Presumably a number of JCRs were yesterday rushing down to newsagents to re-subscribe to The Sun, thinking Page 3 was no more, when The Sun announced it was staying. Whatever would have replaced Page 3 it would have been one more page that The Sun could fill with the rest of their vicious poison, and applauding it for dropping one of its least offensive pages would have been the political equivalent of playing ‘Blurred Lines’ because Robin Thicke had agreed to skip the first verse.
Far from being a misogynistic blip in an otherwise well-meaning and liberal publication, Page 3 is by far one of the least pernicious and toxic parts of that paper and we should focus on the whole of its politics, which have always been incredibly reactionary.
A friend of mine and a disabled people’s rights campaigner put it quite well, saying, “I don’t want to scrap Page 3, I want to burn every copy of The Sun that tells me I’m a scrounging waster who lies to get her sick pay handouts from the government, I want to burn every copy of The Sun that tells my immigrant friends that they’re ruining the country and don’t deserve basic human rights.”
This is the paper that smeared the victims of Hillsborough, libelling the dead with accusations of urinating on other supporters. This is the paper that attacked a transgender parliamentary candidate, writing, “being blind, how did she know she was the wrong sex”. This is the paper that runs endless stories about disabled people ‘scrounging’ the social security that is their right. The campaign for students’ unions to boycott The Sun purely on the basis of Page Three always had this problem: after ‘victory’, it would still be full of misogyny, victim-blaming, lies and anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Look out your window at a country with over a million people using foodbanks, two million people having had their benefits stopped by a draconian sanctions regime, and one in five people, over thirteen million, living in poverty. This is the austerity Britain moulded by papers like The Sun.
Let’s not pretend that the absence of Page Three would have changed The Sun in the slightest. It’s a reactionary publication and the JCRs like Teddy Hall which do without The Sun are better off without its poison polluting our spaces.
