sScreengrab of GB News’s Nigel Farage show. Photo: GB News

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 £131m since its launch in mid-2021, racking up another £22m 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.

Writer Sam Bright

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 ofms 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 £2m, 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 £25m 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

The medics, from left: Maggie Fay, Alice Clack, Patrick Hart, Ali Rowe, David McKelvey and Juliette Brown. Photo: Gareth Morris

At 7.30 on a sweltering Sunday morning in July 2022, six medics from across the UK met at London Bridge station and set off for Canary Wharf. They were wearing scrubs and carrying bags loaded with hammers and chisels. Their mission was precise and perilous: to carefully crack six windows belonging to JP Morgan, the American bank they had identified as topping the league for investment in fossil fuel extraction. They knew that they would be arrested, and that they were putting both their careers and their liberty at risk. It was a gesture of desperation, a performance for what they saw as the greater good.

One of the six, mental health nurse Ali Rowe, was also carrying a letter she had hurriedly scribbled on the tube, which she read out to the police who arrived to arrest them. “It is with overwhelming sadness that I take this action,” she wrote. “I’ve never broken the law in my life until now.” London was in the grip of an unprecedented heatwave, she explained later in court. “On that day it was the first level-four heat warning and people were going to die. 3,271 people to be precise that are not walking the Earth are dead. I broke a window because we are in a medical emergency.”

The six defendants – two hospital consultants, two GPs and two nurses – are all members of Health for XR, an independent group of medical staff supporting Extinction Rebellion. Last week, all six were dramatically acquitted of criminal damage, in one of a series of blows against increasingly draconian restraints on the right to protest. Two days later, aggravated burglary charges were dropped against 18 Palestine Action activists after a jury cleared six others of the offence at an Israeli arms firm site in Filton, near Bristol. 

In the case of the medics, it was the second time jurors had disobeyed a clear instruction from the judge that the only questions they had to answer were whether the defendants had broken the windows and whether they had set out with intent to do so. In the first two-week trial last year, the jury was dismissed after being unable to reach a verdict. The prosecution immediately requested a retrial. It took the new jury less than four hours on Monday last week to declare all six not guilty.

Three of the medical staff defended themselves in court, constructing vivid arguments based on medical ethics and clinical observation from their own lives. Yet so many protesters have been brought to trial in the last couple of years that the case of the Health for XR Six received barely any media coverage. Their story might have disappeared for ever into the court archives were it not for a brave decision by a charity, Empathy Museum, to commission a verbatim play from transcripts of the first trial. 

Most verbatim theatre on legally and politically sensitive issues – for instance, Richard Norton-Taylor’s Tricycle theatre collaborations about the Stephen Lawrence trial and the Hutton inquiry into the death of whistleblower Dr David Kelly – happen after the legal processes are safely over. In Case of Emergency was different, coming in the middle of two trials, when restrictions on reporting were still in force.

In Case of Emergency on stage at the Purcell Room in January, 2026. Photo: Archie Redford

The scale of the undertaking became clear in real time for Clare Patey, Empathy Museum’s founder and the show’s producer, starting with the challenge of finding backers to finance it, and a venue willing to take the risk of staging a work that could at any moment be halted for contempt of court, thereby putting their own institution at risk.

Two weeks of testimony had to be condensed down to 90 minutes of drama under the lead of playwright April de Angelis, director Ian Rickson and the writer and climate researcher Robert Butler who alerted Patey to the trial. A series of post-show discussions had to be cancelled, and all media coverage postponed, for fear of running into legal trouble and endangering the medics’ case. But, almost miraculously, days before the retrial was due to begin, In Case of Emergency was performed by a star cast to packed houses across five nights at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room in London. 

At the time, the buzz of witnessing the arguments unfold was tempered by pessimism about the likely outcome of the looming second trial. At an informal gathering after the final performance, anxious questions hummed around the room. The power of the case rested on the judge’s decision to allow the defendants to tell their stories. Would they be allowed to do so a second time? Might the very mention of the climate crisis be ruled inadmissible as evidence in a trial for criminal damage? How likely was it that a second jury would refuse to accept the narrow criteria for criminal damage as defined in law? 

Now that the trial is over, plans are being hatched to restage the show and, potentially, tour it around the country to reach as wide an audience as possible. The unique perspective of the medics, and the clarity and force of their evidence, make it a story that urgently needs to be heard.

Several of them had worked for medical charities in some of the regions worst hit by the crisis. Alice Clack, a consultant in gynaecology and obstetrics now based in north Wales, told of coping with 40-50C heat in Yemen. “We had air conditioning in our house, and there was some in the hospital, but I just wondered how any of my patients were managing to survive in tents around the town.”

David McKelvey, a Manchester-based GP, spoke of being in Tanzania when the rains failed. “They call it the njabi – the hunger – and, you know, people talk of the challenge of putting their child to bed when they’re crying of hunger, and then you land them with a bit of malaria on top of that, these children become desperately ill.”

But all of them were clear that climate catastrophe is no longer something that happens somewhere else. Maggie Fay, a hospice nurse living on a Scottish island, recalled trying to explain to an elderly patient with dementia, who lived on her own, why spending the weekend in her conservatory – her favourite place to while away a sunny day – might be fatal.

As she took her hammer to the glass, said Juliette Brown – a consultant psychiatrist working in east London –  she thought of the children of Tower Hamlets “whose lungs are smaller than those of other children across the country because of air pollution, which is a manifest injustice”.

In the very week of the protest, Brown pointed out, the IT systems for two major London hospitals had collapsed in the heat. “We rely entirely on our IT systems: we don’t have paper records in London any more. It was a critical patient safety incident and people died.”

Cast members from In Case of Emergency at the Purcell Room, London. Photo: Archie Redford

Patrick Hart, who worked as a GP in Bristol, recounted the life story that led to his first public protest in 2018. It took him from a complete faith in the power of medicine – because, as a child growing up in Devon, he had frequently witnessed it saving the life of his own mother – to a realisation that good health did not rely on doctors and nurses so much as on the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink. “I started asking: ‘What does it mean to be a health worker?’ I can either be just the narrowest version of a doctor – keep giving out the pills – or I can start thinking about the health of the global population, and the health of the planet.”

Between the first and second trials, Hart spent four months in jail for convictions arising from another protest. His licence to practice has been suspended by the General Medical Council. Meanwhile, the British Medical Association last year passed a resolution recognising that the climate crisis was a public health emergency and that medical professionals had an ethical duty to advocate for urgent action.

Among the issues given painstaking clarity by the trial were the ethics of protest and the importance of juries – described by Brown, in her summing-up, as “the moral sense of the people – who bring humanity into this system … reality into these rooms”. 

For both these things to be under extreme legal challenge at a time of such unprecedented crisis is a small catastrophe of its own. If the case had come to court back in 2022, Hart pointed out, legal defences would have been available that have since been taken away from protesters.

Yet, Rowe said in her closing address last week: “Medicine is not about blind rule-following. Every good clinician knows there are rules that must be broken to prevent more serious harm. Is it acceptable for doctors and nurses to do nothing more than write another letter, sign a petition, attend a march, lobby MPs, organise high-level briefings? Is it ethically justified to break a lesser rule – to crack a window – when our collective intention was to protect life?”

In the old adage, justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done. In court, it was done but not seen by anyone beyond the few dozen who packed into the public gallery to support the medics, and the readers of legal bulletins and medical magazines. By putting it on the stage, In Case of Emergency has given their testimony a loudhailer and a future. As Hart said of the glass-cracking that set it all in motion: “Why bother when things look so bad? Because it is in this trying that we find our humanity.”

For details of upcoming projects: empathymuseum.com

The recent release of the Epstein files by the US Department of Justice has so far led to little accountability in the US for the many sordid crimes revealed there, but it has caused the swift and decisive downfall of Peter Mandelson. On Monday he was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office, having been under investigation due to allegations he shared market-sensitive government information with Epstein when he was a minister in Gordon Brown’s government (it’s been reported he does not think he’s committed an offence). A scion of New Labour who rode to power with the Blair government, he famously declared in 1998 that he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes”. True to his word, he frequently relaxed in the company of billionaires. In 2008, this led to the affair known as “Yachtgate”, which seemed shocking at the time, but in the light of the revelations in the Epstein files looks like a pretty quaint idea of a scandal.

Yachtgate was about political figures rubbing shoulders with shady Russian oligarchs. It hinted at possible financial improprieties. The superyacht, moored off the coast of Corfu, belonged to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminium magnate who had his US visa revoked in 2006 because of suspected ties to organised crime. In Europe, Deripaska was benefiting from the lifting of EU tariffs on aluminium in 2007, so when Mandelson, Britain’s EU commissioner in charge of trade, showed up on his boat, questions were raised about a possible conflict of interest. 

Other guests at the party included Mandelson’s good friend Nathaniel (Nat) Rothschild, a financier and heir to the Rothschild fortune (Mandelson often stayed at his villa in Corfu), and Rothschild’s old schoolmate, the then shadow chancellor George Osborne. Rothschild was so livid that gossip about the party had made the papers that he wrote a letter to the Times, insisting that the only impropriety to have taken place was Osborne trying to solicit from Deripaska, a foreign national, a donation to the Tory party. The editor of the Times, Rothschild’s friend James Harding, published it and soon the waters around Yachtgate were muddied. People lost track and lost interest. 

Perhaps we should have suspected that this particular constellation of people sharing cocktails on the Ionian Sea wasn’t just happenstance. Deripaska was a businessman with a sketchy past (Roman Abramovich once said of the 1990s “aluminium wars” in Russia that “every three days someone was being murdered”; Deripaska came out the winner). But he was also a close associate of Vladimir Putin and had swept into London in the early 2000s, forging relationships with Britain’s political and monied elites that could be strategically useful for Russia. None of the relationships between these men, as we see in the Epstein files, were straightforward friendships.

Mandelson had done favours for Deripaska and would go on to trade access to him in exchange for favours from others. We now know that, contrary to the story he told in 2008 about when he first met Deripaska, Mandelson had arrived at an EU-Russia summit in The Hague on Deripaska’s Gulfstream IV jet in 2004. We also know that Mandelson and Rothschild flew to Siberia with Deripaska in 2005, where the three visited a sauna together and were thrashed with birch leaves. And now, thanks to the Epstein files, we know that, in 2010, Mandelson asked Deripaska to help a friend of his, convicted sex trafficker and questionable financier Jeffrey Epstein, get a Russian visa. 

Rothschild apparently nixed Epstein’s introduction to Deripaska in 2011. He had an interest in keeping Deripaska to himself. In 2009, he had signed up to buy a large stake in Deripaska’s aluminium company Rusal when it launched on the Hong Kong stock exchange in 2010 (this was probably the reason he was so sensitive about being in the press during Yachtgate – he didn’t want to jeopardise that relationship). He made a $40m investment in the commodities and mining company Glencore in the same year, a company which had complex and somewhat opaque relations with Rusal, including holding a stake in Rusal’s parent company, Deripaska’s EN+ Group.  But Mandelson evidently persisted. Soon he, Rothschild, Deripaska and Epstein would be part of a world that had little regard for laws or loyalties, but was held together by different types of indebtedness and varying degrees of kompromat. 

For a long time the public assumed that the secrets of these elites involved “white collar” crimes, like tax evasion or financial fraud. Glencore has been an object of unrelenting suspicion since the 1980s when its founders, Marc Rich and Pincus Green, were indicted for tax evasion, wire fraud and racketeering (Bill Clinton would later, in one of the greatest scandals of his presidency, pardon Rich). In the early 2000s, the CIA suspected Glencore of paying illegal kickbacks to evade UN sanctions on buying oil from Iraq. Similar charges have dogged the company to the present day. In 2022 they were ordered to pay a $1.5bn fine for corrupt activities in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria and Venezuela. Related prosecutions are ongoing. But it’s not just “white collar crime” – the wealth of men like Marc Rich and Deripaska is reputed to have originated in mob ties, which would implicate them in much worse things. And we now know from the Epstein files and related sources that this code of secrecy, binding together people who can be trusted only because they are all compromised, has covered up horrors.

In 2008, as Mandelson partied on yachts, his good friend Epstein was fighting federal child trafficking charges. In the end he pleaded guilty to much lesser state charges, including soliciting prostitution from a minor. He served just 13 months in exceptionally comfortable circumstances and when he emerged, now a registered sex offender, many of his powerful friends stood by him. The reality that they were apparently able to overlook, in spite of scarcely hidden and even flaunted evidence, was that girls as young as 14 were being raped and trafficked. 

None of the headline-making stories about the varying degrees of complicity of Epstein's famous friends can prepare you for the grim reality of child rape revealed in the files that have been released and in the horrifying accounts of survivors. It makes very uncomfortable viewing and reading, but you have to understand how viscerally disgusting it all was to appreciate how deeply the perpetrators were compromised. And any friends who had an inkling of what was going on were compromised too, because their silence was a form of complicity. Many of those who didn’t directly participate in the abuse of the girls (like Mandelson, who is gay), must have seen the constant retinue of teenagers, often half-naked (though, as Virginia Giuffre tells us in her memoir, on his island Epstein insisted they hang around fully naked). They must have heard crude boasts of the kind we can now read in the messages. These people traded favours with Epstein and his friends anyway. 

What Mandelson wanted out of it seems to have been fairly simple: money. Tony Blair had been making a fortune exploiting his political connections since founding Tony Blair Associates in 2008. He continued making valuable connections out of office in his position as Middle East envoy representing the “Quartet” of Russia, the US, the EU and the UN. So in September 2012, when Glencore ran into trouble over a deal Rothschild supported (a merger with mining group Xstrata), Blair could use his connections to Qatar’s royal family to help broker the deal at the last moment. Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, QIA, held a stake in Xstrata and had been opposing the merger before Blair’s intervention. This favour apparently earned him around £250,000. It was lucrative to be part of this money-go-round. 

But Mandelson didn’t have quite the same cachet. The new files show that in 2011 he had sought a role at Glencore himself, with Rothschild advising him to talk to its billionaire CEO, Ivan Glasenberg. Epstein schemed with Mandelson about how to make this happen. It didn’t work out. But what Mandelson could do was trade on his access to business partners in Russia. In 2010, Mandelson founded a consultancy business, Global Counsel, with a former Blair adviser, Benjamin Wegg-Prosser. They had a natural base in Moscow because Wegg-Prosser had worked since 2007 for a big Moscow online media company, SUP, and he and his Russian wife, Yulia, continued dividing time between Russia and the UK. And the Epstein files show that Global Counsel immediately began soliciting business in Russia, primarily with a large nanotechnology group called Rusnano Group. That was the same year that Mandelson tried to use his connection with Deripaska to wrangle a last-minute Russian visa for Epstein. 

Other emails show that in 2011 Mandelson was consulting Epstein about some potential business with Yuri Milner, a Russian oligarch who had been making large investments in Facebook. Epstein said: “You must be careful if you want this and will visit lebedev [sic]” – presumably referring to London-based oligarch and former KGB officer Alexander Lebedev, who had been investing heavily in British media (he acquired the Evening Standard in 2009, and the Independent in 2010). Interestingly, the following year Epstein cautioned another friend to take care with Milner, saying “yuri money is russian gangster money, usmanov…[sic]”. In 2017 it was revealed that the Kremlin had been behind many of Milner’s strategic investments in Silicon Valley, with the money being funnelled through the Russian mining oligarch and former Arsenal shareholder Alisher Usmanov. 

If Epstein, Mandelson and others knew this, Britain’s intelligence services and political classes should have too. But in yet another sign of the entanglement of British politics with Russian money, Liberal Democrat peer Lord Owen has served as a representative for Usmanov, and the late Lord Myners, a former Labour treasury minister, was on the board of Usmanov’s telecoms group, MegaFon, until 2018. Meanwhile, Mandelson took a directorship of Sistema in 2013, a Russian conglomerate with shareholdings in defence companies, and refused to resign when Putin invaded Crimea the following year. But sometimes it’s convenient to ignore what everyone knows, and a silent bond is forged between those ignoring it. 

None of the men in these circles were naive about Russian money. Epstein least of all. He set out to become an adviser to the Kremlin at just the time Putin was silencing all dissent domestically, had intensified his hybrid warfare on liberal democracy, and made clear his expansionist ambitions. Between 2013 and 2018, Epstein sent many messages to people who could act as intermediaries between Putin and himself. He used three friends in particular for this purpose: former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, former Norwegian prime minister and  secretary-general of the Council of Europe Thorbjørn Jagland, and Emirati billionaire Sultan bin Sulayem, all of whom were holding private meetings with Putin. Epstein didn’t just want money, he wanted influence – he was always very close to power. It made sense in this amoral world for Mandelson to maintain a friendship with him for nearly two decades in spite of what he knew and pretended not to know.

The full story hasn’t yet been told. We probably only have a fraction of the materials the FBI and DoJ obtained. The files that are public are still redacted. But we can already see a dark realm, set apart from laws, morality and the most basic humane impulses. It’s inhabited by some of the world’s most powerful men: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and many others. And now that we’ve seen just a glimpse of this world into which Yachtgate was potentially a window, we have to wonder why no one took a better look 18 years ago. 

Tamsin Shaw is Associate Professor of European and Mediterranean Studies and Philosophy, New York University