They don’t have a liberal stance. They will cover some issues of importance to liberals, but they’ve always tried to being in conflict with the party of government. The last time they got into conflict - and this wasn’t “being liberal” so much as wanting to show a diverse set of opinions - was during the Thatcher administration, and they had conservatives like Rees Mogg appointed to their board as a result.
On top of which, British “liberalism” is pretty sick at the moment when it comes to LGBT rights. Even the Guardian, which was a liberal newspaper at one point, has no problem posting transphobic material from their regular columnists or overblowing anti-trans “scandals”. They’ve had trouble keeping staff (one example) because they didn’t want to be associated with the transphobia of the UK part of the group.
Sadly in UK transphobia seems to be pretty common in liberals and liberal institutions. I think that is because in UK the idea to connect transphobia with “womens rights” was really successful and this results in otherwise really liberal / left leaning / feminist individuals & groups to be actively anti-trans. As far as i know even otherwise trust worthy news papers like the guardian plattform anti trans talking points.
Thank you for that, most interesting.
It’s odd given their usually quite liberal stance… I wonder if there some old conservatism creeping in with the Tories being in power for so long…?
They don’t have a liberal stance. They will cover some issues of importance to liberals, but they’ve always tried to being in conflict with the party of government. The last time they got into conflict - and this wasn’t “being liberal” so much as wanting to show a diverse set of opinions - was during the Thatcher administration, and they had conservatives like Rees Mogg appointed to their board as a result.
On top of which, British “liberalism” is pretty sick at the moment when it comes to LGBT rights. Even the Guardian, which was a liberal newspaper at one point, has no problem posting transphobic material from their regular columnists or overblowing anti-trans “scandals”. They’ve had trouble keeping staff (one example) because they didn’t want to be associated with the transphobia of the UK part of the group.
Sadly in UK transphobia seems to be pretty common in liberals and liberal institutions. I think that is because in UK the idea to connect transphobia with “womens rights” was really successful and this results in otherwise really liberal / left leaning / feminist individuals & groups to be actively anti-trans. As far as i know even otherwise trust worthy news papers like the guardian plattform anti trans talking points.