Virgin Trains has announced that it will no longer sell the Daily Mail on board its services nor offer it free to first class passengers on the basis that ‘We’ve decided that this paper is not compatible with the VT brand and our beliefs’. It goes on to say its staff have objected to the Mail’s ‘position on…immigration, LGBT rights, and unemployment’ – although it fails to expound exactly what it finds so offensive about the Mail’s coverage on these issues.
So is it a victory for the ‘Stop Funding Hate’ campaign – or a reflection that the Daily Mail has been at the forefront of criticism of Virgin Trains for exploiting its monopoly to jack up fares and its failure to deliver on the East Coast, where it runs trains in a joint operation with Stagecoach and has just been released from its contractual obligations to make payments to the government to 2023?
I know that there are some people on the left for whom the Daily Mail and everything it publishes are the incarnation of evil, but I would have thought that even those people would stop a minute to ask themselves whether it is really such a good idea that a corporation which has received a pasting in the press attempts to banish one of the critical newspapers from its retail outlets.
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