Hope is a funny thing to be prescribed.

People mean well when they say it: stay hopeful, look on the bright side, it’ll be all right in the end.

But, more often than not, the effect is the opposite. Being told to have hope when the world feels like a dumpster fire is a bit like being asked to admire the view while the train you’re on is visibly accelerating towards a cliff.

It’s not that the instinct is wrong. It’s that hope, as an instruction, often doesn’t work.

This is something I’ve been thinking about recently.

For more than a year, I’ve toyed with the idea of writing a book called ‘The Little Black Book of the End of the World’ – a pocket-guide to our collective doom-scrolling. The premise is to determine what will kill us first – climate change, conflict, computing, or capitalism?

It felt appropriate for an era in which the news cycle seems to be designed not merely to inform but to erode our will to live.

But then a colleague said, almost casually, “why not write ‘The Little Black Book of Saving the World’ instead?” They were right, and ideas around this reframing lodged somewhere deep inside me.

Because if we really are living through the end of something, it’s worth asking what might be beginning too.

That shift in thinking collided with my recent reading of Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness by Jamil Zaki – a book far wiser than its title initially lets on. Its central thesis is that hope is not something you can simply assert but something that must be earned.

The message I took from Zaki is deceptively simple: stop telling people to have hope, and start giving them a reason to do so.

So here are some reasons – political, personal, and somewhere in-between – for why hope is not only possible in dark times, but necessary.

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For much of her adult life, my mother hid a dark secret and most of the people she met never even noticed.

To neighbours, villagers and colleagues, she was a respectable, upper-middle class, home counties woman who commuted up to London and who loved to hold dinner parties and fill our family home with guests. She arranged the flowers in church; was the backbone of the local tennis club, the local action group and the parish magazine; and, for years, the local Conservative Party. She was very particular about ways of addressing people and the right way of doing things – some might say too particular. She had a habit of befriending aristocratic people and, when we were children, we would sometimes find ourselves playing at grand houses owned by grand people with unwieldy double-barrelled names who had nannies, stables of ponies, and whole wings of smug, self-satisfied, social superiority. Sometimes Mum would play tennis with their mothers and put on a peculiar upper-class accent as she did.

All of this, although I did not realise it at the time, was her cover. But often, unwittingly, she would blow it. Downed RAF pilots in wartime France often gave themselves away by stealing bicycles before setting off through French towns on the wrong side of the road smoking English cigarettes. Mum’s Achilles heel was her innate sociability: she was irrepressibly gregarious and, despite those put-on airs and graces, treated everyone the same. She was too funny and full of life to ever fit in with the women whose class she so desperately craved to join. For Hannah’s secret was this: she was a social imposter.

The sixth of seven children and born into a working-class Staffordshire family, her upbringing was the very antithesis of the upper-middle class, home counties woman that she later played. In the pit village she was born into in the 1930s, there was no money and no such thing as social mobility. She loved her family but, from an early age, aspired to lead a different life.

Aged 11, she got into grammar school. From there she went to secretarial college, took elocution lessons (to rid herself of that accent) and, having evinced the transformation, moved south, where she landed a job with an MP at the House of Commons. The new Hannah wore designer outfits, would fend-off the advances of a young Geoffrey Howe, danced with Harold Macmillan at the Conservative Party Conference and eventually met and married my father.

Several years later, they moved to Essex with my sister. Several years after that, I was born. And, some years after that, I began to notice the peculiarities of her double life.

The Cult

In Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw wrote that “it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him”. My mother had a different accent for all of her life’s scenarios – just in case that eventuality should arise.

When she spoke to her sisters on the phone, she would be northern. When we went up to visit family, she would start calling everyone “duck”. But, as soon as we were in the car and heading down the motorway to Essex, the Staffordshire accent would disappear and she would start banging on about those people with the double-barrelled names again.

She was forever balancing out the two Hannahs.

If the subject of her childhood came up in so-called polite company, she would insist that her grandfather had been a big deal in Staffordshire; that he had owned land and farm – and it was true. But he was hardly the Duke of Westminster. The farm was a smallholding on the outskirts of the pit village and he had earned his keep as a school-teacher.

Why did she do it? Why did she expend so much sweat and effort on hiding who she was? On pretending that she had come from a different class and on sucking up to people who were not a patch on her?

As time wore on, I would often tease her about it. Oh, such and such is from a very old family! she would say. And, when I pointed out that ‘such and such’s’ family could not, by the laws of nature, be any older than ours, she would double-down and start claiming that they came here on the boat with William the Conqueror! England’s self-styled upper classes like to propagate stories like that. Some will even go to great effort and expense and draw up elaborate family trees to prove it. But, if you have any European heritage at all, you too are undoubtedly descended from the same people on those boats and quite likely William himself. Your family has simply forgotten it.

The cult of English aristocracy hasn’t. And the cult has a long memory – which is exclusively about itself to the exclusion of the 99% of other people on these isles. Like all cults, it is wrapped up in itself and wedded to a series of self-serving myths and fantasies that set it apart.

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‘The Better People’

For centuries, these ‘elite’ families have been as effective at spinning their own inimitability even as they have been at clinging onto their money, power and influence. The origins of that wealth are usually kept deliberately opaque and with good reason: nobody ever got fabulously wealthy on altruism.

Many of Britain’s poshest families built their fortunes on the suffering of others.

The exploitation of the nation’s working people (including my mother’s family) could be seen down the pits; or through land clearances (which were very far from being a uniquely Scottish phenomenon); and, of course, in slavery. But good luck finding someone who will admit that. The history of Britain’s slave trade in particular has been politely and deliberately buried by the descendants of those who are still benefitting from its legacy today.

The sheen of the grand family piles wears a little thin when you realise that they were built on the wealth of human suffering. That is why all attempts by the National Trust to tell those stories are resisted – they undermine the whole ghastly conceit of ‘blue blood’ and entitlement and the credibility of the upper-class cult.

Of course, there’s no such thing as ‘blue blood’ any more than there is such a thing as ‘breeding’, but dip into the pages of the Telegraph, Tatler, the Spectator, or any of the other old establishment publications and you will find people still shoring up the myth of it.

Centuries of grooming left millions of people – including my mother – believing that some families were inherently better than others; that their wealth and family seats were magicked into being by dint of that inherent superiority and not built off the back of the vicious and murderous exploitation of other people; that they were more inherently fascinating than anyone else; that their lives mattered more.

In the last years of her life, before Alzheimer’s took hold, Mum mellowed a lot. She would laughingly refer to herself as “that Bucket woman” – in self-deprecating reference to the central character in the sitcom Keeping Up Appearances. And increasingly, she began to dismiss her haughtier acquaintances and their inherent snobbery. But she never shook it completely and never fully accepted that they were not better than her.

She would be aghast that I have told you her story and revealed her truth but I tell it because I am proud of her. Hannah rose on her own efforts and her own toil – nobody gave her a leg-up or made a call on her behalf to an old school chum; she had no ‘old tie’ network to fall back on. She got herself into grammar school through her own hard efforts and could, in other circumstances, have got herself to university.

But she felt obliged by the stifling conditioning of her era to hide who she was. She looked up to people who had been handed every advantage because she had been conditioned to think that they were her betters.

Far too many people in this country remain wedded to the cult of the upper class – a cult that should long ago have withered to a death, but which is instead enabled by the media, by stealth, and by a fawning faith in aristocracy that still prevails. Its bastard by-product, nepotism, remains rife – elevating those of little talent, charm or ability to some of the top gigs in the land.

We need greater acknowledgement of the fundamental truth it exposes about our land. This country could do with a lot more Hannahs and far fewer Jacob Rees-Moggs.

Otto English is the author of Fake History and Fake Heroes

This article was originally published in 2021 in the monthly print edition of Byline Times

It is easy to lampoon historical fiction. All those wimples and whalebone corsets, all those stories which bear little relationship to historical fact. Television adaptations generally do nothing to elevate the form. Why bother to make the imaginative leap necessary to step into the past when historical characters are presented as the same as us except wearing fancy dress?

But historical fiction is a broad church and, at its best, it can do a great deal more than simply entertain. Mainstream history is the skimmed milk of the past. It rarely tells us what we actually want to know, what it felt like to be there. It may give us facts, but it stops short of situating us imaginatively in the past. How does this affect us as readers? What can we get from an historical novel that we cannot get from non-fiction accounts?

This question was very much in my head in 2018 when I set out to write a novel about Dr Hans Asperger who worked at the world-famous Curative Education Ward in the Vienna Children’s Hospital in the 1930s. Asperger was a pioneer of autism research but his work was lost for decades. When it was rediscovered, he came to be known as ‘the father of neurodiversity.’

Then, more recently, paperwork came to light which revealed that Asperger was a Nazi collaborator. I wanted to know how, and why, a man who undoubtedly cared deeply for troubled children finished up signing paperwork which was effectively a death warrant for more severely disabled children.

I knew this subject matter would be difficult. This was recent, controversial, heavy-weight history. Was the historical novel the appropriate form in which to tell this story? My novel might have consequences for the living members of the Asperger family and for the neurodivergent self-styled ‘Aspies’ who borrow his name. Also, I know myself to be dangerously porous. Might my desire to understand lead me into a dangerous moral relativism?

It would certainly need more than mere fancy dress to explain Asperger’s story.

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New York City has fallen – at least that’s the apocalyptic ‘MAGA’ worldview, in which the election of 34-year-old Muslim democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as Mayor-Elect marks the dawn of a new ‘Islamo-Marxist’ dark age.

Terrified by visions of breadlines in Times Square and a burqa on the Statue of Liberty, radical keyboard warriors furiously type that ‘Western civilisation is being destroyed from within’.

“He’d never have won were New York full of New Yorkers,” wrote right-wing pundit Michael Knowles. Meanwhile, conservative William Wolfe declared that “Americans didn’t elect Mamdani – foreigners did”. And self-styled “proud Islamophobe” and Donald Trump ally Laura Loomer labelled the Democratic Party’s Mayor-Elect of New York City an “enemy combatant”.

Mamdani’s Muslim faith and support for Palestinian civil rights have made him a lightning rod for America’s rising tide of nativism and resurgent Islamophobia. But even as Trump and his allies have called for his deportation, many top Democrats have stayed silent – or worse.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand warned of Mamdani’s potential ties to “global jihad”.

Hillary Clinton hinted that Jewish New Yorkers may have cause for concern.

Barack Obama, as well as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and others declined to endorse him.

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In the summer of 2015, Jasmin O’Hara’s brother was turning 18 and moving out. Their parents were worried about having no children at home any more and so they started looking into options to foster or adopt.

The couple realised there was a need for host families for unaccompanied minors arriving on the shores of Kent – some as young as seven – searching for sanctuary. Jasmin’s parents put their names forward.

It looked likely that Jasmin’s new sibling would be coming via the ‘Calais Jungle’, the makeshift refugee camp on the French coast. So Jasmin decided to go there. “That trip really changed the course of my life,” she told Byline Times.

It was the height of the Syrian civil war and many had fled the violence to Europe. But people from war-torn Sudan and Eritrea also filled the camp.

“The conditions people were living in in France were very shocking,” she said. “I didn’t realise we had informal refugee camps like that in Europe. But the most shocking thing was the difference between the media portrayal of the reasons why people were leaving and the people themselves – and the reality of the people I was meeting. Their stories were incredibly courageous.”

On her return to the UK, she posted on Facebook about what she had seen, and – almost as an afterthought – attached a fundraiser. She had soon raised £250,000, becoming JustGiving’s biggest crowdfunding campaign ever at the time.

“That was very unexpected and catapulted me into a world I didn’t know much about,” Jasmin recalled. She began distributing clothes and necessities to those in Calais. She had, in essence, become a non-profit organiser overnight.

Then, on a Friday in August 2015, her parents were officially accepted as foster parents.

By the Sunday, they received the phone call they had been waiting for – Kent social services said there was a boy, Meseret, from Eritrea at the Eurotunnel terminal who needed a family. He was 13 years old, didn’t speak English, and was in good health. Did they want to foster him?

Jasmin’s parents’ response was “this is who we’ve been waiting for”.

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The thought keeps me up at night. How do I prepare my children for this world? How can I be honest with them about the way things are? And how do I keep them limitless in considering the way things could be?

On a recent walk through the woods, as we enjoyed the crunch of leaves under our boots, I asked my eldest child what she would change about the country if she found herself as its leader tomorrow.

She declared that the first thing she would do is make all cars electric. Before she could get stuck into the detail of that, she carried on listing her big ideas: stopping arms sales to Israel; pulling down all the flags; making everyone sign a kindness charter so we can be nicer to each other.

I smiled – partly out of worry that I have radicalised my babies, but also partly because I am glad that I haven’t shied away from talking to them about the way the world is. And because they’re kids – unconcerned with bureaucracy, budgets, and detail – the solutions feel easy. I want to keep it that way.

I wish I didn’t have to burden my child with the thought, but I have to – because the world we are handing over to our kids feels so very broken.

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As President Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt calls the BBC ‘fake news’ and encourages Americans to watch GB News instead, we publish this article from the current print and digital edition of Byline Times, which looks at how the Reform-supporting channel is now spreading anti-British, Pro-Trump content to American viewers across the Atlantic

GB News’ new US show is providing a regular platform for the claim that the UK needs to be ‘saved’ by Donald Trump’s America.

The Late Show Live launched on 22 September, broadcasting in the United States as well as on GB News’ UK channel and on YouTube.

Speaking at a party to mark the launch of GB News in the US in September, its co-owner Sir Paul Marshall is reported by Politico to have told the audience of ‘Make America Great Again’ allies and supporters: “We need you to come and save us. To rescue us … You are making America great again… We need to make Britain great again … We need as many as possible of you … to appear on our channel, to tell the story of what you’re doing to turn your country around.”

Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage, a GB News presenter, was the headline speaker at the party.

Judging by its first week of output, the new US show appears to be fulfilling Marshall’s wishes.

Hosted by Bev Turner and Ben Leo from Washington DC, The Late Show Live is also being shown – along with other GB News content – on Donald Trump’s streaming platform Truth+, as well as other pro-Trump networks.

The US launch raises questions about the media and political discourse GB News hopes to frame around the UK, from the perspective of American politics, and the extent to which such a project aims to help Farage’s party, which is leading UK polls.

The American launch party, held at Ned’s Club in Washington DC, was attended by 500 people “across US politics, American business, and the global media”, according to GB News – including 11 members of Donald Trump’s Cabinet.

Speakers included US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt – who gave “a huge shout-out to Nigel Farage”.

“You share the values this administration holds dear: free speech, that men cannot be women, secure borders – we don’t want illegal aliens invading our countries, we want to protect the integrity, democracy, and culture that make our countries two of the greatest countries in the history of the world,” Leavitt said.

Farage told the audience that GB News had been “prepared to take on the wokery, the left-wingism, the negativity, the managed decline” and “to have a news channel that believes that we can make Britain great again is so important”.

Marshall – who also owns the Spectator magazine and the UnHerd site – told the crowd that “every TV channel was progressive and the BBC was a state behemoth distorting the entire landscape” when GB News was launched four years ago.

“You are an inspiration,” he went on. “The United States has an incredibly important role to play in the future of Britain. You provide us with hope and inspiration. We want to shine a light on what’s happening here. President Trump is a controversial figure, particularly in Europe. There are many naysayers. But there are many others who want to hear and understand what you’re doing in this country.”

According to Politico, Marshall was “close to tears” as he quoted Churchill, branding Trump and his supporters “the new world” which would replace the “old” one.

The outlet reported that speakers at the party “discussed a budding transatlantic alliance that could help propel Farage into Downing Street”.

Alan McCormick, GB News’ Chairman, told attendees that “Britain has been infected by a mind virus that sees no value in place, in family, in community, in love of country and these views have been reinforced by an establishment media who have suppressed any alternative viewpoints”.

Michael Booker, Editorial Director of GB News, claimed that “what happens in the USA is having huge consequences, both socially and economically, for the people of Britain”.

“The world’s biggest political story is playing out in Washington, and its impact is being felt daily in towns and cities across Britain … We’ve seen, time and again, this year that a decision made on one day in Washington DC is felt the next day in Washington, Tyne and Wear,” he said.

GB News is broadcast in the UK on streaming channels regulated by broadcast regulator Ofcom, including the new US show, which airs on UK television from midnight until 2am every day.

An Ofcom spokesperson said it had an “ongoing duty to be satisfied, as the independent UK broadcasting regulator, that broadcast licensees remain fit and proper to hold their licences” and that it kept “all licensees under review”.

For Richard Wilson, co-founder of the Stop Funding Hate campaign group, GB News’ “relentless promotion” of Trump’s Government through this new show “makes a mockery of the channel’s claim to be a champion of free speech”.

“Just at the moment that Trump is stepping up his attacks on freedom of expression in the United States, this toxic channel is doubling-down on its effort to ingratiate itself with the MAGA movement – and import the Trump playbook to Britain,” he added.

Polls indicate that about 70% of Brits now have a negative view of America’s President – with Wilson saying this demonstrates “how out of touch GB News is with the UK public”.

Night One: A Love-In for Trump

Hosts Bev Turner and Ben Leo have both rejected man-made climate change, espoused anti-vaccine views, and appeared to cast doubt on the Coronavirus pandemic being real.

Content from the inaugural US show included frequent praise for Donald Trump and his MAGA backers by the GB News hosts and their guests – as well as praise for GB News from MAGA figures.

Turner’s heavily pro-Trump commentary has previously included her saying that she believes “we’ve got such amazingly exciting times ahead” under the President, and on another occasion, “where Trump goes, hopefully the UK will follow”.

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Leo has also praised Trump, previously called the climate crisis a “climate scam”, and frequently uses far-right tropes about a so-called immigrant invasion.

He has previously referred to pro-immigration politicians as “traitors” and said of the US President: “I think President Trump, in decades to come, will be remembered as one of the greatest US presidents in living history. He has shifted the Overton window on everything from mass deportations, from the trans debate, take your pick … I think his face should be carved into Mount Rushmore.”

The first programme featured an exclusive interview with senior Trump advisor, former Fox News anchor and 2020 election result-denier Kari Lake, who – along with Leo – repeatedly castigated the UK on immigration, free speech, and the BBC licence fee, while calling for Nigel Farage to become the next Prime Minister.

Subsequent shows cemented GB News’ apparent Trumpian worldview.

Night Two: Paracetamol Panic

On its second airing, Turner backed Donald Trump’s announcement urging pregnant women to stop taking tylenol – the US name for paracetamol – claiming, without firm evidence, that it caused autism.

She said: “I just find it astonishing when Wes Streeting comes out as our Health Secretary the morning after and just says this is wrong, as though he has evidence … I imagine he hasn’t even read their report by the time he went on breakfast telly this morning.”

She claimed that doctors may now recommend taking paracetamol to people on the basis that they do not like Trump, saying: “The trouble is, if people go into the doctors and the doctors hate Donald Trump and they say ‘I’m pregnant, should I take paracetamol?’ The doctors are going to say, yeah, take paracetamol, don’t listen to that Donald Trump.”

She added: “Social media is literally awash with people, pregnant women today on TikTok … it blows my mind, necking tylenol just to say ‘you take this, Donald Trump’ as they put tylenol down their gullet with their pregnant bump.

“What’s wrong with those women? They [have] completely lost their mind. They are that politically enraged by Donald Trump that they would risk the health of their baby rather than listen to people who have their best interests at heart.”

Right-wing American commentator Stephen Kent appeared on the programme, drawing a comparison between diverse London and “Pakistan or India”.

“The idea that Britain should be British and that, when you go to London, it should feel like the storybooks and the history books that you were promised is not a controversial idea,” he said. “You’re not going to London to visit Pakistan or India.”

Kent described climate advocacy as having “religious fundamentalist energy”, suggesting it meant “we need to cleanse the Earth of human beings”.

Meanwhile Neil Oliver, who has platformed antisemitic conspiracy theories on his YouTube show, also made an appearance. His output has largely disappeared from TV broadcasts but he remains a GB News host online, where content is largely unregulated by Ofcom.

Night Three: Injecting Bleach

In the third show, Turner challenged a guest, Mally Smith, who had said of Trump’s attack on tylenol: “We also should have scepticism if we’re taking medical advice from one guy who told us to inject bleach during Covid.”

Turner replied: “Just to clarify, he was talking about hydroxychloroquine, which, let’s face it, sounds like a bleach, which was a medication which we now know did well on Covid.”

Smith responded: “He did not. He actually said we should inject bleach.”

In April 2020, President Trump said at a press conference, as the first wave of the Coronavirus was taking hold in the US: “I see the disinfectant where it knocks it [Covid] out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? So it’d be interesting to check that.”

Night Four: Firing Squads

On the show’s fourth airing, Turner said she believed bringing back the death penalty in the UK “would dramatically cut crime, I guarantee it”.

She asked a guest: “President Trump’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi, has announced that she’s seeking to apply the death penalty across the whole of the United States. But with Britain’s crime rocketing, is it time to do the same, bring back the death penalty as the ultimate deterrent?”

She also suggested that Charlie Kirk’s alleged murderer should be killed “by firing squad”.

Turner called the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ protest rally in London on 13 September, organised by far-right convicted activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’), a “celebration, I would say, of Britishness on the streets of London”.

The Metropolitan Police described the event as “a very challenging day that saw disorder, violence directed at officers, and 26 officers injured”. There were dozens of arrests for offences including affray, violent disorder, assaults, and criminal damage.

In another segment, right-wing British-Indian activist Aman Bhogal claimed that the UK Government’s plans for digital IDs presented “a very, very slippery socialist slope to full-blooded communism” and that Keir Starmer “might as well rename the country the People’s Republic of North London”.

The programmes have aired frequent claims from Turner and Leo that the Prime Minister should replicate Trump’s border policy, with Turner declaring to a guest that “we” – referring either to GB News or the UK – “are here to be saved!”

Night Five: Language Problems

On the programme’s fifth outing, Leo claimed that “there’s some streets [in the UK] where they don’t speak English at all. I went to one in Leicester the other week”. It is unclear whether he spoke to every resident on these unspecified streets.

According to the latest 2021 Census data, more than 91% (52.6 million) of residents in Britain, aged three years and over, had English (and English or Welsh in Wales) as a main language. A further 7.1% (4.1 million) were proficient in English but did not speak it as their main language.

Guest Raheem Kassam – Editor-in-Chief of the London edition of the Steve Bannon-founded Breitbart News and a former advisor to Nigel Farage – also branded the UK civil service’s “quote unquote, deep state” as “nefarious” and “entrenched”.

Night Six: Big Guns for All

Leo delivered a flurry of concerning comments on the sixth night of the show.

On anti-fascist movement Antifa being classed by the Trump administration as “domestic terrorists”, he said that “we should do the same in the UK”.

On US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) making light of deportations, he said: “As a Brit who has 50,000 illegal migrants flooding the Channel since Labour took power, I quite enjoyed that.”

He praised Trump’s military deployments to Democrat cities, adding: “I love them. I love seeing the National Guard on the streets of DC. They make me feel safe … I salute them.”

And he suggested bringing in the military against asylum seekers in the UK: “President Trump sends in the military to defend immigration officials in Portland, in Oregon. He’s literally sent in the big guns, the army’s there, and they’re protecting the ICE agents against the lunatics from Antifa. Do we need to do the same thing in the UK?”

Night Seven: High Steaks

On the show’s seventh night, Leo cast doubt on Trump’s criminal convictions, the pandemic, what he called the “green scam”, and US election results.

Commenting on the UK Government’s plans for digital IDs, he suggested that it was a form of social control, claiming, without evidence, that it could be used to monitor how much meat people eat.

“Maybe they’d say … you’ve had too many steaks this year … Your carbon footprint is doing harm to the nation … You are eating chickpeas and gruel for the next six months until your social credit score is big enough,” he claimed.

Leo added: “Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I don’t care.”

The GB News anchor also referred to the Coronavirus as a “so-called pandemic”.

Commenting on the 2020 US Presidential Election, which President Joe Biden won, Leo gave a nod to Donald Trump’s debunked claims of election fraud, saying: “Wasn’t it interesting that 20 million less people voted in the election last year than the 2020 Election?… Where did 20 million votes go?” The answer is that many Democrats stayed at home.

In another segment, he said that he was “pro-gun”, adding a usual (and much parodied) pro-gun trope: “I argue guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”

While he conceded that it may be preferable to have no guns, he added: “At a time when criminals, bad people, bad hombres, have access to all sorts of weapons, the only sane response can be: you need to make sure you’re armed yourself.” ■

A 20-Year Plan To Take Down the BBC

Almost 20 years ago, Dominic Cummings was calling for the “end of the BBC in its current form” and advocating to make the broadcasting environment a more favourable one for the right.

The plan of the man who would go on to become Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s controversial chief advisor was first outlined in a series of blog posts for the think tank Cummings then headed – the now defunct New Frontiers Foundation.

Cummings described the BBC as “a mortal enemy” of the Conservatives and wrote that there were “three structural things” the right needed to happen. These were the “undermining of the BBC’s credibility”; the “creation of a Fox News equivalent/talk radio shows/bloggers etc. to shift the centre of gravity”; and “the end of the ban on TV political advertising”.

In Cummings’ eyes, the “privileged closed world” of the BBC needed to be “turned upside down” – “its very existence should be the subject of a very intense and well-funded campaign”.

All of this went alongside plans to keep the BBC chronically underfunded and to abolish the licence fee. This would keep the corporation cowed and compliant, it was argued.

Parts of the plan began to be enacted by the Conservatives.

One of the first acts of David Cameron’s Government, for instance, was to compel the BBC to take on funding for the World Service and free TV licences for the over-75s (there was no compensating rise in the licence fee).

Squeezing the BBC financially was attractive to the Conservatives on several levels.

First, it has long been a common view within the right of the party that the licence fee is an unfair compulsory tax. This ideological objection fits nicely with the views of the right-wing owners of the majority of the UK’s print media, who see themselves as being in direct competition with the corporation.

But there is more to it. Restricting the BBC’s income, and constantly questioning the existence of its funding model, also helps to keep it in line. BBC bosses saw the threat to abolish the licence fee looming behind them like a terrifying black shadow. And the response from successive director-generals, from Mark Thompson onwards, has been to appease those seeking to destroy the broadcaster.

Among those most passionate about its destruction was Boris Johnson, who despite first coming to notoriety through his own appearances on the BBC, had long dreamed of neutering the corporation. “The only two things Boris really cares about are Brexit and killing off the BBC,” one close ally of his told this newspaper while Johnson was Prime Minister.

Another key element of the plan – not said out loud at this point – was to insert ‘true believers’ into key editorial positions, and to encourage others – such as former Director-General Tony Hall – not to rock the boat by too rigorously holding the Government to account.

As a result, with some honourable exceptions, the BBC was often timid to the point of cowardice during the Brexit and pandemic periods – fearful and reluctant to call out the misleading statements of Johnson’s Vote Leave campaign and the Conservative Governments that have followed.

The effect has been untold damage to the country.

The damning evidence given to the Covid Inquiry, and the economic and political damage caused by Brexit, is evidence of how badly the national broadcaster has failed Britain and why journalists in other parts of Europe shake their heads sorrowfully about the corporation’s downfall – while questioning how it could have been allowed to happen.

It is a good question.

The BBC’s Policy of Appeasement

The answer is that politically-motivated actors made it happen, facilitated and enabled by cowardly senior figures within the BBC, who thought that the best way to ensure the broadcaster’s survival was a policy of appeasement.

Under its former Director-General Tony Hall, the BBC enacted a series of editorial decisions which appeared primarily designed to appease the Conservative Government. One of the worst – in terms of its long-term consequences – was his order, following the 2016 EU Referendum, to treat Brexit as a ‘done deal’. This edict almost completely excluded the voices of the 48% of voters who had sought to remain in the EU from the BBC’s output for around two years – amounting to an egregious failure to inform democratic debate.

Hall’s attitude towards booking guests from the cluster of right-wing think tanks based in London’s Tufton Street was also hugely damaging. These organisations – most of which are not transparent about their sources of funding – continue to have a large presence on BBC programming, where they are allowed to pose as independent academic research bodies while refusing to reveal their anonymous funders.

Also central to the rot during these years was an approach to political ‘balance’ which has mostly benefited the right. Rather than trying to establish the truth on a given subject, BBC news programmes were too often content to merely present different – usually extreme – points of view. This approach helped to create a false equivalence between experts with views grounded on peer-reviewed evidence-based knowledge, and individuals from right-wing think tanks and pressure groups which rarely bothered with such things.

As a result, instead of educating and enlightening its audiences, the BBC all too often presents a ‘he says this, but she says that’ narrative that fosters a feeling that there are legitimate debates on topics where none really exist, because the evidence so overwhelmingly points the other way. This was most famously seen when climate change denier Lord Nigel Lawson was wheeled out for Radio 4’s Today programme to ‘balance’ the opinion of pretty much every scientist working in the field.

This approach to ‘balance’ has been continued by Lord Hall’s successor as Director-General Tim Davie, a former Conservative candidate, who stunned journalists at the corporation late last year after deciding to address a closed meeting of the influential 1922 Committee of Conservative backbench MPs.

During the meeting, he apparently assured his audience that Sir Robbie Gibb – a former BBC editor who went on to be Theresa May’s director of communications – was being given a key role in ensuring BBC ‘impartiality’. Sir Robbie was drafted onto the BBC’s Board by the Government he supports.

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The Chairman of that body until last year was Richard Sharp, another committed Conservative and close confidant of the Prime Minister who appointed him, Boris Johnson. In 2020, Sharp helped Johnson secure a loan guarantee for £800,000 from another friend, Canadian businessman Sam Blyth. This happened when Johnson was Prime Minister and as Sharp was in the process of applying for the job of BBC Chairman. Sharp told the UK’s top civil servant of the time, Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, about the arrangement, but then had another private meeting with Johnson and Blyth at Chequers.

The idea that a candidate for the chairmanship of the BBC could be that close to the Prime Minister of the day should have been enough to rule him out. He should never have been let anywhere near the job. But, in fact, he was chosen by the Government precisely because of his political views and attitude towards the BBC.

Sharp did not, of course, content himself with a hands-off role. Instead he meddled in editorial affairs, including intervening in senior editorial appointment processes. He even accused the BBC of “liberal bias” in an interview with The Sunday Times in December 2022. It is hard not to draw the conclusion that he was brought in to help bring the corporation down.

Mired in accusations of conflicts of interest, Sharp eventually resigned last April 2023. But not before much damage had been done.

Off-Balance: Compliance on the Inside

So how does the BBC’s top-level commitment to appease the Conservatives, and to advance the party’s agenda, play out in the lower ranks of the BBC?

The Conservatives have been able to rely on individuals with very influential editorial roles who have helped frame the country’s political discourse on a daily basis.

While not necessarily Conservative supporters, these senior editors, it is alleged, came under the influence of Downing Street through political pressure and the need for access.

The result of this has been what one former senior political journalist at the corporation described as a “culture of fear”.

“There was a period which coincided with the aftermath of the 2019 General Election and the Covid pandemic when BBC bosses were absolutely terrified of Downing Street,” they said. “What the Government, then under Cummings and [Johnson’s communications director] Lee Cain, managed to do was convince the BBC that they [in Downing Street] were the embodiment of public opinion and that the BBC was the embodiment of everything that wasn’t.”

This strategy was pursued “mercilessly” by Downing Street, according to the insider, and was highly successful in terms of being internalised by senior figures.

“It got into the heads of a lot of bosses up to and including the Director-General himself – that we were all basically ‘metropolitan liberals’ who weren’t representative of anyone and that we needed to be bloody careful because, if we stepped out of line, then we knew what was going to happen.”

The big problem with this drive for so-called ‘impartiality’ was that the demands for ‘balance’ only seemed to come from one political direction.

“I don’t remember anyone ever saying to us ‘oh I just don’t think we’re properly reflecting the Green Party view or the liberal-left view on this story’,” one former BBC journalist said. “It was always just slanted in one direction – which was basically the nativist, authoritarian, Conservative direction. The pressure was always from the Conservative direction and never from the Labour direction.”

Governments of all colours have always sought to put pressure on the BBC. But, while in the past, editors may have been able to resist this pressure, in its more recent weakened state, senior executives and editors appeared to be far too ready to buckle.

“I would get messages communicated to me directly from editors telling us to be so careful because the Government was out for the BBC and its journalists,” one former BBC political journalist said. “That was obviously the result of quite substantial pressure from the Government. But who is really to blame for that? Is it the Government for exacting political pressure or is it the BBC for being so craven to a party which at that time was seen as so hegemonically powerful?”

Katy Searle: A Cosy Relationship

Among those in charge of exerting this pressure was Katy Searle, who headed the BBC’s Westminster operation during the period of the Brexit Referendum campaign, three UK general elections, and the pandemic.

Byline Times has spoken to five people who worked in the Westminster newsroom during this period, who saw Searle in operation at close range. These former and current senior BBC figures said she had a reputation within the organisation of being too close to Downing Street and with a focus on “access journalism”.

One said “she would often rely solely on No 10’s briefing, which would sometimes turn out not to be true. If you come bounding out of your office saying ‘here’s the story!’ it doesn’t create a very good impression”.

It is claimed that Seale would often use the 10am editorial meeting in the Westminster office to stamp her mark on the day’s political coverage. Participants have described how she would routinely repeat the Government line she had been given without properly scrutinising it, causing unease among other journalists. It was also suggested that she would refer to senior Government figures by their nicknames, implying an overly cosy relationship with them.

An example from the pandemic lockdown period, in May 2020, sets the scene.

Then Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock claimed that the Government had achieved its target of carrying out 100,000 Coronavirus tests a day – a number later found to not only be wildly optimistic, but would have actually been impossible to calculate at that time.

A source claims Searle entered the editorial meeting that day claiming Hancock had hit his target. She was challenged on this assertion, and it was pointed out to her that the Government could not possibly know that it had achieved the target, because not enough time had elapsed for the tests to be returned and processed. One contributor to the meeting said the BBC would “risk looking ridiculous” if it reported the claim as fact.

But Searle apparently ensured that the BBC News’ online team “led with the line all day”, according to the source, “and everyone just did as she told them because they were scared” and so “they just rolled over”.

Indeed, the BBC’s handling of the pandemic was a particular matter of concern within the organisation.

One former colleague noted that there was a view within the broadcaster that the crisis could help the BBC ‘prove its worth’ with Downing Street – which led to one former colleague of Searle’s describing the BBC as effectively becoming a “state broadcaster” during the period.

This was all part of what the former colleague described as “an incumbency bias” shown towards the Government by Searle and the BBC. They claim this had an impact on what stories the corporation reported and how they were covered.

The situation was exacerbated by a merger between the management of BBC political programming and BBC News under Searle. This removed the barrier between the Westminster news operation, which was heavily reliant on access to Downing Street and Government figures for stories. Political programming had previously not had the same imperative to maintain such a comfortable relationship with the Government.

Searle, it is claimed, had a particular reputation within the BBC for trying to squash stories that were damaging to Downing Street. A former colleague provided two examples of this.

One again related to Matt Hancock and revelations about his lockdown rule-breaking, which were initially dismissed by Searle who told colleagues that it was not a story – only for the BBC to have to reverse its position once the controversy was widely picked up by other news outlets. Searle was also allegedly unhappy when a BBC camera crew was eventually sent to doorstep Hancock about the story.

Then there was the alleged bullying of officials by Priti Patel. It is claimed that Searle was very dismissive of the story and suggested that the BBC should not cover it. It was later noted with frustration by other broadcasters that the BBC had failed to ask the then Home Secretary about it when a reporter conducted what is known as a ‘pool’ interview with Patel on behalf of all broadcasters after the story broke.

One source said Searle “used fear to get the whole newsroom to do as she wanted” and that the “threat of job cuts was never far away” – which she “used all the time”.

“People were scared to say anything – she would try to humiliate us, and shout us down so that we wouldn’t do it again the next day,” the source added. “She would also threaten to take correspondents off air permanently.” Searle was, they said, very direct.

The source also described how several Westminster journalists had been subjected to “real Alex Ferguson-style hairdryer treatment” – a reference to the way the former Manchester United manager would shout into the faces of errant players from very short range.

Searle would often focus particularly on the online team as its output would set the tone across the BBC and it is seen as a trusted news source in the country. “She was continually asking them to tweak headlines – everyone knew what was going on,” the source added.

It is claimed that Searle would talk to Downing Street and pass on its views – not as an element of a story to be explored or challenged, but as a command to be followed. “She would come out of her office and tell us all ‘here’s the line’,” the insider said. “It really felt as if we were a bureau of [Conservative] Central Office.”

Katy Searle declined to comment.

A BBC insider said she was “backed to the hilt” by Laura Kuenssberg, then the BBC’s Political Editor. “They were best best buddies,” they said.

During the pandemic, Kuenssberg was heard to remonstrate with colleagues who she felt were being too critical of the Government. “Oh look guys,” one source – who heard the exchange – quoted her as saying, “it’s really hard what they [the Government] are trying to do. Cut them some slack”.

Laura Kuenssberg: Competition and Scoops

Kuenssberg’s friendly relationship with Downing Street appeared to be driven by the desire for access and the search for scoops.

Chosen as the BBC’s Political Editor in 2015, she was not particularly well-known at the time for her political knowledge and expertise, but was seen as an experienced news journalist. To those who saw her abilities in this sphere – including the authors of this article – she was undoubtedly confident, ambitious, and fluent. She loved being on air, being first with a story, and was always a go-to correspondent whenever airtime had to be filled.

Sadly, this also made her profoundly unsuitable for the role of Political Editor. What the BBC really needed – and what the country needed during this politically turbulent time – was someone who could take a step back and tell the audience when they were being lied to.

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What they got instead was someone who was far too reliant on access to the powerful and who was imbued with a determination to get Downing Street’s version of events out before the competition at Sky or ITN.

Some former colleagues of Kuenssberg and Searle look back at this period with embarrassment and question how close the BBC allowed itself to get to Downing Street under Boris Johnson.

“We had Searle and Kuenssberg there at the helm [in Westminster] during the most unbelievably tricky journalistic episode we’ve ever faced in covering Brexit and the pandemic, with a person in Johnson who they’d already basically decided was this most extraordinarily colourful character who would bring so much life to our coverage,” one former colleague told Byline Times. “And neither of them came with the sort of intellectual heft that was needed to deal with it. So there is a shame and an embarrassment about that.”

For Kuenssberg, access to power was crucial. She was never more than a single phone call or text message away from people right at the heart of power, who would instantly feed her a line to throw on air. Scoops appeared to be all that mattered – even if they were simply spoon-fed from Downing Street.

“There’s a great sort of cachet in getting the story and getting it first and scooping people,” one of Kuenssberg’s allies told this newspaper. “And that inevitably drives closeness and I think the famous park bench moment [in which she sat alongside Johnson and interviewed him in a park] is the prime example of where that just all felt a bit wrong.”

Kuenssberg also faced allegations of bias against the Labour Party and its former leader Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 when the broadcasting regulator Ofcom found that she had inaccurately reported his views about shoot-to-kill policies in the aftermath of the terror attacks in Paris. She later apologised after helping to spread a false story about a Labour activist punching a Conservative advisor during the 2019 General Election campaign.

Broader relations with Labour hit a particular low during this period when Corbyn’s team was misled into agreeing to a major election campaign interview with the BBC’s Andrew Neil under the understanding that Johnson had also agreed to take part. In reality, sources on both sides say no such agreement had been made. So as Corbyn suffered the Neil treatment, Johnson simply refused to take part. Although embarrassing at the time, there was little fear at the BBC of upsetting Labour under Corbyn, sources say. “There was just this general sense of them [Labour] not being in the game.”

Internally, Kuenssberg was widely expected to be moved on after the 2019 General Election. But, when the pandemic hit, those plans were apparently derailed. Kuenssberg instead played a big part in the BBC’s coverage of the Government’s handling of the crisis, hitting a particular low point following Dominic Cummings’ infamous trip to Barnard Castle.

Cummings had been accused of breaching lockdown rules by driving hundreds of miles north, culminating with a jaunt to Barnard Castle to ‘test his eyesight’. The story was broken by Pippa Crerar, who then worked for the Daily Mirror. But before most people had read the story or even heard about it, Kuenssberg tweeted Downing Street’s rebuttal, effectively undermining Crerar’s genuine scoop. She appeared to have completely bought into the idea that her role was to tell the audience what she had been told by her top level sources – no matter what their credibility.

But at a time when Britain’s Prime Minister and the people around him lied as a matter of routine, the BBC’s political coverage, fronted by Kuenssberg and policed by Katy Searle, risked losing them credibility too.

Sir Robbie Gibb: A Right-Hand Man

Laura Kuenssberg left her role as Political Editor in 2022, while Katy Searle left the BBC entirely the following year.

Today, however, at least one high level ‘true believer’ is still exerting considerable influence within the organisation, supported by others in the editorial infrastructure.

Sir Robbie Gibb’s position on the BBC Board gives him the power to enforce a Conservative agenda on BBC journalists through his influence on middle managers. Alongside fellow travellers, such as Director-General Tim Davie, they are ensuring that the broadcaster continues to move to the right.

Former Guardian and now Prospect Editor Alan Rusbridger has recently done sterling work in exposing Sir Robbie’s role in the Conservative capture of the BBC. He describes him as “the most important journalist at the BBC, even though he doesn’t work there. And therefore he’s one of the most important journalists in the country”.

Rusbridger has pointed out Sir Robbie’s links with Downing Street and the broadcasting regulator Ofcom.

One former BBC journalist, who observed him closely when he was the Editor of the BBC’s Daily Politics programme, described Sir Robbie as being “obsessed with the Brexit agenda” long before the Cameron Government announced the referendum.

“He would tell output editors to get Farage and other right-wing figures on to peddle that agenda – at a time when its polling position just didn’t merit that amount of coverage,” the source said. “He would relentlessly drive the Brexit agenda and, because it was so extensively covered by the Daily Politics, other programmes – like Newsnight and Today – would pick it up and run with it. So when Brexit happened, Robbie thought that it was all down to him – and, in a way, it was.”

Internally, he was widely seen as a surly, humourless, individual who often scared subordinates into tiptoeing obedience. He was never popular at the BBC.

However, one source insisted that they “have a certain admiration for him”.

“He’s loathsome, but he’s a politically-motivated operator – and he operated,” they told Byline Times. “And he did it all flying under the radar and went almost completely unnoticed.”

Sir Robbie was later appointed as Prime Minister Theresa May’s director of communications and even given a knighthood for his services. The fact that he now sits on the BBC Board, and is part of a four-member committee tasked with ensuring BBC impartiality, is truly shocking.

But it is not at all surprising.

For his placement is all part of a plan that has been followed for two decades – a plan to keep the BBC timid, compliant and on-side.

Even as a general election defeat looms, the Conservatives are keeping up the pressure by attacking the BBC’s supposed lack of impartiality – at the same time as they turn a blind-eye to GB News, which boasts current Conservative MPs as regular paid ‘presenters’.

These are dangerous times for Ofcom and for the BBC. Both organisations risk being seen – if they are not already – as Conservative mouthpieces, at the precise moment when the polls suggest that the national mood is swinging strongly the other way.

The question is whether the BBC will carry on down this road of appeasement – and what challenges are in its way to changing course.

It was no great surprise that Kemi Badenoch announced that it was now Conservative policy for the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Many in her party have agitated for this for years and, with Reform UK already making the same proposal, it is one way for Badenoch to try to save her increasingly embattled leadership.

Yet surprising or not, it marked the crossing of a Rubicon.

This is not a fringe party as Reform still is, despite its current position in the opinion polls. This is the official opposition, and the party that has ruled the country for the majority of the years since the advent of modern democracy.

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In the city of Thebes, at the height of a pandemic, the head of state Oedipus questions his most trusted advisor, Tiresias, as to who the worst transgressor in his country is. He receives a shocking answer. “You,” he is told, “you are the cursed polluter of this land.”

Here the lure of othering, that act of denigration used to secure one’s own status, baits its own trap. In a vain attempt to find some abnormal scapegoat for all the ills of his society, Oedipus discovers that it is himself, the “first of all men”, that is the worst of all offenders.

Sophocles’ Oedipus the King is a classical tragedy of identity politics.

As the ongoing drama of the ‘culture wars’ becomes ever more toxic, and the struggle over the narrative of self is played out as spectacle, it seems a good time to look at one of the founding myths of gender and sexuality.

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Hardeep Matharu is shortlisted for the Editors’ Editor 2025 Award by the British Society of Magazine Editors.

I became a journalist because I am curious about the forces that shape us.

The artist Paul Klee once said that art does not represent what we see, but makes us see. And I quickly learned the same is true of journalism: far from being a neutral arbiter of information, it has the same power to craft the ideas we think with, not just the ideas we think about.

I see this being affirmed, once again, as the media and adjacent political class create the conditions for a potentially stark future for the UK – even with an election still four years away.

It is not simply that it is easy to forget that a Labour Government was elected just last July with a considerable majority. Or the endless headlines on Nigel Farage’s Reform UK – much of the coverage framed around the prospect of a man whose party has five MPs becoming the next Prime Minister.

It is that the temperature of the water we swim in is heating up, and has been for years, but is now getting obviously hotter, in different ways, all around us – without us hearing anything meaningful about this.

A friend I have known since I was a teenager recently told of their concerns that the suburb in which they live is full of St George’s and Union flags. “I know it sounds stupid, but this is the first time in my life that I’m now thinking of myself in terms of my race.” A person of colour, they are concerned about what a turn to the hard-right for the UK might mean for their everyday lives and that of their children. They asked me what it would look like. I didn’t have any answers, but said we can witness events in the US as evidence of what happens to a society when the frames of what is permissible to say and do are widened to the extremes.

In Liverpool for this year’s Labour Party Conference, a few weeks earlier, a similar sentiment was shared by someone living close to the Bell Hotel in Epping, the location of protests against its housing of asylum seekers. They said security guards now positioned outside the building marked out that there were ‘others’ inside, and that they would see children who live in the hotel playing outside – behind the fencing erected around the hotel. A disturbing scene, in their view. The individual, whose children are of mixed heritage, said they drove them to and from school every day now.

In line for dinner in the city centre, an older couple shared how they would not be voting for Reform but believed it had a good approach on immigration. While Liverpool had always been multicultural, the man said, what had happened in the past few years was not right. He referenced an apparent increase in black babies in prams in the streets – “white people don’t have big families like the Africans do” – and was shocked when he asked me my name. “Oh, have I said racist things in front of you?” he responded – before mentioning that Chinese and Indian immigrants were his ‘favourites’ because of their work ethic and contributions to British society over many years.

The complexity of this increasingly fragmented political culture had been on my mind all summer.

On the evening of 13 September – the same day as the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ protest rally organised by far-right convicted activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’) in central London – I was generously afforded a media ticket to the Last Night of the Proms. I’d seen it broadcast on TV for years and jumped at the chance to stand beside the stage with the Promenaders. Aside from the stellar music, I thought it would provide some interesting insights.

While the atmosphere inside the Royal Albert Hall was friendly and pleasant, I also found it alienating.

A simple bite to eat set me back £40 in one of the restaurants. Speaking to a man who had travelled from Oxford, he agreed with me that our part of the audience was not diverse in any way – particularly in terms of race or class. He was surprised to find that I was Indian (he, like the Liverpudlian man, assumed I was a white woman from my appearance) and told me about his wife, who also had Indian heritage. I noticed two small badges on his shirt placed next to each other – one of the St George’s flag and another of the Union flag. He said he had only put them on once he had reached the Royal Albert Hall and would be removing them again before the journey home on public transport – because he didn’t want anyone to see them and come to their own interpretations about why he was wearing them.

As we approached the end of the concert, the flag-waving ramped up. European Union flags, as well as those of other countries, alongside those of the UK, were vigorously waved and Rule, Britannia! belted out. It was joyous but also exclusive; removed. A ‘bubble’ of an evening.

Walking to the tube afterwards, I saw news reports of the violent scenes from the day’s protest rally. The gap, I felt, was ‘too big’: between those people on the streets and those in the Royal Albert Hall. Not just in terms of the obvious difference of their behaviour that day, but because of the truth that we are living in many different worlds in the UK which can’t seem to find a way to relate to, or understand, each other.

And instead of fostering more cohesion, or offering a new vision, our journalists and politicians can speak only of immigration – that is the extent of our ‘national conversation’. Presented as the ultimate explanation for this fragmentation, it merely masks all of the underlying conditions that have created an unequal country alienated from itself.

This is why I found Keir Starmer’s warning that the UK risks becoming an “island of strangers” such a seminal political moment this year – because it was the right conclusion to draw for the wrong reason. Immigration is seized upon because the media-political class knows it gives some voice to the grievance and justified disconnection people feel. But the real reasons for this are not excavated, more honestly or profoundly.

Even on basic factual inquiry, British journalism shows shockingly little curiosity in digging deeper.

When Green Party Leader Zack Polanski challenged Reform’s Zia Yusuf on BBC’s Question Time about the closeness of the relationship between his Leader, Nigel Farage, and the former Reform Leader in Wales, Nathan Gill – who has admitted taking bribes to further Russian interests – the exchange was cut short by Fiona Bruce. Quickly intervening, she said: “I think there are other things that the audience want to talk about, am I right?” When a vague ‘yes’ followed, she carried on. “Where are we with time?”

On the verge of a profound schism I fear, unless we find some common reality again which does not require us to discount the experience of others. ✺

Saudi Arabia is set to host the 2034 World Cup, and its Pro League is busy raiding top European clubs for talent, including the likes of Christiano Ronaldo. The country’s shocking human rights record under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi have taken a back seat to the oil state’s vast wealth, as Adrian Goldberg explains in this edited extract from his new book, Where’s The Money Gone? The Battle for the Soul of English Football.

Come and hear Adrian Goldberg in conversation with Niall Cooper (Chief Executive of football advocacy group Fair Game) and Charlie Methven (former Sunderland AFC director now running Mount Pleasant FC in Jamaica and Mons FC on Belgium) at the book launch on 16 September. Details below.

When Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) initially tried to buy Newcastle United in 2020, the Premier League rejected the takeover, recognising the PIF as an arm of the Saudi Government.

Its objections to the Saudi takeover had nothing to do with government ownership per se, however. The key issue was TV rights.

In the Gulf region, the Premier League had sold these to beIN Sports, a broadcaster based in Qatar, the Government of which was locked in a bitter diplomatic rivalry with the Saudis.

In 2017, Saudi Arabia severed all diplomatic ties with the Qataris and banned the sale of beIN receivers as part of a wider economic blockade. The Government in Riyadh promoted a rival service called beoutQ, which was, in effect, a state-sanctioned illegal streaming service.

This bitter piracy row was playing out in the eight months during which the PIF’s possible purchase of Newcastle was being reviewed by the Premier League.

With the decision still up in the air, the Saudi Public Investment Fund withdrew its offer to buy Newcastle, blaming the “unforeseeably prolonged process”. In a statement, the PIF sought to distance itself from the Government of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), describing itself as “an autonomous and purely commercial investor”.

What was going on behind the scenes paints an altogether different picture.

According to the Daily Mail, MbS was “enraged” by the collapse of the deal. It quoted a text he had sent to then Prime Minister Boris Johnson in June 2020, saying that “we expect the English Premier League to reconsider and correct its wrong conclusion” – even though, at that stage, no decision had been announced.

In October 2021, the deal was back on again.

What happened in the intervening 16 months is the subject of much intrigue and speculation.

Premier League chief executive Richard Masters said there was “no pressure applied” on him by ministers to approve the takeover and Johnson insisted that “these are commercial matters for the parties concerned”. He told Parliament that “the Government was not involved at any point” in the takeover.

Correspondence released under Freedom of Information to The Athletic suggests that, as with many of Johnson’s statements, this may require a flexible interpretation of the truth.

These emails showed that the British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Neil Crompton, discussed the takeover with PIF officials, although large chunks of their conversation were redacted. Full disclosure, it was said, “could potentially damage the bilateral relationship between the UK and Saudi Arabia”.

WhatsApp messages leaked in 2024 also suggested that Crompton had talked directly with MbS about the issue.

The then Middle East and North Africa Minister James Cleverley also requested an update on the bid when talking to the Saudi Ambassador to the UK.

A breathtaking compromise was finally brokered in October 2021.

The Premier League said it had “received legally binding assurances that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will not control Newcastle United Football Club”. The precise nature of those “legally binding assurances” has never been revealed or the consequences for the PIF if they are broken.

The idea that there is somehow a separation between the Public Investment Fund and the absolute monarch who chairs it was contradicted by its own lawyers in a US court hearing investigating Saudi disruption of the professional golf tour in 2022. The PIF’s legal team argued that it did not need to hand over evidence because it was protected by a federal law which protects foreign leaders and government from prosecution in America.

In other words, it was demanding protection as a government entity in the US, while insisting in the UK that it was somehow divorced from the Saudi leadership.

Nevertheless, the fudge did its job.

By accepting that the PIF was operating at arm’s length from the Saudi Government, the Premier League was absolved of its responsibility for putting MbS through its potentially problematic owners and directors test.

No doubt it was relieved. Had it turned down a bidder believed by the CIA to have blood on his hands over the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, it had the potential to cause a full-blown diplomatic incident.

Adrian Goldberg will be in conversation with Niall Cooper (Chief Executive of football advocacy group Fair Game) and Charlie Methven (former Sunderland AFC director now running Mount Pleasant FC in Jamaica and Mons FC on Belgium) at the book launch on 16th September from 6.30-8.30 pm at Vout-O-Reenee’s, The Crypt, 30 Prescot Street, London, E1 8BB.

Entry is free, but please RSVP to rachael@bylinetimes.com

Where’s The Money Gone? The Battle for the Soul of English Football is published by Byline Books. This extract appears in edition #77 of Byline Times.

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A quietly unsettling paper recently appeared in AIP Advances, an open-access, peer-reviewed scientific mega journal published by the American Institute of Physics. Its author, Dr Melvin Vopson of the University of Portsmouth, proposed a theory that, if true, could upend our understanding of gravity – and perhaps even God.

Gravity, he argued, is not a force acting at a distance, nor a curvature of space-time, but a computational process: the universe may function like a cosmic computer, drawing matter together to reduce informational complexity.

An online article on the study published by the University of Portsmouth carried the headline “scientist suggests gravity further supports theory we are living in a simulated universe”.

In short, we may all be in the Matrix.

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When Ian Perkes, a Brixham fish exporter on England’s south coast, first spoke openly about the toll Brexit had taken on his business, it had only been three weeks since the UK had officially left the European Union on 31 January 2020.

During those 21 days, he hadn’t been able to send a single shipment of fish to Europe.

He was frustrated with the Conservative Government for not providing exporters with the correct commodity codes, a key part of the paperwork required to import products into Europe. When it did finally provide him with what it said were the correct codes, French authorities insisted that they were not correct and rejected the entire consignment.

It was a tough pill to swallow for a man who, having himself voted for Brexit, had told America’s PBS NewsHour two years before that “there is never going to be any fish left on the dock” and that “every fish here for the last 30 years is sold, nothing is ever left”.

After Brexit, Perkes’ fish weren’t left on the dock, but instead were rejected in France where they were destroyed at his own expense.

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Heidi Siegmund Cuda: As I travel through Europe, there seems to be a disconcerting lack of awareness about Russia’s war in Ukraine, even though its outcome will directly impact Europe’s future. How do you see this?

Marci Shore: Heidi, you’re travelling mostly in Western Europe. I’m travelling mostly in east-central Europe, and am currently in Lithuania, where the war does feel very present. Lithuanians, while not panicked per se, are preparing for war. This is true in Poland as well, and from what my colleagues there tell me, I sense also in Latvia, Estonia, and Finland.

Are European leaders finally moving in a more united direction to combat Russian aggression? Are they doing enough?

I’m sure there are things happening behind the scenes that I don’t know about, but my short answer would be yes: they are moving in a more united direction, but painfully cautiously and agonisingly slowly. Europe has to give up its Freudian denial about what’s happening in the US and mobilise.

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Given the Trump administration’s hostile rhetoric towards Europe, its mixed signals about NATO and other US security alliances, and its ambivalent stance on Russia’s war in Ukraine, Europeans are understandably worried about what this might mean for their own security.

They might take some comfort in a recent opinion poll conducted by the Reagan Institute about the foreign policy attitudes of American voters, which indicates continuing strong bipartisan support for US engagement in the world. But they may also be concerned about Americans’ more lukewarm attitude towards Europe in the findings.

“Americans are not retreating from the world – they are rallying around a foreign policy grounded in peace through strength, strong alliances, and morality,” the findings state. “They want the United States to counter authoritarian adversaries, to support our allies and friends, and to uphold freedom and democracy worldwide.”

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The Plumb-Pudding in Danger, James Gillray’s 1805 cartoon of the French Emperor Napoleon and the British Prime Minister Pitt the Younger, not only satirised the two warring superpowers as they carved up the Atlantic and the European landmass between them, it also visualised the Victorian ‘great power’ theory of history.

Napoleon, of course, did not gobble up continental Europe for long, and Britain was not content to just patrol the seas riding on its naval supremacy. It had to cross the Channel to defeat France.

But the principles of territorial imperial competition defined much of the era, culminating in the ‘scramble for Africa’ at the end of the 19th Century, and the frustrated ambitions of Germany that led to two world wars.

For most of the postwar period, the United States apparently opposed this imperialistic view of world affairs.

After the carnage of the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson was the key promulgator of a post-imperial order of ‘self-determination’ with the League of Nations as the forum, rather than war and conquest, to resolve international disputes.

After that failed to stop the Second World War, successive American administrations have, at least when it comes to Europe, stood behind a framework of international law, using the voluntary association of NATO to defend it, and the soft power persuasion of major financial investment to bind it. The EU was the ultimate expression of this post-imperial rules-based order of economic interdependency and federated bargaining.

But with the second accession of President Donald Trump, all that has changed. Changed utterly.

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We may doubt how serious he is about gaining control of Greenland and usurping the Danish administration. But it is clear from the verbal attacks of Vice President JD Vance (who has accused European leaders of turning their back on the continent’s “most fundamental values”) and from the pronouncements from the US State Department – and above all the trade war over tariffs – that ‘America First’ Trumpism considers the European Union to be an ideological threat and an economic adversary.

The EU, to many of Trump’s officials, is based on soft ‘woke’ principles. These include Article 1 of Protocol 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights, preventing capital punishment – which EU member states are bound to via the Council of Europe – and an inherent acceptance of compromise and pooled sovereignty. There is nothing more repugnant to the sociopathic anger of ‘MAGA’ supporters than a benign community of nations.

By overtly breaking 80 years of Pax Americana (for all its hypocrisies and deceptions), Trump has emboldened ethno-nationalist authoritarians all over the world.

Vladimir Putin is the obvious beneficiary (so far), with the US administration’s reluctance to help Ukraine – which first prompted the ire of Russia by attempting to rebel and join the EU rather than Putin’s ‘Eurasian Union’.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also used this disruption of the international order to extend his devastation and depopulation of Gaza, so close to European shores.

We seem to be returning to the ‘great power’ era of global affairs, when only ‘might is right’ and missiles are traded between Israel, the US, and Iran in an unstable game of retaliatory power.

Chinese President Xi Jinping will be watching closely as he conducts his military exercises in the Taiwan Straits.

In all these ways, a decades-long postwar period during which nations tended to form large coalitions and tried to negotiate conflicts through international institutions, appears to have come to a sudden, shocking end.

But can a new ‘scramble’ for world dominance replace it? As Bruno Maçães points out in this edition, and as Putin has learned to his cost, merely occupying physical territory is no longer a guarantee of power. Thanks to our economic and social systems, most of the key affairs of the world are conducted in complex networks of finance, trade, governance, and social discourse. To dominate that, you have to build strong, resilient (and often firewalled) virtual worlds.

The EU has done virtually nothing in this realm of virtual soft power, and the US seems determined to dismantle all the key departments dealing with cyber threats, foreign aid, vaccines and medicine, and monitoring global warming.

Beyond the virtual worlds, whether powered by resource-hungry AI servers or vulnerable undersea cables, we are reaching the limits of our ecosystems.

In an updated version of Gillray’s memorable image, all of us are a baked Alaska pudding still in the oven, and globally interdependent when it comes to the consequences of climate change. The new Napoleons and Pitts would be carving up a cake that is irremediably burnt. But perhaps they know that. Hence the hurry.

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