Trump-style book censorship is spreading – just ask British librarians | Alison Hicks

UK schools are coming under pressure to remove titles from their shelves. It's not coming from the place you might think

For all its talk of free speech, the Trump administration seems remarkably comfortable with censorship. Earlier this year, children studying at Pentagon schools (serving US military families) were prevented from accessing libraries for a week while officials reviewed their shelves for titles that might be related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics". Trump's presidency has injected new energy into the book-banning movement that has been simmering for years on the US right. You might think that censoring school libraries would be totally unimaginable in Britain. You'd be wrong.

I worked as a librarian for 10 years, and now I teach on the library and information studies master's programme at UCL. After the pandemic, I began noticing signs of an eerily similar trend. It erupted in the spring of 2022, when a Catholic school in Croydon invited Simon James Green, a prominent gay children's author, to give a talk. The US anti-LGBT website Catholic Truth ran a campaign encouraging readers to contact the school and protest against the event (one reader said, somewhat implausibly, that Green's visit to the school was 100% as much of an issue as the ongoing war in Ukraine"). The commission responsible for the school released a statement suggesting the event should be cancelled, teachers went on strike, and the story reached the national press.

Alison Hicks is a lecturer in library and information studies at UCL