The left won’t allow the Trumpification of British broadcasting

Fear of the populist right is driving Labour policy

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Tory shall speak unto Tory. GB News celebrates “diversity” by allowing two Tory MPs to interview the Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer

This week’s Economist carries a warning.  “Britons should watch GB News,” it declares. The channel will change our politics and culture, and become the place “where the Tory right organise and proselytise in the struggle for dominance”.

It’s a compelling piece of doomism. The Economist notes that GB News has already “torn a hole” in the regulatory system that once guaranteed, or  tried to guarantee, that broadcasters were politically neutral.  The regulators at Ofcom are no more willing or able to control it than they were willing or able to control Vladimir Putin’s propaganda channel RT when it operated in the UK.

GB News is the platform for Tories who “wish to set out the case for leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, or junking climate policies,” the Economist continues. It will do all it can to denounce the woke, immigrants, and with a little too much relish for comfort, Sadiq Khan, the Muslim mayor of London.

What is to stop it replaying the role of Fox News in the US and ensuring the triumph of the radical right?

A Labour government will stop it. That is the short answer the Economist cannot grasp. However learned Economist journalists are, they do not understand the British centre-left, a fault shared by many after 13 years (and counting) of Tories dominating our thoughts.  

A parliament with a Labour majority will simply not allow a British Fox News to take off, and that will be an end to the matter.

We are in a strange political moment.  On the one hand pretty much everyone accepts that the Conservative government is finished. On the other, they talk and write as if everything will stay the same once the Conservatives have gone.

If they understood the centre-left, they would grasp that Trump and Trumpism have the same place in its nightmares that Stalin and communism had for the 20^th centre right.  They (well, “we”, if I am being frank with you here) believe that fake news leads to populist strongmen exploiting demagogic fears and, in the case of Trump, threatening the democratic futures of their countries.