Danny Finkelstein in The Times on GB News:
Most of the time the channel features one right-wing person discussing right-wing opinions with another right-wing person for an audience consisting only of right-wing people.....
Slowly the channel’s schedule is being taken over by people making straight-to-YouTube videos on behalf of Ukip. There is a uniformity to the view expressed, which is that the world is going to hell in a handcart due to stupid modern ideas and the people in charge aren’t doing anything about it. The voices of common sense are portrayed as a small beleaguered minority who would struggle for a platform if it were not for brave GB News.
The main problem with all of this is that it is nonsense. Farage does not struggle for a platform, nor was he cruelly excluded from appearing on the BBC. Britain has a Conservative cabinet in which sit Jacob Rees-Mogg and Priti Patel. One or two people who oppose cancel culture have even managed to secure newspaper columns in leading outlets.
The challenge for the right is to ensure that the dominant institutions and ideas it supports — consumer capitalism, for instance, or immigration control, or Brexit — actually work, rather than pretend that the world is really being controlled by a charity boss who has put up a plaque about slavery or an academic writing a paper on critical race theory.
Powerful people commiserating with each other about how powerless they are isn’t much of a basis for a political movement. Or even, as it turns out, for a niche TV channel.
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