For GB News’s funders, £130 million is a small price to pay for vast influence

GB News has filed its latest accounts, and the headline figures are difficult to spin – even by the notoriously fact-sceptic broadcaster. It has now lost £131 million since its launch in mid-2021, racking up another £26 million during the latest period – the year to May 2025. 

To some extent, GB News has achieved a feat simply by making it this far. Its early broadcasts were a montage of bloopers, epitomised by its star presenter and co-founder Andrew Neil turning an ever-more alarming shade of red as the farce escalated.

GB News has changed a lot since then. Gone are the black curtains that perfectly framed Neil’s scarlet features, replaced by slick sets, coiffed presenters, and hard-right politics. He resigned as chairman and lead presenter three months after launch and later described the channel as looking like “it were coming from the nuclear bunker of the president of North Korea”. 

Indeed, one of the most startling features of the latest GB News accounts – alongside the ever-expanding financial black hole – is the claim that its “mission” is to “provide balanced and fair coverage, ensuring that its journalism is accurate, and conversations are insightful, respectful and set an example by treating others the way they would expect to be treated.”

Let’s take those mission statements in turn. 

On accuracy, GB News presenters have suggested that the Covid vaccine caused “turbo-cancer” and have called the virus a “plandemic” cooked up by ministers and government officials to ensure their future careers in the pharmaceutical industry. It regularly platforms perspectives that contradict the overwhelming scientific consensus on human-caused climate change, including on one occasion airing the claim that seven billion people will die if the world reaches net zero emissions. 

On the question of balance, the broadcaster has previously been fined £100,000 by Ofcom for breaking impartiality rules for giving an “uncontested platform” to the then prime minister Rishi Sunak during an audience Q&A programme. It also employs several Reform UK politicians as presenters – including its leader Nigel Farage - who’s paid roughly £400,000 a year, making the broadcaster his highest source of income - as well as his stablemates Lee Anderson and Matthew Goodwin. 

And on “respectful” conversations, three GB News presenters were sacked in 2023 for either making or defending misogynistic comments on air. More recently, the broadcaster regularly hosted a commentator who has been accused of racism. And, just this week, it allowed a senior Restore party figure to suggest on air that GB News presenter Nana Akua is not fully British, despite having been born in Newcastle.

This reactionary rage bait is propped up by two key shareholders: Sir Paul Marshall, who founded and runs Marshall Wace, one of Europe’s most successful hedge funds, and the Dubai-based investment group Legatum. Marshall, who also owns the right-wing publications UnHerd and The Spectator, is himself an interesting case study in right-wing radicalisation. A former Liberal Democrat, he has spent tens of millions of pounds trying to own the libs who were once his allies. 

The amount of money torched by Marshall and Legatum is often mocked, but in reality their flippant largesse is the acceleration of a worrying trend in British politics. Namely, the super rich have cultivated vehicles to inject their low-tax, anti-regulation, elitist ideologies into political debate. 

Up to now, this has occurred largely through “Tufton Street” think tanks – policy shops based in and around one street in Westminster that drafted David Cameron’s austerity agenda, came up with the blueprint for Brexit, and “incubated” Liz Truss.

Their influence on British politics has been vast, but their clout pales in comparison to GB News. For context, one of the largest Tufton Street think tanks – the Institute of Economic Affairs – has an annual budget of roughly £2 million, which is less than the amount that GB News lost every month on average in the year to May 2025. If cash is indicative of clout, GB News dwarfs its right-wing counterparts.

GB News is a vast, monstrous spectre looming over British politics – a relentless content machine that has executed Steve Bannon’s ploy of “flooding the zone with shit”.

And, in turn, it’s serving as an inspiration to the think tank world. Last year, with funding from Farage’s old mates in the metals industry, a new pro-Reform think tank was established, the Centre for a Better Britain, which claims to be far more ambitious than its Tufton Street predecessors in raising money and rewriting the political agenda. 

The think tank, whose alumnus James Orr has already become Reform’s head of policy, wants to raise more than £25 million over the next few years – assembling the platform for a future Farage government. When asked by the BBC about the ambitions of the think tank, which he previously chaired, Orr told them that he was an admirer of the Heritage Foundation – the U.S. group behind Project 2025, the playbook for Donald Trump’s second term agenda. 

The Centre for a Better Britain – which is openly attempting to court Trump’s donors – is reportedly being investigated by the Electoral Commission for its proximity to Reform. If the regulator believes that the group has been campaigning alongside Farage’s party, it may be required to disclose its funding. 

However, as in the case of GB News, this will be unlikely to dissuade the mega rich and highly ideological from piling their profits into the project. These individuals are increasingly willing to sacrifice their cash in service of their political delusions and ethnic prejudices. And no regulator has so far proven even remotely capable of restraining their distorting, destructive influence. 

Sam Bright is DeSmog’s UK deputy editor and writes a newsletter focused on exposing reactionary populism