I almost never worry about things I got wrong, unless the error was so egregious that every day brings fresh evidence of how wrong I was; so, hello, GB News. The channel is almost three years old, and it’s just over three years since people started worrying about its provocations: should we be calling for an ad boycott, they wondered? My line was, relax, everyone, and my reasons were threefold.
First, GB News would be boring and nobody would watch it. The thing about reactionary views is that they’re nothing if not predictable. They can be incoherent, sure – and argue simultaneously that women belong in the kitchen, and that women’s rights are so fundamental that transgender rights are anathema – but you can always guess which way they’re going to go. Who’d ever want to watch that? I was right, to a degree: the viewing figures were laughable, initially, climbing year-on-year to “respectable fringe”. But I was wrong on a more fundamental level, in conceiving this as regular, commercial broadcasting, whose aim is to win viewers and turn a profit. Even as its viewing numbers have climbed, financially its losses have soared – this week, it posted an annual £42m loss, nearly 40% more than it lost last year. The one thing GB News doesn’t worry about is money.
Second, I thought Ofcom would come down harder on bias: the whole point of the channel was, if not to replicate Fox News, at least to speak to that imagined constituency, which would be an impossibility under the UK’s quite strict impartiality regulation. In fact, Ofcom often finds against GB News, not just the more florid events – the “clearly and unambiguously misogynistic” conversation between Dan Wootton and Laurence Fox, both of whom have since left the channel – but also in more workaday matters, such as the legitimacy of a panel discussion on last year’s budget in which only Conservative MPs (Esther McVey and Philip Davies) and their acolytes were involved. These rulings don’t seem to leave a trace of shame – the channel ploughs on, impassive, and the individuals leave for even fringier pastures, blasting the “Ofcommunists” (copyright Dan Wootton).
Third, I thought that Andrew Neil, the founding chairman, whatever his views, had too much respect for basic news values to helm an enterprise that peddled untruths, or was so biased as to amount to misinformation, or was technically shonky and intellectually thin. I was right about that, and Neil left after three months. But I was wrong to think that mattered: his departure, again, left no shadow of embarrassment.
My naivety was immense, but first, the stupidity: I wasn’t following the money. I was basically looking at a gold rush going, “that won’t take off, who wants to stand in a puddle all day waving a sieve?” Well, people who think there’s gold there, idiot. Backers of the parent company, All Perspectives Limited, including the hedge funder Paul Marshall, plough scores of millions into this loss-making enterprise every year. Is it a vanity project, or a means of donating massive amounts – £660,000 since its launch – to the insurgent wing of the Conservative party without going through the regular channels?
It does more than keep rebel Tory MPs solvent; it identifies them, musters them, supplies them with cheerleaders, amplifies them and renders them unignorable, both to the media as a whole and the scant remnants of sane Conservatism there are in parliament. It doesn’t matter how many viewers the channel has, because what are viewers for except, via advertising, money – and that’s the one thing GB News already has. It moves the discursive dial every day, using nothing more complicated than money. It is too rich to fail.
It’s salutary to compare the fortunes of rebel Tory MPs with those of the now-forgotten Labour discontents who went off to start Change UK. Similarities: Change UK was also unprepossessing, its press conferences were embarrassing, it was shifty about its programme (it said it was the amorphous “change”, it meant “get rid of Corbyn”). But those Change UK MPs were no worse than the GB News favourites; plus, at least when they did racism, it was by accident. It wasn’t because they were less skilled that their party sank without a trace. If someone had given it a TV channel and poured millions into it, it would still be with us today. To repurpose the over-quoted exchange between Fitzgerald and Hemingway, the hard right is different from you and me. It’s got more money.
The naivety, though, was the more important error: I thought television – yes, even rolling magazine-format current affairs – was about cultural appetite, determined by us, the ragtag army of British people. We don’t always agree, but when we do, we want to see Danny Dyer talking about David Cameron with his trotters up, and we want to name a boat Boaty McBoatface. We do not want to see Lee Anderson smearing Sadiq Khan. Not even quite committed Islamophobes want that; natural sense of fair play and all that.
But this kind of TV, this kind of politics, doesn’t care about your cultural appetite. Where was the appetite for any of its talking points, from small boats to trans rights to extremism poisoning public life? How is it possible, when you can’t reliably put dinner on the table, for food not to be your top priority? It isn’t possible, because it isn’t true; yet salience is being determined by financial elites, who have so strengthened Tory insurgents that now the party is nothing but insurgents, while the Labour party does nothing but respond to that insurgency.
It’s interesting that when any individual, whether it’s Anderson or Fox, flies the kite too far, they can be cut loose by the party or the channel without a second thought; the big names are dispensable, just grist to the project. Again, the hard right is different from you and me. It has a different agenda, of course; a different vision for society; different conceptions of loyalty and belonging; and different priorities, which is to say, upside down priorities in which the least salient get the most attention. But still, most of all, it’s got more money.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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