GB Nutters
Five years of our favourite broadcaster...
A lot of attention has been paid – justifiably – to Christopher Harborne’s £5 million “gift” to Nigel Farage in 2024, which miraculously coincided with his return to frontline politics.
But the focus on Harborne has distracted from Farage’s other major patron, GB News, and the way it has sprayed his ideas across our airwaves.
GB News is five years old next weekend, and Farage has been there since its infancy. Hiring Farage in July 2021 was the channel’s attempt at a rescue mission after almost detonating on launch.
The early weeks of GB News were broadly unwatchable – not due to the pernicious politics (though that didn’t help) but the technical gaffes, which were frequent and hilarious. Andrew Neil, red-tinted at the best of times, turned an alarming shade of claret as his autocue failed – his studio a patchwork of cardboard and rubber bands.
Neil, briefly the broadcaster’s chair and lead presenter, quit soon after – fleeing back to the south of France.
A video I recorded about GB News five years ago (please forgive the beard).
Farage saved GB News, and the favour has been repaid – both financially and politically. Since becoming an MP, the channel has been his largest income source – earning him over £700,000, comfortably more than his £94,000 a year parliamentary salary. Lee Anderson, now Reform’s chair, has also collected £300,000.
And, over the past five years, GB News has morphed into Reform TV. While the platform hired a roster of Tory MPs during its early days, only one now remains – Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has to share his slot with Reform politician and failed by-election candidate Matthew Goodwin.
As Neil told The New World in March, when the newspaper audited GB News’ output: “Just as Fox basically became the channel of Donald Trump, it’s clear they have turned GB News into the Reform channel. I think they see themselves as in the vanguard of the Reform movement”.
Alan Rusbridger, The New World’s editor-at-large, asked a panel of eminent journalists and academics to make the ultimate sacrifice and sit through hours of GB News’ coverage. One reviewer, asked to watch Farage’s evening show, said: “This programme is Farage propaganda dressed up as a panel show.”
From June 2021 to May 2025, GB News lost £131 million – spending roughly £180 million in total.
That’s a huge outlay, largely dedicated to promoting Farage and Reform, serving up a sprinkling of left-wing dissenters as cannon-fodder to maintain the illusion of conforming to Ofcom rules.
Even Harborne’s huge donations to Reform – which hit a record £12 million last year – pale in comparison to the amount shelled out by GB News.
The broadcaster is one continuous advert for Farage’s political project and the conspiratorial grievances that underpin it.
GB News attacks climate science (I can only assume their studios are air-conditioned) with disturbing regularity.
On 10 March, GB News presenter Ben Leo even said he would be happy to see the government “turn the British countryside into Swiss cheese” by restarting fracking for shale gas.
On 14 April 2024, “journalist” Jasmine Birtles was invited onto the channel to spout her opinion that climate policy represents a “depopulation agenda” that seeks to “remove seven and a half billion people from the world”. Ofcom, as usual, refused to investigate this blatant, egregious falsehood.
Like a decent proportion of his fellow GB News presenters, Farage is a climate science denier. He has even claimed it’s “nuts” for CO2 to be considered a pollutant.
Elsewhere, GB News has aired claims that the Covid vaccine is causing “turbo cancer”, and that the rollout of the jab was equivalent to “mass murder” – comparable to the actions of “doctors in pre-Nazi Germany”.
Reform’s claims have never stretched this far, but the party’s former chair David Bull did suggest that an anti-vaxx crank helped to draft its health policy. Meanwhile, Farage has claimed that the Covid jab is not a vaccination because it requires a seasonal top-up (just like lots of other vaccines).
GB News has also been a leading source of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim diatribes – feeding the far-right frenzy that is now pushing for the mass deportation of legally-settled migrants from the UK.
Westminster has normalised GB News as a counterpart to the right-wing newspapers that spew out similar vexatious garbage. Former Ofcom chair Michael Grade – who was ostensibly in charge of regulating the broadcaster – even recently suggested that GB News’ critics were simply jealous of its success. If £131 million in losses is judged by Grade to be a success, I’d hate to see the state of his bank account.
Yet GB News is anything but normal. It has contributed significantly to the poisoning of British politics, the radicalisation of the right, and the growing distrust of science and reason among the public. It doesn’t represent the “silent majority”, as it proudly claims. Rather, it’s a soapbox constructed by sociopathic billionaires to distract people from the true causes of our national ills: predatory corporate elites and their political allies.
And, having accepted hundreds of thousands of quid from GB News – and millions more from crypto oligarchs – Nigel Farage sits very firmly in that bracket.
Never understood how this crap gets away with calling itself ‘news’ - half of our regulators aren’t doing their proper job (like Ofwat). Ofcom needs a serious rethink
I was persuaded to watch GB News, I tried 3 times and at different times of the day in order to get a scope of what they produce - beyond appalling in content and contribution was my conclusion!