’s Guardian today about how his government is going to make it easier for people to cancel unwanted rip-off subscriptions. “The average person has about three subscriptions and spends about £500 a year on them, according to government figures,” says the paper, adding “There are about 155m active subscriptions across the UK, and about £1.6bn a year is spent on unwanted ones.” Anyone who has tried to change TV or mobile provider subscriptions, not to mention utility companies, will know just how hard it can be. But the one I have found the most difficult to cancel is … er … The Guardian.
I have been a Guardian reader for about 50 years now. I bought the paper version until the last decade or so until I finally moved with the times and moved to an online subscription. I didn’t mind paying a nominal sum for the service, either, since it’s the only genuinely independently owned national newspaper and it enjoyed a position on the soft left of politics, at least in terms of its editorials and its columnists. Since the current Labour government was elected in 2024, the paper has swerved to a far more hard left position, coming at Labour, almost uniquely in the British media, from the left. Two years of this persuaded me to cancel my subscription. It was far harder to do than I expected.
The Guardian subscription model is interesting. The paper itself is not behind a paywall. Most of its content is still freely available on the internet. It’s the App you pay for. And, very quietly, the paper has upped what is actually a financial donation to what is for me an eye-watering sum of £180. In other words, I was paying a voluntary sum of money to keep the likes of Owen Jones, Nesrine Malik, Aditya Chakraborrty and Andy Beckett, among others, in a job, to rip into the government, on a more than daily basis. Sod that, I felt.
As the time approached when my subscription was due to renew, I went through the rigmarole of cancelling and thought I had, until I received a bank statement which revealed I had renewed after all. I was not impressed. £180 had left my account, just like that. So I went about cancelling and this time, after a fiendishly complicated and tiresome process, I finally escaped from their hold. I won’t say it was exhausting, but the whole cancellation process was designed to make it as difficult as possible for the reader. At every stage, just as you think you’re done, yet another “ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DO THIS?” came along.
Despite its current hostility to the Labour government, The Guardian remains the only newspaper I would read. Despite the comrades who would never be happy until a crank like Jeremy Corbyn was in charge, the paper still employs numerous excellent writers and it is a shame that I am no longer paying for the excellent writing of the likes of John Crace, Rafael Behr and Jonathan Freedland, again among others. But it’s the ultimate in irony that a newspaper that makes it so hard for readers to unsubscribe should run a piece by the prime minister promising a crackdown on companies that make it hard for people to unsubscribe from whatever it is they sell.
I am always dubious of governments of whatever colour when they promise a “crackdown” because it usually means they are not actually doing anything new, or even anything at all, but hopefully this one will stop rip-off companies taking advantage of us, rip-off companies like The Guardian.
