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!
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”.
It is really astonishing how so many in the current Tory party cannot see the writing on the wall. That they've been tacking ever further right & ratcheting up racist rhetoric and policies and this has had *no impact whatsoever* on Labour's poll lead should be enough to make pause for thought.
A friend who is an old fashioned one nation Tory (quite a fan of Rory Stewart) finds Tory culture war posturing is tedious & irrelevant. He's not sure who he'll vote for in next GE, but it won't be the Tories!
I recall a media interview with a local man (early 60s, semi retired) in the Somerton & Frome constituency just before the byelection. The man said something along the lines of "We've got problems with local NHS services, roads and public transport and all the government does is talk about migrants". I suspect he didn't vote Tory...
You are of course right about GB "News" serving to make the Tories think that far more people share their views than actually do so. But for decades the Tory press (which has always supported the right of the party) has performed exactly the same function. Had Thatcher not believed that what the client press said about her government represented "public opinion", she might have lasted longer and not been defenestrated by those colleagues who could see beyond the hall of mirrors constructed by Fleet Street's finest.
That’s actually a positive feedback loop, not negative. Negative feedback tends to resist change. Positive feedback causes the howling sound when a microphone is too close to a loudspeaker.
I think it will take at least another bad election defeat after this year's before there's even a chance they start to look at themselves meaningfully. And that might not be enough. After 97 they went for the relatively sensible Hague. After the 01 defeat they went for the hopeless right winger Smith, followed by creepy right winger Howard. The membership is now even further to the right compared to then, and have more say on who's leader.
A surprisingly trivial topic for an essay over a period when Britain, without any Parliamentary discussion whatsoever, committed two foreign policy errors of historic magnitude:
First: Signing an agreement for "Mutual Security" with the criminal Ukrainian state, essentially committing Britain to hot war against Russia.
Second: Joining in the expanding ME war, on the side of the Israeli einsatzgruppen, by bombing Yemen. Laughably, in defense of "Navigation Rights", when Britain has no commercial shipping of any significance. The reality of course is that the UK falls into line with its US master, struggling vainly to achieve some sort of global relevance, the public school/Oxbridge crowd yearning for the days of Empire.
This, while the cost of living crisis spirals, infrastructure rots, excess deaths in the thousands, including of children, social breakdown across the nation and the failure of every organ of the British State.
But the unelected dandy boy Indian midget gets to play tough on the world stage. Pathetic.
GB News is commercially failing. Some days it's audience is so small that it fails to be recorded over zero. It is a loss leading long game vehicle to promote populist right wing views, mostly at present, parcelled up in bites for youtube. It's risk is that it's failing to meet the OFCOM requirements of a new channel, because it isn't a news channel at all and it doesn't offer a balance on opinions. It exists to promote biased opinion.
GB News makes a half hearted attempt at balance at the odd time, but the left wing or centrist foil gets little time to make any case and is talked over by the predominant view.
Perhaps it will take a change of government for OFCOM to grow a pair and enforce the rules by closing GB News?
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”.
It is really astonishing how so many in the current Tory party cannot see the writing on the wall. That they've been tacking ever further right & ratcheting up racist rhetoric and policies and this has had *no impact whatsoever* on Labour's poll lead should be enough to make pause for thought.
A friend who is an old fashioned one nation Tory (quite a fan of Rory Stewart) finds Tory culture war posturing is tedious & irrelevant. He's not sure who he'll vote for in next GE, but it won't be the Tories!
I recall a media interview with a local man (early 60s, semi retired) in the Somerton & Frome constituency just before the byelection. The man said something along the lines of "We've got problems with local NHS services, roads and public transport and all the government does is talk about migrants". I suspect he didn't vote Tory...
You are of course right about GB "News" serving to make the Tories think that far more people share their views than actually do so. But for decades the Tory press (which has always supported the right of the party) has performed exactly the same function. Had Thatcher not believed that what the client press said about her government represented "public opinion", she might have lasted longer and not been defenestrated by those colleagues who could see beyond the hall of mirrors constructed by Fleet Street's finest.
That’s actually a positive feedback loop, not negative. Negative feedback tends to resist change. Positive feedback causes the howling sound when a microphone is too close to a loudspeaker.
I think it will take at least another bad election defeat after this year's before there's even a chance they start to look at themselves meaningfully. And that might not be enough. After 97 they went for the relatively sensible Hague. After the 01 defeat they went for the hopeless right winger Smith, followed by creepy right winger Howard. The membership is now even further to the right compared to then, and have more say on who's leader.
A surprisingly trivial topic for an essay over a period when Britain, without any Parliamentary discussion whatsoever, committed two foreign policy errors of historic magnitude:
First: Signing an agreement for "Mutual Security" with the criminal Ukrainian state, essentially committing Britain to hot war against Russia.
Second: Joining in the expanding ME war, on the side of the Israeli einsatzgruppen, by bombing Yemen. Laughably, in defense of "Navigation Rights", when Britain has no commercial shipping of any significance. The reality of course is that the UK falls into line with its US master, struggling vainly to achieve some sort of global relevance, the public school/Oxbridge crowd yearning for the days of Empire.
This, while the cost of living crisis spirals, infrastructure rots, excess deaths in the thousands, including of children, social breakdown across the nation and the failure of every organ of the British State.
But the unelected dandy boy Indian midget gets to play tough on the world stage. Pathetic.
GB News is commercially failing. Some days it's audience is so small that it fails to be recorded over zero. It is a loss leading long game vehicle to promote populist right wing views, mostly at present, parcelled up in bites for youtube. It's risk is that it's failing to meet the OFCOM requirements of a new channel, because it isn't a news channel at all and it doesn't offer a balance on opinions. It exists to promote biased opinion.
GB News makes a half hearted attempt at balance at the odd time, but the left wing or centrist foil gets little time to make any case and is talked over by the predominant view.
Perhaps it will take a change of government for OFCOM to grow a pair and enforce the rules by closing GB News?
...could be *waiving* their appearance fees...!