Rishi Sunak came to power in an “anti-democratic coup,” and is in hock to a shadowy “globalist elite”; mass migration is “replacing” British culture, and net zero is a “suicide note” – not the rantings of an internet troll, but a snapshot of views espoused by presenters on GB News across seven days last week.
The Guardian watched a week’s worth of output from the upstart rightwing channel in an attempt to understand the worldview at work – and how GB News gets away with sailing so close to the wind.
Since the broadcasting veteran Andrew Neil quit as chair three months after the channel’s launch, complaining that he was in “a minority of one” about its direction, GB News has increasingly planted its flag on the radical right of British politics.
With a monthly reach of 2.8 million viewers – twice that of its Murdoch rival TalkTV – and a place in the political “pool” in which major broadcasters share filming duties, GB News’s boss, Angelos Frangopoulos, told staff in a recent email: “We are firmly part of the mainstream media.”
But some of the views regularly encountered on the channel are anything but mainstream.
Last summer it secured an additional £60m in funding from founding investors Paul Marshall – an ex-Liberal Democrat who went on to be a vehement Brexiter – and Legatum Ventures Ltd, the Dubai-based financial firm behind the free market Legatum Institute thinktank.
Earlier this year Marshall wrote on the website UnHerd, which he also funded, that Prince Harry had fallen victim to “the woke creed”, which he claimed had also infected other institutions, including newsrooms.
Rejecting this “woke creed” seems a constant preoccupation at GB News, which Frangopoulos styles as “staunchly non-metropolitan”.
Much of its output is standard fare for a rolling news channel: last week there was Eurovision gossip and speculation about Phillip Schofield’s future and Harry’s car chase, punctuated by anodyne news updates.
But at the heart of its anti-establishment pitch is a string of presenters whose shows are shot through with their fiercely rightwing opinions.
These include the former Coast presenter Neil Oliver, the actor turned populist Laurence Fox and the ex-Brexit party leader Nigel Farage.
Less well-known presenters, including Patrick Christys in the 3pm weekday slot, and Mark Dolan at 10pm at weekends, are equally forthright. These TV shock jocks generally kick off each hour with a polemical monologue (or Moggologue, in the case of the former Brexit opportunities secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg).
On Friday’s edition of Calvin’s Common Sense Crusade, presented by the controversialist preacher Calvin Robinson, this involved calling for nuance over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – for which he suggested viewers look to Donald Trump.
Frequently the tone is arch, rather than earnest, and discussion panels often feature at least one leftwinger, albeit rarely a senior figure (perhaps in part because the channel’s reputation deters many from appearing). Viewers’ contributions also feature heavily as the channel builds a committed community, with emails read out live and frequent use of vox pops. (Bernard, a Mark Dolan viewer, wants to bring back corporal punishment and “the rope”.)
But the framing of sensitive topics by highly opinionated hosts sometimes appears to stretch the definition of “due impartiality”, as demanded by Ofcom.
GB News has already fallen foul of the broadcasters’ regulator twice – most recently, for an appearance by the Covid conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf on the Mark Steyn Show, in which she linked the vaccine to “mass murder”. Steyn has since left the channel.
The ruling was on the grounds of potential harm to viewers rather than due impartiality, however. Ofcom made clear that broadcasters are “free to transmit programmes that include controversial and challenging views” – so long as they don’t go completely unchallenged.
The regulator also declined to pursue complaints about an episode of Oliver’s show in February, despite conceding that he had made references to “a global elite controlling world politics” – an idea sometimes regarded as an antisemitic trope or at best a baseless conspiracy theory.
The regulator said it had “issued guidance to GB News to ensure they take care when discussing conspiracy theories, given the potential harm to audiences”.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews and the all-party parliamentary group against antisemitism had urged Ofcom to act. At the time, a GB News spokesperson said: “GB News abhors racism and hate in all its forms and would never allow it on the channel.”
The broadcast code enforced by Ofcom is clear that opinionated hosts are fine but “alternative viewpoints must be adequately represented”. It has not specified what exactly that means, but GB News insiders believe 10-15% representation for differing views is probably adequate.
A spokesperson for the channel said: “GB News chose to be an Ofcom-regulated channel and we take the Broadcast Code seriously. All staff receive Ofcom training when they join us to ensure they understand the code and the importance we place on complying with it.
“Ofcom is very clear that due impartiality does not mean a 50:50 balance. Instead, broadcasters are required to include a range of views. Diversity of opinion is what GB News is all about.”
Oliver gave little sign of having changed in last Saturday’s show, arguing that the fact that Pfizer’s Covid vaccine was not tested to assess whether it reduced transmission showed “the whole psy-ops, nudge unit campaign to shame people into taking the jabs and force them on the kids as well in the spirit of protecting others was a lie”.
As Full Fact has pointed out, the jab did reduce the likelihood of catching Covid in the first place, which seems relevant.
In the same monologue, Oliver claimed the government’s cooperation with the World Health Organization (WHO) in combating future pandemics amounted to letting “unelected, unaccountable non-entities living tax-free in Switzerland and protected by diplomatic immunity shut us in our homes”. For good measure, he alsodescribed net zero – cutting greenhouse gas emissions to nothing – as “a suicide note”.
The WHO also came under attack in Mark Dolan’s Sunday evening show, in which he used his “Take at 10” to argue that having “hopped in to bed with obese health guru Bill Gates to roll out vaccine tyranny”, the Geneva-based organisation now “think that four-year-olds should learn about sex, masturbation, the pleasure their own body can give them and reflect on what their gender might be”.
He appeared to be picking up on a Telegraph article, which cites a WHO document published back in 2010. In the subsequent panel discussion, the explorer Adrian Hayes said: “This is a corrupt organisation which is highly influenced by China, highly funded by Gates, and I think we should have nothing to do with it” – leaving the veteran journalist Nina Myskow to come to the WHO’s defence.
Watching GB News’s deliberately provocative shows back to back last week, gender is one of the themes that recur: others include the “war on motorists”; working from home (it’s “bankrupting Britain”) – and most of all, the menace of migration.
A Daily Telegraph story earlier this month, based on a projection by the rightwing thinktank the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), suggested annual net migration could hit 1 million, when the data is published later this month.
Jonathan Portes, a migration expert from UK in a Changing Europe, who took part in a robust discussion with Rees-Mogg on the issue on GB News last week, called this “worse than a zombie statistic”.
Describing the CPS analysis behind it, Portes said: “I teach a class on migration and if I were marking this from one of my students it would barely scrape a pass.”
Yet the number took on a life of its own, repeated across the media – and combined with the public call by the home secretary, Suella Braverman, for a cut to legal migration at the National Conservatism conference on Monday, it helped to supercharge the issue.
On GB News, it repeatedly formed part of the framing of discussions. On Laurence Fox’s show on Friday, which included an extended monologue on what he calls “racialism”, (apparently a hierarchy imposed by leftwingers which dictates “dark skin good, light skin bad”) Fox mimed his response to the 1 million figure by drawing out an imaginary pistol and pretending to shoot himself in the head.
He was then joined for a discussion about migration with Ben Habib, a former Brexit party MEP now of the Reform party – a rival to Fox’s own fringe party, Reclaim. Perhaps not surprisingly, the pair were in firm agreement.
“You cannot have a culture so unremittingly replaced. I feel like my culture is being replaced in front of my eyes,” Fox complained, before jokingly asking Habib: “In the interests of balance, are you and I just white supremacists?”
The idea of a “Great Replacement”, in which white Europeans are supplanted by people of colour (and specifically Muslims), has deep roots on the far right.
Christys also took aim at the cultural threat from migration in his Monday afternoon show. “All too often in my view it’s deemed socially unacceptable to say: ‘I’m really sorry, but I don’t want the place where I live and where I’ve grown up to become minority white British or even just minority British’ – but there is a stigma attached to that: is it racist to think that way?” His guest, Benjamin Loughnane, who works on migration for the Thatcherite thinktank the Bow Group, reassured him that it was not.
As well as its stable of professional provocateurs, GB News also has several Conservative MPs on its roster, for whom creating controversy on the airwaves is only a part-time job. The former cabinet minister Rees-Mogg has his own show. The deputy Tory chair Lee Anderson was recently added to the payroll on £100,000 a year.
Ofcom is investigating whether the 11 March edition of the weekend breakfast show from the chatty husband-and-wife team Esther McVey and Philip Davies, both Tory MPs, in which they interviewed the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, broke its rules requiring news and current affairs to be presented “with due impartiality”. GB News has not commented on the investigation.
Prof Tim Bale, whose recent book, The Conservative Party After Brexit, charts the Tories’ growing radicalisation, said the exposure offered to otherwise powerless backbenchers by social media, and channels like GB News, helped to promote their ideas, however wacky.
“I do think it has allowed people who probably we would never have heard of, and maybe ideas that we would never have given much time to, to breathe and to gain a profile,” he says.
GB News is as focused on expanding its online reach as growing viewers and listeners on its DAB radio channel, and lively moments are quickly packaged up for Twitter and TikTok.
As the week on GB News rolled on, it became clear that the idea of a mysterious “global elite” controlling British politics was not confined to Oliver’s anti-lockdown rants.
Dan Wootton told his viewers on Monday evening: “The Tories in 2023 have morphed into a big-state, high-tax, centre-left party seemingly driven by globalist forces and the snivel service blob,” adding that Sunak and his “authoritarian chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, were both put into office in an anti-democratic coup”.
When Belinda de Lucy, a guest and former Brexit party MEP, mused: “Who knows who facilitated his rise to power, but they were not Brexiteers,” Wootton chipped in: “It’s the globalist elite pulling his strings.”
Watching on, it was sometimes hard to credit that the Conservatives are in power, as the channel’s rightwing hosts and panellists lined up to attack Sunak. “For the last 30-40 years, there’s been a neoliberal Blairite consensus paradigm,” complained one young guest, Connor Tomlinson.
Governing parties tend to look tired as they reach the end of a long spell in power, and collapse into acrimony after election defeat – but if the narrative on GB News is anything to go by, the post-election disintegration of the Tory party has begun already.
A betrayal narrative is firmly in place – with Sunak as the “globalist” villain, and more rightwing figures, including Braverman, the defenders of true Conservatism.
Of course, Keir Starmer is another favourite baddie, regularly referred to as “slimy Starmer” or “slippery Starmer” – though it doesn’t stop Labour frontbenchers appearing on GB News, as part of the daily broadcast round.
Dolan claimed on his Sunday show that a Starmer government would be “the most autocratic in history”, based apparently on the Labour leader’s record during the pandemic.
Wootton hosted a panel discussion on which partnership was the most dysfunctional: Starmer’s with his deputy, Angela Rayner, or Phillip Schofield’s with Holly Willoughby.
It featured the former Tory minister Edwina Currie, the current Tory MP Andrea Jenkyns, and, for some reason, Kim Woodburn from the noughties TV hit How Clean Is Your House?
But the loudest howls of derision were reserved for Sunak and his cabinet. On Christys’ Tuesday show, one tagline across the screen read: “Grow a Pair, Rishi.”
Two years after launching as a scrappy upstart, the channel still at times retains the air of a low-budget start-up.
On Sunday’s breakfast show, Ellie Costello apologised for her squeaking chair. Her co-presenter, the ex-Sky anchor Stephen Dixon, joked that he had had to get on his hands and knees before the show and fix a chair in the makeup room.
Presenters regularly appear as guests on each other’s shows – with Wootton welcoming Farage to give his prescription for “saving Brexit”, for example. One of Rees-Mogg’s panels included his own sister.
But scrappy or not, GB News is giving a powerful platform to radical rightwingers; amplifying a ragbag of conspiracy theories, once confined to the wilder corners of the web – and, perhaps, laying the polemical groundwork for a very different Conservatism, when Sunak is swept away.
