Morbid Symptoms

The launch of GB News is a good moment to consider what's really behind what has come to be known as the "culture wars". Though there are superficial similarities to the pushback against "political correctness" in the 1980s and 90s, not least the conjuring of the figure of the woke as a cross between Angela Davis and Rick from The Young Ones, that was pretty clearly a reaction to a social evolution centred on the growth of tolerance arounds areas such as sexuality, feminism and racial diversity. Importantly, the chief site for the disputes over "PC" was academia, which reflected both the expansion of tertiary education in those years to previously neglected sections of society (the emergence of the knowledge economy and its need to incorporate women and minorities into the labour force) and the new perspectives on the curriculum brought by younger, more diverse academics as a result of that expansion. But despite the evergreen tales of campus cancelling and snowflake over-sensitivity, it's clear that the contemporary culture wars have a much broader social scope than higher education. GB News isn't being set up to counter feminist reading groups or to turn back the tide on the teaching of critical race theory.

Andrew Neil's claim that the new channel will cater for the underserved part of the country raises the question as to who he thinks this audience is. The early viewing figures suggest it is attracting mostly older, well-off males (not unlike its roster of presenters, and not unlike established TV news). That is hardly an ignored demographic in the wider British media landscape. The idea that it will appeal to the non-metropolitan parts of the country makes more sense, not least because the press and national TV are particularly London-centric, but it clearly isn't a pitch for a more devolved offering in a country already well-served by regional TV news and local radio. There will no doubt be coverage of "loony left" councils and the "incitement" of the SNP, but that is hardly a departure from the standard operating procedure of the national press. The well-founded suspicion is that the bulk of its political content will continue to revolve around Westminster and its daily agenda of opinion will be led by London-based newspapers (unlike the BBC and ITV, it can legitimately plead a lack of reporting resources for this parasitic relationship).

The suggestion that its output will be "more upbeat about both the UK’s future and the positive impact of capitalism" has an amusingly 1970s vibe to it, as if the problem were a media landscape sunk in pessimism and cowed by the imminent threat of a socialist revolution. This obviously chimes with Boris Johnson's combination of declinism and boosterism, and we know that there is a solid market for that product, but again it hardly puts clear blue water between GB News and the established players of the BBC, ITV and Sky. The channel's representatives have been keen to stress that it won't be a British Fox News, not least because it will likely feature liberal counterpoints in order to stay the right side of broadcast impartiality rules, much as LBC uses James O'Brien to offset Nick Ferrari. As ever, this will be a confection that locates the centre ground of British politics on the right and delegitimises the left as abhorrent in the eyes of all good people, liberal and conservative. But perhaps the chief difference is that GB News isn't intended to dominate the airwaves, or even simply set the agenda of a particular political party. It's chief aim appears to be to act as a critic and goad of the BBC and as such its values are those of newspapers rather than television. 

Structurally, GB News is a late development in a much longer trend that has shifted media resources from reporting to opinion. This was initially driven by newspaper bloat in the 1990s (lifestyle sections, cultural reviews and greater financial coverage), but also by a sense that politics was now sufficiently technocratic that only strong opinions on social issues, from immigration to gay marriage, could tickle our jaded palates. This was exacerbated by the impact of the Internet, which first made investigative journalism increasingly costly as advertising revenues fell and then raised the bar for performative outrage through social media. Television, and in particular the BBC, has always been constrained by its commitment to balance and a piousness arising from its national responsibilities. The result was a tendency to outsource primary opinion to the press, with coverage then focusing on its secondary effects: the denial, the row, the tweetstorm. Piers Morgan's role at ITV was to introduce tabloid values to the staid world of daytime television long after the tabloids had lost their bite. GB News looks like a similarly morbid symptom of the industry's decline, with its values somewhere between the Daily Mail and Telegraph and its presentational style (including cock-ups and Neil's abrasiveness) recalling an earlier age.

In the US, the motor for much of the culture wars is still religion, but this is less a reflection of social norms (observance and affiliation are both in decline) than religion's utility in providing a commitment to discrimination in a country that nominally insists that religion and politics are separate spheres. It is for this reason that the Protestant right have been happy to see conservative Catholics promoted to the Supreme Court. For the secular right, the attraction of  "religious liberty" is that its target isn't secular society in general but the state in particular, and precisely because the constitutional separation of the state and religion allows the latter to be painted as under threat from the encroachment of the former. Any limitations on the exercise of choice by the non-religious right that religious liberty gives rise to can usually be bypassed by money - e.g. flying elsewhere for an abortion. It is the non-wealthy who are constrained, which reinforces the hierarchies of privilege that the right, religious and secular, ultimately seek to defend. 

Consequently, while the American culture wars do extend to the private sector, notably in areas such as entertainment and sport, the central points of friction tend to be within the ambit of the state. This can be in the form of conflicts between individual states and the Federal government, or between those individual states and community groups that can cite specific constitutional protections, such as churches. This explains why American culture war topics are often linked back to the 1960s and 70s and the demand for equal rights and recognition against an oppressive state. Both sides insist on liberty, and not just because the right habitually adopts the left's rhetoric. In contrast, the UK right's attempts to paint the state as oppressive have always been half-hearted and unconvincing. Compare the US salience of a term such as "carceral state" to the British deployment of "nanny state". The result is that the UK's culture war is more reflective of the bigotries of newspapers, such as Islamophobia and transphobia, and the sort of shallow history that Sellars and Yeatman were satirising 90 years ago. Attempts to import the American style of "liberty", notably in the form of anti-lockdown protests, have produced little media interest beyond the entertainment value of Laurence Fox's midlife crisis, while the early Covid scepticism of the likes of Toby Young and Allison Pearson has fizzled out in the face of the vaccine "triumph".

In fact, the culture wars have come to prominence in the UK at a time when the libertarian right has been marginalised by the Conservative government's switch to a strong state narrative. Anti-state rhetoric of the sort pioneered by the likes of the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs will no doubt feature at GB News, but what we probably won't see is direct criticism of the government's further centralisation of executive authority. The downgrading of Parliament since the 2019 election and the increasing reliance on prerogative powers to bypass scrutiny is currently receiving little media attention, which is notable after the hyperventilation over meaningful votes and prorogation in the last Parliament. One morbid symptom of this ennui is the low public opinion of the official opposition, which doesn't just reflect Labour's poor performance in opposing the government, or Starmer's failure to articulate a distinctive programme, but also arises from the sense of powerlessness as the government ignores the Commons and pays only lip service to the remonstrations of a weak Speaker.

In the topsy-turvy world of the culture wars, it is the upper levels of hierarchies who claim to be the most oppressed, from multi-millionaire pastors thundering about gay marriage to middle-aged, white, male academics who want to rehabilitate colonialism. It is a sense of grievance that is the common characteristic of the political right across the globe these days. One explanation for this is that victimhood allows for a more aggressive language of resistance. This morbid symptom is not just another example of the right's détournement of leftist practice, it also pays tribute to the evolution of social norms. You can no longer simply display contempt for those you despise, as in the manner of the old right (for an example of this generational shift, compare the syles of Jean-Marie Le Pen and Marine Le Pen). Instead you must present yourself as under attack and therefore justified in hitting back. If you don't play the victim, you risk being labelled a bully. To make this work, your attacker must obviously be inflated to the level of an existential threat, hence the exaggerations and outright lies. 

One irony of the comparison of the US and the UK is that the inflation is far more pronounced here, despite the American rightwing media's susceptibility at the margin to conspiracy theories such as QAnon, essentially because the US struggle centres on the actual disposition of power while the UK's largely doesn't. Local government long ago had its wings clipped and the story of Parliament since we "took back control" from the EU is of its further emasculation by the executive. It also doesn't help that we have an official opposition torn between ignoring culture war issues (so conceding media bandwidth) and trying to outflank the Tories on the right. Rather than Supreme Court battles over substantive issues of legislation, we are reduced to urban myths about no-go areas or claims that removing the Queen's portrait is tantamount to regicide. Perhaps the most ridiculous expression has been the defence of racists booing black footballers on the grounds that they are protesting against Marxism. 

In this context, the role of GB News is twofold. The power struggle it has been recruited to is that over the BBC, not the state. It isn't a realistic competitor to the national broadcaster, but it can be used to further push the discourse to the right in the short-term and to make the case in the longer-term for the Corporation to be broken up to allow a variety of roughly-equal voices covering the full spectrum of opinion from centre to far-right (Paul Dacre remains the preferred candidate for the Chair of Ofcom). Its secondary role is to salvage the newspaper industry by providing a constant feed of free advertising. While the press already gets a good deal of complimentary coverage from the BBC and ITV, this is restricted to exclude the more extreme views (though quite a lot of that still seems to find its way onto Question Time). GB News will broaden that broadcast spectrum, further corroding the discourse ("Will you nationalise sausages?" will appear quaintly tame in years to come), which in turn will encourage newspapers to push even further right in the search for controversial and edgy opinion. The newspaper industry is dying and, as the Daniel Morgan case once more reminds us, the smell is going to hang around for a while yet.