Should left-wingers go on right-wing shows?
Labour and GBnews - the Buttegeig case for engaging the radical right
As A Few Good Men reaches its climax, Jack Nicholson’s character delivers the infamous words,
You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall -- you need me on that wall.
It’s a quote symbolising men in long coats, working in dark places, doing the work that no one else wishes to do, that keeps us all safe. Setting aside the vital fact that Niklaus’ character takes it too far, he has a point. The job of keeping society ticking relies on people doing work many of us would find unsavoury, or just wouldn’t be caught dead doing.
One such job is subjecting yourself to the ritual humiliation of being the token lefty on right-wing talk shows. And for my **valiant** efforts, I find I am being cancelled. This is undignified in 2025, and especially if you have my impeccable woke credentials, but I became persona non grata in a particular Labour clique because I appear on GB News - a right-wing TV channel.
My once-university chum, let’s call him Jon, screeched in front of everyone at an event that I needed to decide if I was going to ‘fly with the far right.’ Confused, I asked him to elaborate, but he said he was too bored to do so and that I should ‘look into my conscience’. He turned his back on me, and I ran outside, shaking and holding back tears.
In the US, American politicians beg the right-wing shows to have them on. In the UK, it is a long-standing debate within Labour, whether by going on the right-wing channels and writing for right-wing rags we legitimise them, and whether we should be boycotting those platforms altogether.
The argument that has been winning is that we should go where the voters are, and that means writing for the Sun and the Daily Mail, as well as appearing on talkTV and GB News. When GB News first started, one could argue against helping them by providing commentators, but they no longer have trouble finding people to fill their spots. The point is, do you want their panels to be filled with people who will defend your party or people who will join the Labour pile-on? It’s the same conundrum with whether a Presidential candidate should appear on Joe Rogan, until you realise that when you reject his invitation, you don’t look more serious or morally superior, but rather smug and dismissive towards your voters.
I respect people who want to keep their profiles as clean as possible, and I understand those who are Labour royalty. They couldn’t possibly go on GB News or be seen near Reform voters without security guarding their soul like a chastity belt on a 25-year-old actress playing a teenage medieval princess. I was always jealous of people whose entire families are card-carrying Labour grantees, who grew up in households where if you have nothing nice to say, you don’t say anything at all. In my home, I have to restrain my reaction when my Trump-loving mother uses slurs lest she realise they trigger me and starts using them in public to get one up on her woke snowflake daughter.
These most civilised individuals shouldn’t appear on alternative media and combative panels alongside dubious guests, as they require a specific style of communication and a willingness to reach a particular audience. I always had the scrappiness for it, and by the time a producer approached me, many Labour MPs were already doing it, so it never even occurred to me that I was doing anything wrong.
Jon suggested to someone else that I don’t just go on GB News to defend Labour, but I also agree with them sometimes. I don’t know why he would smear me like this unless he scrolls through clips of me gesticulating next to Nigel Farage with the sound off and confuses my sardonic smile for a sign of appeasement.
I am disciplined about how and where I air my disappointments about my party because I am a loyalist. I believe that whether or not your ‘faction’ (if there is one that claims you) is at the helm, it is your duty as a political commentator who fills out the ‘Labour’ spot on the panel to explain your party. Everyone else will find the worst faith explanation for why your party is doing something. Maybe you even have insider knowledge of why it is even worse than it seems. Whether you share is between you and your maker. I like to act as a shield bearer in a Swiss pike formation- holding the line while the media hounds circle. Buying time while the party’s learning how to govern.
I have only deviated from the Labour Party line a couple of times, most notably on Gaza and the Chancellor’s fiscal rules. I suspect that history will prove me right on both. When you disagree with the party, you must do it in a way that does not damage the party brand and alienate its core base (unionists (or labourists), soft left, progressives/blairites). The leadership did precisely that when it came to Gaza, alienating its base and frustrating its values.
This clip is from October 14, 2023. It was shortly after I started commentating, so I sound stilted and awkward. You can find plenty of videos from my first six months of commentating, when I was not even sure what I was talking about, but precisely because I was building my confidence, the positions I took were usually moderate. This is another point about appearing on GB News and TalkTV: if you’re just starting out, you need all the practice you can get. The BBC is not going to slide into your DMs if they are not 100% certain you can perform well.
The only other times I can think of where I disagreed with Labour were when I said I would welcome Rachel Reeves raising taxes, that we should replace the triple lock on pensions with a double lock, and that Keir Starmer should move closer to Europe and take a firmer position against Trump. I wrote a letter with another commentator criticising the welfare cuts, because they were a blunt instrument that did not reform the system. After Keir’s ‘island of strangers’ speech, I also went on Novara Media (a left-wing platform) with Aaron Bastani and criticised Keir for conceding to the right-wing framing on immigration instead of making the left-wing case for immigration reform.
What makes this even more curious is that I am on the left of Jon. It doesn’t do my standing within the party any favours to highlight my left-wing credentials, but given that Jon has low key bullied me throughout my time in the party for being a naive lefty I think he at least owes me an explanation as to what is it about my politics that now makes me right wing.
I could make this post about how censorious the left is or how insular the Labour party or whatever but all of that is total bollocks. Jon did not feel the need to shout at me because of his left-wing moral conviction. He worked for one of the most right-wing Labour MPs for close to a decade. On the day he shouted at me, he had just listened to a speech by a Labour MP who also regularly goes on GB News. He is still friends with the chair of our university’s Conservative society. He presumably does not have the guts to speak the way he did to me to any of the people in our party who are from, say, an artistocratic or very wealthy background.
By attacking me, he is striking at what he can reach. I imagine he is feeling helpless, now more or less outside the tent, watching the project he dedicated his career to trashing the Labour brand and potentially chauffeuring Prime Minister Nigel Farage into No. 10. I’ve seen the same reflex elsewhere. A friend, shaken after someone close to him lurched into far-right radicalism, recently rebuked me for replying to racist anonymous accounts on Twitter. In his eyes, even condemning them gives them oxygen, and therefore makes me partly responsible for people like his friend being groomed into the right.
That would be comforting if it were true because it would mean that stifling the influence and grip of these actors is within my power. It isn’t. Their prominence came first, it spread like wildfire, we were summoned to put it out, and now we are engulfed in flames. The problem with the left is that our team is so paranoid of secret arsonists within our ranks that they turn off the hose while we are still on duty. No wonder lefties get depressed and burn out.
I was joking in the introduction, but going into these spaces really gets unpleasant. I have deleted Xitter from my phone because I don’t want to look at the comments I receive. I get ratioed hard. For every 10 likes I get, I get hundreds of ‘deport her’ comments. A lot of the abuse is gendered. I have been called a whore of all manners of ethnicities: Albanian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Turkish etc. There is a lot of scepticism about my ability to speak English and explosive anger about the fact that ‘we are allowing immigrants to comment on our politics’. Mostly, I get reassurances that when remigrations start, I will be the first one on the plane.
When I first started, a part of me died when I began comparing the comments I received with those of British male commentators. They were referring to the content of their arguments. Mine were informing me I deserve to be raped by Pakistani gangs. However, that was just what people posted on the internet. Behind the curtains, in my DMs, in my emails, in handwritten letters sent to my office, on the streets, in shops, even on the doorstep during canvassing, calm, polite, pleasant people would tell me, ‘I really like what you do’. They didn’t need to explain ‘what I do’. We both understood what it is, and it is not ‘flying with the far right’.
It is, in particular, the younger people who have approached me over the last two years of writing and talking who have made me insist on inserting myself in all spaces. They often feel conflicted and alienated. They don’t know how to label their politics; they want to follow the energy, they want to feel like they belong, they don’t want to be bad people, but they want a career, to be given a chance, and maybe even some credit. The clique of people who have soft-cancelled me are not bad people, but they suck at outreach beyond their tribe because they don’t tolerate people outside of it. If you are not even willing to explain to an old mate from uni who you apparently think is going down the wrong path, where they’ve gone wrong, you are obviously not interested in convincing anyone else.
I also no longer get booked on GB News as much since I called out Simon Danczuk on a panel for having the audacity to talk about the protection of young girls from grooming when he had to resign from Labour because he was found to be sending sexually explicit texts to a minor. That was also when I got disillusioned with Blue Labour. While I was waiting in the green room before I debated with Danczuk, I saw Maurice Glasman, with whom I’ve enjoyed long chain-smoking chats many times before. I was on the edge of my seat because I had already planned to confront Simon about his misconduct. Maurice hugged Simon and told him, ‘I was always on your side, never forget that.’
I will not debase myself by pretending I am cancelled because one (1) university friend of mine lashed out at me, and a couple of others glare at me at events like Greek grandmas on a balcony. Nor do I accept that this is a phenomenon limited to the left. I am as representative of the Labour party as any of these weirdos. And, I'd add, just as influential, if not more.
Honestly? I'm mostly upset. I probably secretly hoped that Jon, with whom I came up through the Labour party and who knew me as a fresh-off-the-boat-barely-knows-who-Blair-is fresher, would be proud of me for ending up defending Labour on the airwaves. I remember having a drunken heart-to-heart conversation with him before the 2015 election defeat. I had just found out what a SpAd is, and I asked him if that was what he wanted to do when the Labour Party is in government. He looked at me with as much feeling as would be reasonable for a boy who comes from where he came from and who was raised as he was raised, and said, Stella, that would be the dream. When he got to live it, I was no longer in his life to tell him how proud I was he stayed the course. It hurts not to have his approval, or at least his opinion.
Alas, hopefully now that I am cancelled, Elon Musk will fund my podcast, and GB News will give me my own show, and that will soothe my pain. I will probably draw the line at JK Rowling buying me a Gucci handbag for Christmas, though.
If we can't have civil discourse with people we disagree with, then we can't have civilization
It's a very weird premise from the start.
Half the country are sone flavour of right-ish,and you're throwing sneering little jibes at the thought of sullying yourself by talking to them. It's snobbish and parochial-minded, like a 1920s social climber.
Anyone who is not already inside the tent is unlikely to be won over.