 Sunday night was the launch of GB News. Now, this is the hedge fund backed right wing news outlet fronted by Andrew Neil, which intends to stoke a culture war and drag the UK's center ground ever further to the right. The channel launched with a monologue from Andrew Neil. He railed against cancel culture and metropolitan mindsets, but also reassured viewers that despite having an agenda, GB News would not be purveyors of fake news. We'll be more concerned with what will raise prosperity and create jobs in our left behind towns than what some overprivileged and ahistoric students decide to hang on their walls in Oxford. Social mobility and a fair chance in life for all will matter more to us than the wasteland to know where there is identity politics. And if you want fake news, lies, disinformation, distortion of the facts, conspiracy theories, then GB News is not for you. Because in everything we do, we will be guided by the highest journalistic standards written into the contracts of everybody who works here at GB News. Robust even disputatious debate, of course. A much wider variety of voices than you currently hear in broadcasting, certainly. But never the promotion of matters we know to be untrue or the pushing of facts that are convenient to a viewpoint that may be convenient, but not properly checked. Now, for anyone who watched any of GB News last night, I don't recommend it, by the way. It is laughable, he suggested. We're going to talk about prosperity, not identity, because there's been almost a constant bar underneath whoever is hosting it, saying players taking their knees are okay to boo. The idea they don't care about that, they're there to talk about prosperity, clearly a lie, frankly. What I do want to focus on though, because I think this is more politically significant, is what Andrew Neil was saying there about fake news. He's essentially saying, look, we might be right-wing, but we're not going to be a UK version of Fox News because we're not going to spread conspiracy theories. We're not going to spread an anti-science agenda where we say all the experts are wrong. Don't believe that COVID's a big deal. For example, that's clearly the main one at the moment that's coming from Fox News. You'd also associate climate denial, that kind of thing. We're a Fox News type outlet. That was reassuring to hear the problem. The argument fell apart as soon as Andrew Neil's first show ended because he was replaced by Dan Wharton. He has a nightly show on at 9 p.m. He was recently hired from Talk Radio and The Sun, and in his opening monologue, he railed against science and spread unevidenced conspiracy theories. Tragically, the doomsday scientists and public health officials have taken control. They are addicted to the power and the government has satisfied its 15-month-long never-ending scare campaign has suitably terrified the public into supporting lockdowns. But if we don't fight back against this madness, some of the damage, I think, will be irreversible. Tomorrow night, in an address to the nation, Boris will likely try and tell us it will be just another four weeks as if there'll be the next variant, the next scare story, more intense lobbying by paranoid public health officials repeated ad nauseam by the BBC and ITV, unchallenged. Why don't they report on the good news? The fact 95% of over 65s, the vulnerable age group now have COVID antibodies. The fact that while infections, yes, are fast-rising, deaths are not, because the vaccine program has worked. Why not look to Florida or Texas or Sweden where a different approach that doesn't keep large parts of the economy lockdown has worked? Do you remember what Andrew Neil said? I showed you it quite recently. He said, look, we're not going to misrepresent the facts. We are going to hold ourselves to very high journalistic standards. The next person on the show is their star evening host talking about doomsday scientists, paranoid public health officials. He's saying they've all taken control and they're addicted to power. This is kind of classic conspiracy theory territory. What's the evidence that Chris Whitty and Patrick Ballant are addicted to power and obsessed with lockdowns? If you hear them talking, that doesn't seem to be what they suggest. In fact, they say, you know, we can't have zero COVID. We're going to have to accept this being an endemic disease, but we're going to need this extra four weeks just to vaccinate a few more people. They aren't really extremists. By the way, I'm not trying to say anyone in favor of the zero COVID strategy is an extremist. I think that's also a very legitimate position to take. What has he said that's categorically wrong there other than just being quite distasteful? He says, Sweden worked. He says, we shouldn't have lockdowns. Sweden worked. Now, what he didn't mention is Sweden has a far worse death toll than its neighbors. So Sweden has three times as many deaths per capita as Denmark and 10 times as many as Finland and Norway. And it also had a bigger economic hit. So its policy failed on all terms, which is why they ultimately abandoned it. That was someone picking. It's almost a, it's too kind on him to say he's picking out or cherry picking evidence to suit his agenda. There was no evidence there. He's just essentially flat out lying. Let's take a look at one more example of anti science nonsense from Dan Whitton. Well, I completely disagree with this whole conversation about border closures because actually Benjamin, if you follow international news closely, you'll also know that Melbourne Australia has been plunged into its fourth lockdown recently. The border policies in Australia are so draconian that the government actually broke international law, in my opinion, by shutting the border from India to Australia to its own citizens. Guess what? The Indian variants still got in. Border closures do not stop the variants arriving. Viruses travel. I mean, that was more explicitly what Andrea was talking about, your cherry picking evidence, which is not actually suitable to furnish your argument, but you're presenting it as if it does. There wasn't much pushback there, by the way. Now, what was his argument? Border controls don't work to stop variants because Australia had very tough border controls and the Delta variant still arrived. Kind of true on one level. There were examples of the Delta variant in Australia. Australia's seven day average for daily new cases is 10. The corresponding figure in the UK is 6,689. So the idea you can say, oh, border controls don't work because they had 10 cases. Well, wait a minute, what about the countries about border controls? 7,000 cases, right? And there wasn't an epidemiologist on there to correct Dan Wutton. It was just him able to put forward that completely misleading nonsense. Here's the interesting thing about Boomer TV, is that it really was riding on the prestige that comes with Andrew Neil because of him being such an institution at the BBC. Now, I will give Andrew Neil his full due when it comes to those live interviews which is essentially like performing a televised vivisection of a politician. Nobody is better at doing them. I've really never seen anyone as rigorous and as aggressive as Andrew Neil really in a way which didn't involve shouting, right? He's a very formidable journalist in that way. But when it comes to, you know, the rest of his journalistic career when you take that step back, actually he does have a history of facilitating a very, you know, anti-science and, you know, quack science perspective. So when he was at the Sunday Times as editor, you had multiple articles denying the connection between HIV and AIDS. So it's not really, I think, anything new for him to be kind of comfortable in a journalistic space which also has these, you know, completely discredited quack points of view. When it comes to, you know, Dan Whitten, he's not a serious journalist, I would say in my opinion. He's a showbiz journalist who a bit like Piers Morgan has identified that there's a space for him in his career by stepping out of someone who merely covers celebrity and takes center stage as a contrarian himself. He's very much, I think, following in the footsteps of that kind of model for his own career. You know, he's also worked out that hang on, there's a space in the broadcasting market here in the UK for something which is a bit more like Fox News. And that's not just in terms of this, you know, anti-science point of view. It's also the manner of delivery. So I think that we would be hypocrites here if we said that, you know, partisan news has got no place in the public domain. I think it's got a place. But the way in which it's being done here is both hyper biased and also not reliable, right? The abuse of those statistics really should be considered a matter for the Geneva Convention. But the manner of delivery in that soliloquizing, very ranty, yelling at the camera, yelling at his guests, that's a very Fox News way to do it. So the way in which I see Dan Wooden's own role in this is completely self-serving, cynical and calculated. The question remains is how successful is this going to be? I think maybe something which is sort of worried some of these figures on the right and perhaps also is one of the reasons why GB News has been, you know, sped into production, as it were, is because when it comes to cultural outlook and voting behavior, they very much do have a grip on that older cohort of voters. But when it comes to, you know, lockdown skepticism, they don't. You look at the polling, all the voters are perfectly comfortable with the idea of a four-week lockdown. There's only slightly more opposition amongst younger voters. So in terms of who is this channel serving, there are some real, I think, fault lines here. And I'm not necessarily sure if they'll be able to hold together. Yeah, I mean, I tweeted last night and I think Dan Wooden is their worst hire because I do want to push back slightly. I mean, you sort of compared him to Piers Morgan. He might like to be Piers Morgan, but he's not smart. I've spent quite a long time in studios with Dan Wooden and he's like, he's not an intelligent person. If anyone gives any pushback in an interview, he's completely lost and just has to start shouting because he can't think on his feet. He's someone, to me, I think, he's potentially got a good contact book. Maybe he's got some dirt on people I don't know. I don't know how he manages to get sort of celebrity scoops. But this move to become a political pundit, I just don't see it working. I don't think anyone in Britain really looks at that and thinks I really relate to this guy. You're right. No, he's not a smart guy. He's emulating the broadcasting style of others, but I don't think he necessarily has, you know, even the now saw the strategy behind it. I had my own run in with him. I've had a few, but one was on his talk radio show where they decided to jump me with a clip which had been taken out of context from a Navarra video and had gone viral on far right Twitter where I was making fun of a way in which sociologist called Ted Cantil was measuring residential segregation. And I made a offhand comment of all that. Look, lads were winning and it was taking the piss out of the research not an endorsement of it. And so Dan Wooden decided to try and ambush me with it. And then when I said, Dan, that's a joke. He didn't know what to do. So he just started yelling at me and he was like, but we shouldn't joke about these things. And I thought he believed in free speech and he was like, oh, well, nevertheless, like it was just it's just he really wasn't prepared for the possibility that wasn't saying what he was saying or saying. So he was like, I'm just gonna yell and hope nobody notices. And luckily for him, the Daily Express was ready to write an article in his favor. Solomon Hughes had a great piece about this in Tribune magazine. The kind of media is worth supporting. He writes 20 million pounds of their funding has come from the Discovery Channel. So that's supposed to be expected for for a TV outfit that a production company is funding them. The other funders are more interesting. One such major player in GB News is Legatim, an international investment firm based in the Dubai International Financial Center, a tax free zone in the United Arab Emirates. Legatim is currently GB News co-lead investor putting a reported 20 million into its initial six million pounds fundraising. The firm's founder and chairman is Christopher Chandler who made his fortune investing in emerging markets in times of political and economic uncertainty including the stripping and privatizing of Russia's assets in the 1990s. So classic free market, neoliberal, filthy rich, a little bit more about them. They fund the Mayfair based Legatim Institute which promoted a hard Brexit on the grounds it would allow economic deregulation. So we can, we can see what they're about. Another 10 million comes from Paul Marshall. Marshall runs the Marshall Waste Hedge Fund. He's worth 630 million pounds and was alleged to have increased that wealth by betting against companies hit by the pandemic on his politics Solomon Hughes writes, Marshall is not a straightforward Tory. He backed the Liberal Democrats for decades using his money to move them rightwards. Marshall even funded and edited the Orange Book, a 2004 collection of essays that promoted Nick Clegg's more free market Lib Dems over the party's left-leaning wing. Marshall's Orange Book aimed to shift the Lib Dems away from what it called silky socialism and corporatism towards harder, more neoliberal political lines. This included arguing that the NHS was a second rate centralized state monopoly service and calling for the privatization of hospitals, prisons and royal mail. Now the Orange Book MP, so part of that movement, they were the guys around Nick Clegg who really pushed to go into that coalition with the Tory so essentially responsible for austerity. Marshall later left the Lib Dems over Brexit. He then became a Tory donor and helped fund both of Michael Gove's leadership campaign. So we can see their hedge fund manager, the Legatum investment company, both of them super mega rich, really, really in favor of Brexit, global financial deregulation. They basically want to slash rights, right? But that's not what you're going to lead with on your show. So you have to talk up these cultural issues or for some reason, I think this is probably going to backfire on them. They're trying to hide this drive towards deregulation via railing against lockdowns. This is a class of, you know, vulture capitalists who benefit an awful lot from the degradation of the public sphere. So I don't think they look at one of Dan Whitten's idiotic monologues and think, oh God, this is a bit embarrassing for us. What they see as a contribution to, you know, the kind of poisoning of the well of our public sphere, the place where all of us get our information and take part in a conversation and that's what shapes our politics. They see that, you know, essentially a swimming pool being shattered and they go, actually, that's a really great and useful context for us. And I think that that's one of the reasons why we have had such a lurch to the authoritarian right in this country is because that process of diminishing the public arena has been going on for decades really. And I think that that's part of what has made this country so amenable to, you know, this kind of right wing smash and grab that we've seen since, you know, 2016. And I think what this also perhaps shows us is that Brexit would, no matter where you stand on the EU issue, by the way, whether you thought, you know, we should leave, whether we should have stayed, whether we could have reformed or whatever, is that Brexit, as it actually exists, is not a discreet political event. All right? So it's on the one hand an expression, I think, of a kind of weaponized, home-owning, boomer class of voters who have really benefited from both the most generous welfare state in history and then the selling off of that welfare state and the financialization of the economy. And weaponizing that class, I think, of in relative terms and statistical terms, you know, very well off voters into this really powerful sense of aggrievement and you can kind of point them in different directions, one being the EU and to what these voucher capitalists looks like, you know, constraining regulations which could get in their own way of, you know, turning a profit and says, right, go for them. And then you've got, I think, you know, a kind of not a liberal bias in the country's institutions, but at least a kind of institutionalized sense of racism is bad, we don't really like it. You know, maybe trans people are human after all and saying, right, we're going to point you at that and, you know, get you really riled up and angry at that because one, it's a target that we also agree with, you know, deeply nationalist and aggressive authoritarian set of politics, but also a distraction from what's really going on. And that's why I find this, you know, wolf and, you know, the real working classes, you know, cheap clothing just so interesting, the sheer dishonesty of it. When you look at those funders who've, you know, made their name in part by asset stripping whole states, you don't see them as tribunes of the left behind. Those who have been screwed over by de-industrialization, managed decline. People who are victims of this country's outrageous and runaway geographic inequalities. You see people who are totally and 100% okay with the deepening of those inequalities just along as no one, you know, wakes up, notices them and starts voting for a redistributive party. So I think this is also one of the things that the left can get wrong is that it takes some of these attacks on identity politics at face value and says, well, of course, identity politics, a cancer for the left. And, you know, we shouldn't go on about racism or shouldn't go on about BLM or shouldn't go on about trans rights because that's turning off the real working class. You're instead all turned into GB news. No, this is all a mirage. It's a disguise. It's a way of concealing the real agenda here, which isn't the empowering of the working class in politics, but continuing to dispossess them all in the name of acting in their best interests. The big problems with GB news or the misinformation and the starting pointless culture was at least, you know, inflaming them to distract from the degradations of this country's actual ruling class. But what many comments have focused on in the first 24 hours of GB news existence is the technical problems. So that goes from bad lighting to very dodgy sound. Now, we're not going to dwell on this too much, but this clip is pretty funny. We love talking to you guys. We absolutely love it. So briefly, how's your first day? How's your first day, Paul? Okay, that good. Anisha, are you having a good launch day? Yeah. Lots of sound issues. We'll leave it there. Long time viewers of this show, we've had a lot of technical difficulties on this show. On one level, I feel sympathy when the sound doesn't work and you can't hear what someone's saying or it goes to the wrong person. At the same time, we didn't receive 60 million pound in seed funding, right? So we've always been funded by our subscribers. I can tell you, it's never got close to 60 million pounds. However, we appreciate your generosity. It hasn't got close to that yet. I'm sorry, Michael. You're being too nice. If we had 60 million of your British sterling, do you think we would be having mics that don't work? Do you think we would be having EchoE studio that sounds like, I don't know. You're like filming it in your mum's garage. Do you think you would have like, I was watching bits of it today. Hosts not even looking at the right camera. Are you dizzy? I want to know what this money was spent on because I swear to God, if it wasn't cocaine and champagne, I do not understand what is physically possible to spend your money on and still have a camera that cheap, lighting that shit. We sounded better when we were filming in the shipping container.