Lego: cutting ties with the Mail
Amid all the darkness, there is a “glimmer of hope”, said Frances Ryan on The Pool. Last week, Lego announced it would no longer be running promotional deals in the Daily Mail. This follows a social media campaign by a group called Stop Funding Hate, which has been calling on large corporations to stop advertising in newspapers that promote “hatred, discrimination and demonisation”. The idea is that ordinary people can use “capitalist logic” to force businesses – and thus the media – to develop a conscience. In other words, “you have to hit them in the wallet”. Other companies being targeted include John Lewis, Waitrose and Marks & Spencer, whose “big-hearted Christmas adverts” clash with the xenophobic “bile” of the right-wing press.
At what point does “not like” become “hate”, wondered Grant Feller in Campaign magazine. “The two are very different emotions.” The Daily Mail – like “many millions of Britons” – clearly dislikes untrammelled immigration and believes that “people who seek shelter in Britain” should “abide by British values”. These may not be your opinions, but expressing them is “not the same as hating”. Likewise, its recent “over-the-top” attack on the judges who ruled that Parliament must ratify Brexit was fuelled “not by hate but anger”. These may seem like fine distinctions, but they matter hugely. Unlike, say Nazi Germany, we are lucky enough to have a free press that voices a wide range of political opinion. Trying to silence the voices you dislike is just fascism dressed up as virtue.
This campaign is “short-sighted and dangerous”, agreed Hugo Rifkind in The Times. Do we really want to impose mob rule on the media? What if the next petition “calls upon advertisers to boycott pro-immigration newspapers (such as The Times)”? If we have learnt anything in 2016, it is that the mob doesn’t care much for liberal opinion. This is the sort of idea that could only have been cooked up “in a bubble”, by “people who want the world to look like their own Facebook page. People who have lost all confidence in challenging the ideas they abhor, and now just want them to go away. Liberals grown illiberal, without even realising it.”