The sinister march of the hard left in British politics reached a new level when the civil service union, PCS, decided at its annual conference to ban the sale of the Sun in government buildings by supporting and paying £100 of members’ money to the Total Eclipse of the Sun campaign. You might be surprised to learn that news agency facilities even exist in government buildings but in some of larger offices, in Newcastle, for example, they do. The Sun is, in my opinion, a disgrace to journalism but is banning it really the answer? The comrades plainly think so.
The overwhelming majority of delegates at the conference support banning the paper which suggests the vast majority of PCS members support banning it, since these delegates are supposed to be voting on their behalf. In reality this is a nonsense. Delegates from up and down the country will have the mandates of a tiny fraction of their members and have always voted, and continue to vote, down hard left political lines.
In the eyes of the comrades, the arguments for banning the Sun are roughly as follows:
– The lies the Sun told over Hillsborough.
– The ‘outrageous attacks on refugees” when we should “celebrate diversity”.
– The Sun peddles “lies and bigotry”.
– It is the mouthpiece of a “political class”.
Wouldn’t it be better to just refuse to buy it, instead?
PCS denies it is advocating censorship, but what else do you call it? You don’t call it anything else because censorship is clearly what it is. The hard left in PCS is the same as the hard left everywhere. They are drawn from the likes of the Socialist Party (Militant), the Socialist Workers Party and any of the other 57 varieties of Trotskyism that are available. And through the union they control, they are trying to ban their members from reading whatever they choose.
Now, I am not advocating that anyone should read the Sun. It has a poisonous hard right agenda which works against the very working class readers who are its main customers. And you know everything else. The lies and slurs of Hillsborough above all, always. This is not a nice newspaper and the people who own and write for it can’t be very nice people. We are constantly told we have a “free press” primarily because the newspapers are free from government. They’re not free from proprietorial influence, though.
Several hundred hard left comrades cannot determine who says which newspaper and to whom. Our democracy might be creaking at the edges right now and the arbitrary banning of things we don’t like is a step on a slippery slope.
I might be greatly offended by what I see in the Sun, but then I am greatly offended by a lot of things I see. That doesn’t mean I want to ban the things I don’t want to see. PCS should hang its collective heads in shame. And members should demand that £100 of their money spent on the campaign should be returned to the union to be spent in their interests, not on censorship campaigns.