This week in Brexitland, January 18, 2024
Three reasons why GB News is ultimately bad for the Conservative Party
The advent of the channel GB News has, in my experience, mostly been viewed as a good thing by a lot of the British right. Finally, we have a voice! A channel that is dedicated to our worldview, with the country not having to only rely on the BBC, Sky and all of those other “left-wing” outlets to carry the news of the day! Glory!
My riposte to this is that I think GB News has ultimately been bad for the Conservative Party in ways that are going to get even worse as we get closer to the general election - and then worse again still after the general election has come and gone. There are several ways in which I believe this to be the case, these being the three main ones:et
It has made the Tories think that the GB News audience is the majority of Britain
Something which has hampered conservative thinking in Britain massively since the 2016 referendum, getting worse with every year that has followed, is what I’ll call here “the Brexit delusion” (with full nods to how Brexiters use this term, even as I invert it). This is the idea that because 52% of the country voted to leave the EU in 2016, that means that 52% of the country agree with all of the ideas held by the hard right Brexiters who roam SW1A. 2016 made them become convinced that they have a god given right to govern the country their way because, hey, when finally given a “real” vote (which in their minds, the 2016 referendum was the only example of, really) they plumped for their politics, supposedly.
The GB News effect combined with the Brexit delusion has created a bubble around the Conservative party in which they are convinced their current mode of travel is what most average voters want. You would have thought the Liz Truss experience, the polls crashing horrifically for them as a result and then, the party’s numbers not recovering at all for any real length of time since autumn 2022, would have given them pause for thought. Yet no - many Tories and those in their ecosphere are positive the populist GB News stuff hasn’t gone far enough yet and are sure that if the party embraced that stuff even more, their vote share would recover.
Brexit is the root of this thinking. But the establishment of GB News cemented it, deepened it, made it far worse and more damaging for the Conservative party.
The channel has acted as a paycheque for Tory MPs, moving the centre of gravity of the party even further rightward than would otherwise have been the case after Brexit as a result of the financial incentives involved
There are four serving Conservative MPs who host their own programmes on GB News: Jacob Rees-Mogg, Lee Anderson, Esther McVey and Philip Davies, although the latter two should be slightly caveated as they co-host a show together (as well as being husband and wife). Boris Johnson is set to host his own show and Michael Portillo, another former Tory MP, presents a culture programme on the channel.
The channel also has a lot of Tory MPs on as guests, giving those MPs a direct way of reaching out to the type of people who run and/or are active in Conservative associations. They might also be paid for their appearances - GB News tends to remunerate guests reasonably handsomely, although the Tory MPs involved could be waiving their appearance fees, of course.
What this has done is set up a clear economic incentive for Conservative MPs scared about losing their seats to move closer to the GB News mode of thinking - or at least, pretend they have - as a career backup scheme. This is like a negative feedback loop for the Tories: the more Tory MPs think they are going to lose their seats at the next election, the more they try and pitch themselves to GB News for a job someday, the more Tory MPs do this, the more the Tories look out of touch, the more they look out of touch, the worse the polls get, the worse the polls get, the more Tory MPs think they are going to lose their seats at the next election….
It has radicalised the right even further than would have otherwise been the case, helping to partially split the right-wing vote in Britain again
Because the most watched shows on GB News are also the most right-leaning ones - Farage’s programme and Neil Oliver’s immediately spring to mind in this regard - it has convinced many in the Conservative party that these ideas are not only mainstream, they are widely popular amongst the electorate. Even in the face of polling continually telling them the opposite, they believe that chasing the GB News vote is the way to redemption.
GB News has been a real disruptor in the Tory ecosphere; something that has pulled the Conservative party further and further away from its roots, which is in being a relatively non-ideological (at least in theory) party that does things in the name of rationality. It has transformed them into a passionately ideological party, devoted to things most of Britain either doesn’t care about or actively despises. And as mentioned near the top, they are set to be destroyed by it all and the data available tells them again and again and again and again and again that this is precisely what is going to happen. And yet, they convince themselves, somehow, that it’s all going to work out in the end.
Why? I believe that GB News has to carry a large portion of the can for this one. The channel has given voice to the most negative elements within the British right and further, somehow convinced the Conservative party that its future lies in pleasing the people the channel sets out to make their audience, even though the channel’s ratings overall have been less than stellar, to say the least. The Tories would do well after the bruising general election defeat that’s becoming inevitable to turn away from what GB News has to offer, or if not, at least try and change it from inside of the channel into something that isn’t actively a tumour on the heart of the Conservative party.
That’s very probably not what they are going to do. Instead, I reckon the Tories will embrace the cancer within ever harder. And what that does to their future, I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.
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A mainly two party system with both parties recently going to their ideological extremes until it inevitably crashes and burns is what has been happening. It happened to Labour first.
When New Labour won their second enormous victory in 2001, I thought they must never want to go back to effectively Old Labour which had been losing since 1950, with just a few marginal exceptions in the late 60's and 70's where Wilson then Callaghan struggled against his own unruly party, struggled to get legislation through and against hyper inflation and large numbers of strikes. This set up the public to demand different and by god they got that and worse with Thatcher, with a home grown deep monetarist recession disaster in the early 80's and another that decade.
So after Brown lost and the coalition arrived, Labour didn't think how can we build on the New Labour success and move on past the worldwide financial crisis? Instead, the labour majority, dominated by trade union leaders thought how far can we push this leftwards, not with electability anywhere in sight. So they rejected a top moderate, David Milliband with strong leadership abilities and instead plumped for his left wing little brother. Ed Milliband, with a charisma bypass and his left wing policies were never going to win a British general election outside of the end of a major war. He couldn't even prevail over a bacon roll and his loss in 2015 set the UK up for it's 1st dose of right wing populist success shortly after, in leaving the EU.
As if Labour couldn't have made things worse, they decided to do their best. They allowed £3 new members to vote for the new leader. Every trotskyist, ex communist, anarchist and foiled wannabe revolutionary out there scraped their £3 together and voted for the Corbyn outsider as leader. There were suddenly half a million of them, greatly outnumbering the moderates and soft left factions. It was Michael Foot reborn, resurrecting the longest suicide note in history, which was Labour's 1983 hard left manifesto.
The useless, hapless Corbyn was brexit's little helper who believed in the Benn logic that the EEC was a capitalist club and so the hard right's witless dupe. We were never going to get a left wing worker paradise brexit, but they pushed it over the 2% line. Unelectable, reading out emails at PMQ's, unable to lead a broad party, carry an interview or debate, hopeless on detail and like a naughty, ill informed child over jewish issues, Corbyn retreated to campaigning. But only mainly with his hand picked trot club audiences, where he used the same speech most of the time.
Nigel Farage had been carrying out his part of the plan to short the pound during the Ref. vote, in the biggest shorting event in history, making tens of millions each to his trader mates, the next day Corbyn punched the air on camera. This was a left wing power salute that ignored the delicate and uncertain legal position for the UK and was against the beliefs of 90% of the Labour Party. The stupid clot called for the immediate signing of article 50 which would have hemmed in the UK's already weak position.
The hard left Corbyn had lost to a unique open goal in 2017, when May was unable to campaign, the Tories had an unpopular, uncosted manifesto, offering the wealthy tax concessions on inheritances but hammering the estates of ordinary people to finance social care. He also lost in 2019, with the worst Labour performance since the '30's. It would have been far worse for Labour if Farage, as a right wing Tory vote magnet had stood down in all seats, instead of just the Tory facing half of them.
What is astonishing is how rapidly Starmer has turned around the upended Labour carthorse. I don't believe the Tories will find the leader or discipline among it's many factions or depleted number of MP's from what is coming, for them to recover any time soon. It will be great to see the Tories destroyed, even into 3rd place. I will let off a box of rockets on the night. But be careful what you wish for. Farage is playing the long game, like a lizard, stealthily eyeing his prey - us!
The vote for Brexit was 52% of those that did vote. That translates to 37% of a gerrymandered electorate. In a legally binding referendum that would not have been sufficient for permanent constitutional change. Brexit has never been “the will of the people”.