Why Virgin Trains really wanted to stop selling the Daily Mail

Is it really ‘censorship’ that Virgin Trains won’t be stocking the Daily Mail any more? An internal company memo to staff this week announced that ‘we’ve decided that this paper is not compatible with the VT brand and our beliefs’ and that staff had raised ‘considerable concern’ about the Mail’s stance on ‘issues such as immigration, LGBT rights and unemployment’. This has prompted accusations that the train company is cracking down on free speech and therefore censoring views that it doesn’t like.

Is this true? Many have argued that as Virgin is a private company and not a newsagents, it has no obligation to give every newspaper a platform. This isn’t the state or a university stopping free debate, it’s just one company deciding not to sell another company’s products. Virgin Trains did say as an aside that they were only selling one copy of the Mail for every four trains that stocked it, which suggests that this might even be a commercial decision dressed up as a virtuous statement.