Life under a Labour government should have been easy for GB News. It seemed a brilliant opportunity for the channel, which leans to the populist right – it’s easier to play opposition when the “other” side is in power. Already, though, it is choosing to play a dangerous game.
The populist instincts of Nigel Farage – now a working MP but still moonlighting three nights a week as a host on an Ofcom-regulated channel – have aligned with those of other GB News staff and guests to produce a bizarre response to violent riots.
Farage, GB News, and right wing influencers have decided their audiences want to be told that these violent thugs – who have assaulted police, threatened innocent mosque-goers, burned out a Citizens’ Advice Bureau, a library and more – are somehow representatives of “decent” people with “legitimate” concerns.
This is a high-wire act in more ways than one. Being a cheerleader for the actions of violent mobs can (deservedly) backfire, with career and perhaps even legal consequences.
Regulators may take a dim view on being the channel of the violent far-right. And in reality, very few GB News viewers – or Reform UK voters – will actually be on the side of street thugs. Vocal online minorities can give pundits a very strange idea as to what their actual supporters really want.
But then GB News has always been something of a high-wire act. It was a bid to launch a UK version of Fox News – which is both hugely influential on US right wing politics while also being wildly profitable for its owners.
Yet it is launching decades later than Fox News, when linear television is already in terminal decline. UK TV channels make their money differently from their US counterparts (and make much less). And UK broadcasters face much stricter regulations over their output than US ones – especially when it comes to political partisanship.
GB News’s backers seem not to be in it for huge profits – it made just £6.7m in revenue but lost more than £42m in its latest accounts – but whether they are seeking to cosy up to the establishment right or else fire a populist movement remains a puzzle.
Paul Marshall, the biggest single investor in GB News, is one such player in this game. He is a devout Christian and has become an avowed culture warrior, but as much as anything else he wants to be a respected figure in the mainstream right elite. He was among the bidders for the Telegraph and is now favourite to be the new owner of the Spectator.
Generally, someone like Marshall would prefer their existing outlets not to stir up controversy during sensitive times of key deals – especially given UK rules on “fit and proper” media ownership. But if GB News is concerned about that, they have strange ways of showing it: a particular low was a “poll” asking “Are the left elite to blame for the violence in Southport as they continue to smear and ignore angry communities?”, but its presenters have routinely been saying similar.
Speaking of small mobs of violent thugs around the country, presenter Darren Grimes noted “Sir Keir Starmer has exacerbated, not controlled, public anger”, while GB News pundit Carole Malone claimed Starmer had called “great swathes of decent, law-abiding people… far right thugs”. This had not happened.
Host Michelle Dewberry told viewers: “The second that white working-class Britons have the audacity to take to the streets about something they’re passionate about, boom – ‘we’re going to be tough on you’.” Former MP Neil Hamilton popped up to claim that riots were inevitable “if you impose some kind of laboratory experiment with the British people by imposing mass immigration upon them” and that “this is merely I think a foretaste of what is to come if elites don’t wake up”
And on a show presented by the conspiracy theory enthusiast Neil Oliver, guest Cameron MacGregor claimed that “demographic replacement (has) reprioritised the interest of immigrants at the expense of local native-born populations” and that “young men who’ve been villainised by institutions have been forced out of mainstream society and into a kind of parallel society” where they were recognising “the extent of damage that’s been done to the west.”
All of this raises the stakes: if an Ofcom-regulated body is at best acting as an apologist for street violence and at worst is stoking the flames, there will be calls for sanctions – even if the regulator insists GB News can continue to have its key broadcasters making outlandish, inaccurate and divisive claims as long as they are challenged. Speaking off the record, those within Ofcom say the existing rules had never envisioned the existence of a channel like GB News.
Part of Ofcom’s caution under the last government was knowing that ministers would side with GB News, but even under Labour, action under the existing rules will be limited. That then passes the buck to culture secretary Lisa Nandy, who faces balancing free expression and GB News’s desire to scream “persecution” against allowing inflammation of violence with impunity.
The best outcome for the government is that this problem, at least, solves itself. Many GB News watchers, like many Reform UK voters, define themselves as “law and order” voters – and hate this kind of rioting as much as the rest of us. If Farage and GB News keep doubling down, they will rapidly lose some of the crowd they’ve built and be left only with the extreme fringes. What is more likely is they’ll cut and run, pretending they never played the dangerous apologia game they’re now engaged in.
GB News may also soon outgrow the need for an actual television channel and the regulation that comes with it. Linear TV is a lot of cost for not many viewers – it is instead about credibility while you build an audience. Making GB News disappear isn’t as easy as banning it from cable television.
Farage and his fellow shock jocks have backed themselves into an unpopular and indefensible corner, one in which they could easily share in the blame for subsequent riots.
If their better judgment does not stop them, something else – an investor, a regulator, the government, or their audience – surely will.
