Jemima Kelly of the FT: The Very Online Right has come for Britain too

Key topics:GB News documentary misrepresents immigration, focusing on race and violence.The film uses subtle race-baiting without directly stating racist views.Online echo chambers fuel far-right backlash and embolden racist content..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here..By Jemima Kelly.As soon as I heard the opening line, spoken — in a serious-newsreader voice — over a piece of generic classical library music and drone footage of some random hills, I knew it was going to be bad: “Britain. An ancient place.” But I don’t think I realised quite how bad GB News’s "documentary" was going to get. This was to be a “deep dive into Britain’s exponential change in the face of uncontrolled mass migration”, we are told. “At the turn of the millennium, Britain took a radical new path on immigration . . . Was Britain ready for this?” the blurb reads. The funny thing was, that question is never addressed. The majority of the first half of the documentary focuses on the violence of UK “drill” music, during which we are shown extensive interviews with two British-born musicians. The rest largely consists of some pretty transparent race-baiting and non sequiturs. “This is a story about immigration,” the presenter Steven Edginton tells us in his voiceover, as we are shown footage of a Black woman being asked what it means to be British. “It means that although I’m British and I’m born in this country, that I’m still rejected as a Black person,” she replies. “Welcome to the yookay,” he continues, as if she somehow represented something we are to think of as abhorrent, while we’re shown footage of various ethnic minorities.The “yookay” is a reference to “Yookay Aesthetics”, a satirical account on X devoted to “chronicling the new Britain AKA ‘the Yookay’’. It posts images of multicultural Britain — halal butchers, Deliveroo riders and shops with foreign names all feature. Posts from recent days include one captioned “Indian man showers in River Thames” (showing a fully dressed man with his feet in the water) and a notice about a proposed new mosque in Dover. “Aesthetics account — posts are not implicit value judgments”, the account’s bio reads. Sure, sure. Similarly, the documentary never actually says anything explicitly racist. Instead, it shows us a series of vox pops with people in the streets of Brixton — four Black, two white — who are asked about British values and to give their opinions on “Great British heroes” like Alfred the Great, Lord Nelson and, er, Henry VIII. .Read more:.How Britain’s surrender became a cultural collapse.But one of the vox pops didn’t go down quite the way GB News might have hoped. It showed a young, British-born Black man explaining why he loves Britain but then struggling to respond to what he considers to be British values — “is it something to do with the cost of living or something?” he asks. “You’ve plastered this video all over your social media channels, taking advantage of my autistic older brother for views and to push your weird anti-black narrative,” his brother posted on X in response to the clip. “As a news company that *should* be responsible, this shouldn’t have been posted but oh well.”Quiet. And I wasn’t the only one to agree. Among those to call out GB News were one of their own presenters, Martin Daubney, who asked, “How many white kids would know about Alfred the Great?” (not to mention adults), and the former leader of the English Defence League, Tommy Robinson, who deemed it “a liberty” (ie, out of order) and said the interviewee was “not a problem”. It is an astonishing demonstration of the broader cultural and political shift to the right — not to the traditional, conservative right but to the far more “based”, vice-signalling, Very Online right — that GB News, a channel that claims to stand for “the Great British culture of honour” thought it could get away with this kind of nasty, low-quality content.Part of this shift is about a backlash to the censoriousness and identity politics that has dominated culture for several years and that peaked in 2020. But it is also a product of the fragmentation of the internet into a series of homogenous silos, particularly since Elon Musk’s takeover of what was then Twitter — and the mass X-odus of liberals, primarily to Bluesky. Spend any time on X and the algorithms will rapidly serve you up a whole slew of content aimed at stirring up hatred — often along racial or religious lines. It is a depressing experience. And the problem is that precisely because of how awful so much of it is, those who consider it as such aren’t around to call it out. It seems unthinkable to me that this “documentary” would have come out even three years ago; the nastiest part of the right has become hugely emboldened. And while these might be new online echo chambers, what they are peddling is simply old-fashioned racism and bigotry. .© 2025 The Financial Times Ltd.

Jemima Kelly of the FT: The Very Online Right has come for Britain too

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