The announcement that Andrew Neil is to front a new 24 hours 'News' Channel called GB News, that has already raised £60 million in funding, must be a disappointment. Neil is always quick to claim he's impartial on Brexit but I never hear a word of serious criticism of it from him and a lot that seems to point to him privately supporting it. Suffice to say a lot of remainers think he isn't the unbiased interviewer he claims to be. This is reinforced by major funders of GB News being Sir Paul Marshall, a prominent hedge fund manager, and Legatum, a Dubai-based investment group which were both promoters of Brexit.
Marshall is described in a March 2019 article in the Byline Times as being "instrumental in triggering the shock vote of the 2016 referendum." It was he who persuaded Michael Gove to support Brexit apparently. The Legatum Foundation is controlled by Christopher Chandler, a Dubai-based private hedge fund billionaire originally from New Zealand. The foundation is registered in Bermuda and controlled by a company in the Cayman Islands.
The Legatum Foundation, was the 'lead sponsor' of a charity called the Legatum Institute, described as the Brexiteer's favourite think tank by the website Open Democracy. To any remainers the name will be familiar because Shanker Singham worked there at one point. Singham, thought by some to have a dubious trade expertise, advises Gove and once said if we wanted high food standards we "shouldn't have voted to leave the EU." Matt Elliot, one time CEO of Vote Leave is a senior fellow at Legatum.
One of the trustees of Legatum is Toby Baxendale, who helped run Andrea Leadsom’s Tory leadership campaign and established another "radical free market think tank" called Cobden Centre along with Steve Baker with the objective of going "for the jugular of the state, to cut the oxygen and the blood supply off and force it to be honest".
As for Andrew Neil, a few days ago he tweeted:
The non-EU markets we sold into were growing fast and will grow even faster in the 2020s. And as they get richer so will their appetite for the sort of sophisticated services we’re already providing.
— Andrew Neil (@afneil) January 4, 2021
First of all, does this sound like an impartial person on Brexit? It doesn't to me. It could have come from any number of foam-at-the-mouth Brexiteers. But more than that it isn't even true.
Our service exports were about £185 billion in total, plus financial services at about £21 billion, according to the ONS and of that 51.4% went to the EU in 2018 - increasing by 17.8% from the year before.
Neil tried to argue that the gravity model of International trade doesn't work so well in services:
Services are subject to gravity as well as goods, as travel over smaller distances remains easier than over longer ones. But think another way - for globally traded services (say, phone apps) the UK competes with every country in the world, not just those locally. https://t.co/yvrdTx0Utd
— David Henig (@DavidHenigUK) January 4, 2021
But was shot down by Patrick Lohlein:
This is not about the EU, but about your claims that gravity matters less for services and my question over what type of services the UK can hope to export to Asia. As much as I wish the latter were true, I have to disagree and shed some light on the data you use.(Thread)— Patrick Lohlein (@patricklohlein) January 5, 2021
Lohlein compares our services trade with New Zealand to that of Norway with similar populations (4.9m to 5.3m) and asks why UK exports of other business services to nearby Norway are 10 times higher than what they are to far away New Zealand? He asks Neil; is it proximity, ease of market access or something else (please explain)?
Of course Neil doesn't bother to respond.
So I ask why do we need another rolling 24 hour news channel funded by millionaires. Are they worried that we aren't getting the objective truth or is it to push more distortions our way?
As Marina Hyde in The Guardian says this morning: Without Fox News there wouldn’t have been a Trump presidency, yet the UK now wants its own copycat channels.
