"GB News is essentially Reform TV"

Alan Rusbridger on how GB News became Nigel Farage's broadcast arm – and who is paying for it.

Alan Rusbridger knows a scandal when he sees one. As editor of the Guardian he oversaw some of the most important stories in recent decades: cash-for-questions; phone hacking; WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden.

Rusbridger thinks he’s looking at another scandal right now.

“GB News is essentially Reform TV,” he tells me in today’s Democracy for Sale discussion. “A broadcaster has become the media arm of a political party, and nobody is doing anything about it.”

This isn’t just about a scandal about a failure to enforce broadcasting rules, although it is that, too. At root, it’s a story about how money buys influence in British politics, and how our election laws are failing to keep up.

In Britain, political donations are regulated. Give money to a party or a politician and it must be registered with the Electoral Commission. Above the disclosure threshold, it’s published for all to see.

But pour hundreds of millions of pounds into a TV channel that relentlessly advocates for one party and one political position? You don’t have to declare a thing.

GB News is set up as a for-profit business, but since it launched in 2021 it has done nothing but lose money - and lots of it. Its owners, Dubai-based Legatum Group and British hedge fund manager Sir Paul Marshall, have between them lost well over £100 million.

It’s hard to see the £585,000 GB News has paid Nigel Farage since he became an MP as anything other than a political donation. And that’s before you consider the broader picture.

Marshall has poured money into right-wing think tanks and built a media empire that now includes GB News, the Spectator, and UnHerd. Legatum - owned by New Zealand-born financier Christopher Chandler - has funded right-wing Conservative MPs and was out in force at Reform’s party conference last September.

As Labour’s Liam Byrne MP writes in his new book, Why Populists are Winning and How to Beat Them, a handful of billionaires are funding a “media-political complex”. Between them Marshall, Legatum, and Reform donors Christopher Harborne and Jeremy Hosking have spent more than £130 million since 2020 influencing politics.

In GB News, these multi-millionaires have bought a station dedicated almost entirely to one political party: Reform.

Rusbridger recently commissioned 20 professional journalists to review hours of prime-time GB News output. The result - published in the New World, where Rusbridger is editor-at-large - showed how GB News consistently breaks broadcasting rules, stuffing panels with partisan guests and hard-right talking points.

Farage, his deputy Richard Tice, Reform MP Lee Anderson, and party rising star Darren Grimes have all presented on GB News. Their main topics? Immigration and culture wars - Reform’s two favourite talking points.

One reviewer wrote that Farage’s evening programme was “Farage propaganda dressed up as a panel show.” Another described a show presented by Matt Goodwin, the defeated Reform candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, as “one man’s rant against immigration, supported by compliant and affirmative opinions and a pretence of an opposing view that was shut down rapidly. It was a disgrace.”

Bev Turner’s “world exclusive sit-down interview“ with Donald Trump - in which the GB News correspondent thanked the president for “dropping truth bombs” after he claimed climate change was “a hoax” and that London had “sharia law” - was rated zero out of five for compliance with broadcasting regulations.

Ofcom has barely intervened. That’s a failure of regulation. But the deeper failure is political.

“The other parties haven’t got TV stations pumping out their agendas, their people, their prejudices night after night. Why should Reform have this?” Rusbridger asks. “It’s not just Ofcom that needs to wake up. The Electoral Commission needs to wake up and say: hold on a minute, what’s happening here?”

We don’t have to look far to see where this leads. Silvio Berlusconi’s rise to power in Italy was built on his media empire. Viktor Orbán has used a “sprawling pro-government media empire” to dominate Hungary’s political discourse and strangle democratic opposition.

Britain is not Italy or Hungary - but the architecture of a similar system is being quietly assembled, funded by billionaires our donation laws simply weren’t designed to catch.

Meanwhile, our watchdogs are asleep at the wheel. Something needs to change, before it’s too late.