How to do a Boycott (with example: The Scottish Daily Express)

The background

There is an ongoing employment tribunal in Fife, Scotland, over Dr Upton, a trans woman, being in female changing rooms. You can read about it here and here and here. Note that Dr Upton and NHS Fife were following the law. Also note that, due to a previous ruling that beliefs are protected, and that gender critical views are a belief, the judge ruled that Dr Upton could be referred to by male pronouns by Sandra Peggie.

The situation

The Scottish Daily Express published an article where they explained why they are calling Dr Upton, a trans woman, a man. We’re not linking to that transphobic shitrag, so you can google it if you have to. Their argument comes down to 1) Dr Upton doesn’t have a Gender Recognition Certificate to say she legally isn’t a man and 2) this is about a court case and it’s important to be accurate.

History of Boycotting Newspapers in the UK

A newspaper boycott has been carried out with incredible success in the UK before. Four days after the Hillsborough disaster, The Sun published a story containing a number of falsehoods that alleged Liverpool supporters were responsible, that they assaulted and pissed on police officers, and that they threatened to rape dead victims. This led to organised campaigns like Total Eclipse of the Sun and Shun the Sun, and the papers circulation dropped 55,000 per day. Sun reporters have been denied access at Liverpool and Everton grounds, and it’s estimated to have cost the Sun owners £15 million per month since the disaster in 1989.

Spreading a Boycott

A boycott isn’t much use when it’s just one person. We don’t even buy the shitrag anyway, so they won’t notice if we continue not to buy it.

Being honest, we’ve never organised a boycott before. We’ve taken part in several, and we were closely involved with a campaign to stop a university having links to corporations that invested in the global arms trade a few years ago. Right now, we’re boycotting US products, or product rather since the only US thing we bought was Fanta. We’re also boycotting McDonalds.

Anyway, we know the theory behind organising a boycott, but this is a learning experience for all of us. Alright, so, boycott 101. First step, the target. We have that, it’s the Scottish Daily Express. 

You presumably have your own target.

Second step, which you can call motivation, reason, or message. Why are we boycotting the SDE? Because Ben Borland is a transphobe. Also, because they breached Clause 12 of the IPSO code.

You need to know the reason you are organising a boycott. In order to get other people to go along with it, you need a solid message you can put out. You’re boycotting McDonald’s because they were supporting genocide in Palestine. You’re boycotting BP because fossil fuels are bad for the environment.

You also need to check if the organisation you are boycotting is in an industry has a regulatory body. Can you complain to the advertising standards agency or the FDA?

Tangent: ipso-whatso?

IPSO is the independent regulator for the UK print and digital news agencies. You wouldn’t think we had one in the UK with the sheer amount of shit the press puts out, but we do. IPSO has 16 clauses you can complain about:

Accuracy
Privacy
Harassment
Intrusion into Grief and Shock
Reporting suicide
Children
Children in sex cases
Hospitals
Reporting of crime
Clandestine devices and subterfuge
Discrimination
Financial Journalism
Witness payments in criminal trials
Payments to criminals

IPSO has previously stated that an entire group of people cannot be harassed, so they refuse to target transphobia under the guise of harassment. However, this isn’t about all trans people, it’s about Dr Beth Upton. The Scottish Daily Express has clearly breached IPSO rules on discrimination, and there’s arguments that can be made to it having breached the clauses on harassment and accuracy.

If the IPSO code is breached, they have a few things they can do. It could result in the publication of a correction, apology, follow-up piece, or a letter from you. It could result in a private apology from the editor, or an undertaking as to future conduct from the newspaper. The publication’s records could be annotated to ensure the “mistake” doesn’t happen again.

In other words, you don’t get much out of complaining. That’s fine, because a complaint to a regulatory body is only part of the whole.

Not Just a Boycott

A boycott alone isn’t enough. We reported the newspaper to IPSO, and we emailed the editor. Here is a framework email if you wish to do the same. 

I wish to express my disgust at the way in which your newspaper has been referring to Dr Upton, and in particular your flimsy justification of transphobic rhetoric behind a GRC.
The use of male pronouns for Dr Upton breaches Clause 12 of the IPSO Code. To cite verbatim, ‘the press must avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual’s race, colour, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or to any physical or mental illness or disability.’ It may also violate the clauses on accuracy and harassment.
I have reported this to IPSO and am calling on you to print and an apology and refer to Dr Upton by the appropriate pronouns: she/her.

Express your unhappiness, and tell them why you are unhappy.
If their content breaches regulations, point this out.
State the change you wish to see.

Gathering Support

The Scottish Daily Express costs £1.70. That means my boycott would cost the paper £620.50 per year. They’re not going to notice that. A boycott has to hurt an organisation before they take notice. To do that, a boycott must have a large number of people involved. If 1000 people boycott the Scottish Daily Express, that’s £620,500. If 10,000 boycott, that’s £6,205,000. Only three papers in Scotland report their circulation, and the Scottish Daily Express isn’t one of them. However, the largest papers now have circulation under 100,000. So a 10,000 person boycott would hurt.

In order to increase your boycott from one person to a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand, you need support from individuals and organisations. The first stage here is identifying those individuals and organisations. You do this using two parameters, geography and topicality.

Geography is fairly easy. The Scottish Daily Express is a Scottish newspaper that was transphobic to a Scottish trans woman and we’re in Scotland. Therefore we want Scottish people and organisations, or at least UK ones. Your geography should be easy to work out, too.

Topicality comes back to the message. Our topic is transphobia, we want people and orgs that support trans rights. Your topic could be veganism and you want animal right orgs, or it could be genocide in Palestine, and you want orgs that are against Palestinian genocide.

Once you identify organisations and people, you reach out to them. Here’s a sample email:

I am sure you were as horrified by the Scottish Daily Express’s avowed intent to misgender trans people as I was. I have emailed their editor to tell him strongly and in no uncertain terms how I feel and I have submitted a complaint to IPSO. However, I feel this not a strong enough protest against what they have done.
As such, I have started a boycott campaign, which I have titled #ExpressTransphobia. The boycott calls for a front page apology to Dr Upton, and a commitment to refer to trans people as the gender they are now.
If you feel like this is something you could support, I would welcome any assistance from you.

It’s pretty obvious, but explaining it:
State immediately the reason you are emailing them. Follow this with a quick recap of the things you have done so far.
Explain the boycott, and include the message you came up with earlier. Who are you boycotting, why are you boycotting them, and what result are you aiming for?
Ask for support, but leave the type of support up to them.

Some people disagree with the last point. They think you should ask for exactly what you want, like reskeets, or to get your hashtag trending. Sometimes when you ask for something, you get what you ask for, even if the person you ask would have give you more (like you ask for £1 and you get £1 but they would have given you £10). Sometimes you ask for something you can’t get and you get nothing (like you ask for £10 and they give you £0 but they would have given you £5 if you’d asked for that). To be clear, this isn’t about asking these people and organisations for money, it just makes a good example. Anyway, we prefer open asks as it leaves them to decide what to offer.

Along with asking for support, you can have a social media campaign, you can set up a website dedicated to the boycott, you can issue press releases, though since we’re boycotting the press that might be awkward. Maybe some of the other papers would run it? Anyway, point is, spread the news.

The Most Important Part of a Boycott

This is an exercise in how you can run a boycott. Boycotting the express won’t actually work though, unfortunately. The truth is, none of us read that shitrag. You can search for Scottish Daily Express reader demographics online, and you’ll find that the readers are mostly over 50, mostly male, and since this is Scotland we can guarantee mostly white (Scotland is mostly white). The Scottish Daily Express has supported the Tories in every election since WWII (although this might be changing as the editor, Ben Borland, is so far right he thinks the Tories are left wing). The readers aren’t going to boycott the paper for being transphobic, unfortunately, because the readers probably agree.

The most important part of a boycott is that you have to be a customer. You are removing your custom. We can’t remove our custom when we never bought that shitrag to start with.