Shades of MAGA have come to the UK. Is the media prepared?
Opinion
As Reform rises in the polls and GB News becomes a legitimate competitor to news broadcasters, UK media must not repeat the same mistakes as the Americans.
By any standards it has been a remarkable week for Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party — complete with relatively uncritical media coverage.
The highlights have included Reform’s highest ever performance in opinion polls at 34% — enough, if there were an election today, to form a government, thanks in part to a collapse in support for the Conservatives.
Then from the Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report came the revelation that GB News, the television outlet most sympathetic to Farage and Reform, had shot up the ratings to have the fourth largest reach in the UK across TV, print and radio.
The icing on the cake came on Monday, when Farage was able to successfully launch his “Robin Hood” fable of collecting a one-off fee of £250,000 from returning non doms with the money going directly to the poorest 10 per cent of full-time workers.
The ”Britannia Card”, based on a similar Trump scheme in the US, would protect UK residents whose permanent home is abroad from being taxed on any wealth earned outside the UK, including inheritance tax.
Not much of a Robin Hood
The Robin Hood line went down well in the press, although ironically many believe Robin Hood was a myth.
The stand-out exception was, interestingly, the Daily Mail. There was no mention of the hero of Sherwood Forest in a small, factual piece lodged firmly at the bottom of Page 10. It was a page dominated by a turgid piece by Conservative leader Kemi Banenoch attacking Labour’s social equality plans.
The positioning suggests that the Mail is still having emotional difficulty coming to terms with the Farage surge and the fact that the Conservatives are at a distant third (15% in the latest polls). Such a polling figure could leave the Tories with 12 seats in the House of Commons.
The Times swallowed the Robin Hood line under the headline “Farage pitches a Robin Hood tax”, followed closely by The Sun.
One thing was sadly missing from much of the coverage: any indication of what the overall cost might be. Rather unfortunate you might think, given that Farage and Reform have been accused of the spreading of unfunded proposals in the past.
The missing analysis was supplied by tax expert Dan Niedle and his Tax Policy Associates.
According to Neidle there were three problems with the Farage policy.
Much-needed young professionals would be deterred from coming to the UK because they could not afford the £250,000 cost of the Britannia Card.
The uptake would be low because few would believe this really would provide a lifetime exemption as governments come and go.
Most important of all, Neidle concludes, the scheme would provide a very large and expensive windfall to a small number of very wealthy people at a cost of £34bn in lost government revenue over five years. It would therefore have to be funded by raising taxes or through spending cuts.
Those of the poorest on universal credit would lose much of their windfall anyway.
GB News rises in the rankings
The Reuters Institute report, based on interviews with 100,000 in 48 countries, logs the continuing decline in the share of the traditional media and the rise of social media as primary sources of news, particularly among the young.
In the UK, the good news is that trust in the news is stable but still remains 15 percentage points lower than before the Brexit referendum in 2016.
BBC News has a 60% trust level, followed closely by Channel 4 and ITV both on 56%.
GB News is much lower at 29%, but is markedly more trusted than either the Daily Mail or the Daily Mirror and 12 percentage points ahead of The Sun, trusted by just 17% of the sample.
The big change in this year’s report for the UK is the rise of GB News to fourth position in terms of both weekly use, and also among those who use the service at least three times a week.
GB News on 9% for weekly use is now only behind BBC News, ITV News and Sky News and ahead of Channel 4 News and CNN in the UK.
The BBC, with both TV and radio news, is still miles ahead with a weekly reach of 47%.
The star broadcaster for GB News is of course Nigel Farage, Reform MP for Clacton and he is free to continue broadcasting, the High Court decided, as long as he is not actually presenting news programmes.
A consultation by media regulator Ofcom on whether the rules should be tightened to prevent sitting MPs presenting news-related or current affairs programmes closed this week.
Regulation is often a painfully slow business but when Ofcom reviews the results of its public consultation it should prevent — or seek powers to prevent — sitting MPs from presenting all programmes in the news and current affairs space.
Perhaps with the wind in its sails the regulator should manage to get the job done before the next general election, due in 2029.
Echoes of MAGA come to the UK
Until then, there is an absolute need for Reform and all its works to be seriously scrutinised, and costed, to prevent the party which in its various iterations campaigned so vigorously for Brexit, promising all things to all people.
There was a fine example of such scrutiny by Gabriel Pogrund in the latest issue of the Sunday Times.
Pogrund has discovered that a Reform-linked think tank, The Centre For a Better Britain (CBB), is trying to raise £25m from British and American donors.
The money would be used for developing “radical” policies for Reform and to pay for polls and the training of candidates.
There is a distinct echo from the US of Project 2025, which as a candidate Donald Trump denied all knowledge of, but which has since formed the core of his current agenda.
Reform insists CBB is a separate organisation although it just happens to be based in the same building as Reform headquarters.
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see shades of MAGA seeping across the Atlantic.
US media helped to create Trump and conspicuously failed to properly scrutinise what he planned to do in his second presidency.
The British media, particularly the BBC — which did so much to create the Farage phenomenon — must not make the same mistake again.
After all, Make Britain Great Again was once the slogan of the fascist National Front.
Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays — bookmark his column here.