Pressure in the UK for “pro-Trump” censorship in public libraries

Brussels – While American academia, gripped by multimillion-dollar funding cuts and censorships on the publication of studies and informational materials, experiences a heavy crisis, in Europe, and particularly in the United Kingdom, according to some experts and representatives of the library industry, there are more and more requests to remove books from users’ enjoyment. 

“Although the situation here is not in any way that bad, censorship does occur, and there are some deeply troubling examples of library professionals losing their jobs and being attacked online for defending the intellectual freedom of their users,” said Louis Coiffait-Gunn, director of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), describing the British situation compared to the U.S. context. Ed Jewell, president of Libraries Connected, a foundation that represents and defends British public libraries, pointed out that the observations and experiences of its members suggest an increasing number of requests from individuals or small groups to remove books from the shelves.

Alison Hicks, an associate professor at UCL University in London, wondered about the link between the phenomenon of censorship in the U.S. and the U.K. by interviewing ten British librarians who have experienced difficulties with their own books. The small study revealed instances that suggest links, such as finding propaganda material belonging to an American action group left on a desk. Some respondents “reported being attacked by U.S. pressure groups on social media,” while one of them “was targeted directly by one of these groups,” Hicks pointed out. Nearly all of the attacks considered by the study, whether racist or homophobic annotations or the damaging of borrowed books, involved LGBT materials, in line with the findings of the Index on Censorship’s 2024 survey.

“It is certainly possible that the level of censorship we are seeing in the United States is influencing the debate here at home,” Jewell said. In any case, experts said they were concerned about the difficulty of quantifying the level of influence, given the lack of robust evidence on how widespread censorship is in the UK: “The government doesn’t count how many school or public libraries there are, let alone keep track of book bans,” said Coiffait-Gunn, warning of the need to safeguard free access to books, whatever their theme or subject, against a climate in which libraries may avoid certain titles for fear of bad publicity, threats or intimidation.