Why Britain Needs Breitbart UK

A decade ago, I wrote a Vision Paper detailing why Britain urgently needed a new and specifically editorially conservative online broadcast news or news agency. I did so in the wake of the dramatic success of Fox News in the States.

There, far from "squishing Fox News like a bug", as CNN mogul Ted Turner predicted he would do in the ratings war, Rupert Murdoch's new station blew away the opposition. It was not that Murdoch himself saw Fox News as a reflection of his own consistent 'conservativism'. Rather, Murdoch is foremost a pragmatic businessman. He saw that there was a huge gap in the US broadcast market. One where a whole sector of the American conservative public had, effectively, been dis-enfranchised by a liberal-dominated media masquerading as 'mainstream'. Something similar, on a smaller scale, is the case in the UK as the rise of UKIP in the political arena makes only too clear. In the early Noughties, I was still naive enough to believe that good, well articulated and well argued article writing with a coherent conservative 'bent' would be enough to break into the UK mainstream. I could not have been more wrong. While my paper got hawked around a little, including to one millionaire potential backer, no one really grasped the vision.

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I tried the article route for a while. But I found editors didn't want any controversy that suggested that their publications were not doing their job, much as their steadily shrinking readerships suggested. The old conservative war horse, The Salisbury Review, was still steeped in esoteric pieces where rubber never seemed to hit the road at all. The Spectator had lost its way, exacerbated by the editorship of that CINO (Conservative in Name Only), Matthew D'Ancona. Finally, Daniel Hannan MEP and erstwhile comments editor at the Daily Telegraph kindly put me straight. "The trouble is that the columnists are mostly on contracts. Incredibly difficult to break into that circle," he informed me. At the time, the Telegraph was supposedly carrying the banner of mainstream conservatism. But its editorial positions were regularly confused. Not least, on the key issue at the time - global warming. It, too, had lost its way. That was borne out when Canadian Mark Steyn's column - the best in the UK by a distance - also bit the dust at the Telegraph. Standpoint magazine appeared. It looked promising. But, yet again, it was the same old faces writing for it. I wrote to the editors a couple of times. Not even a response. I gave up and went 'off' to spend the next decade writing from the UK but solely for the US and Canadian market. There I had far more success in all manner of publishing ventures. There it seemed that the standard of writing and depth of insight mattered more than in the UK. Then something miraculous happened. Someone at a major Trust finally caught the vision that the UK lacked a genuine Thatcher-Reagan style conservative publication. The online site 'The Commentator' duly appeared. Suddenly, new faces, new writers and more consistently conservative writings appeared under the guiding hand of executive editor, one Raheem Kassam. Internal issues led to Raheem leaving to set up Trending Central. But the problem, as always was funding. Then at the end of 2013, the US news service Breitbart decided it wanted to expand its global reach, including to the UK. With its news service its strong brand of conservatism and, just as importantly, its financial muscle it was a welcome move. And Raheem Kassam was the natural choice after his successes with both The Commentator and Trending Central. The inimitable James Delingpole also took over Executive Editor responsibilities bringing with him his ability to ‘drvie traffic' as he had done so well for the Daily Telegraph blogs. It is still early days. But the UK finally has an online conservative news site where it is possible to "tell it like it is" with unadorned conservative 'knobs on'. With Kassam and Delingpole, Breitbart London is in the hands of a new generation and not those of the CINO old-school figures who had lost their conservative way. Which brings me to a point raised by my colleague James Delingpole in his Andrew Breitbart's War Comes to Britain. In it James posited this:

"In the Spectator recently, my old friend Toby Young described a dilemma which all those of us of right-wing persuasion must face up to in the end: should you soften your position in order to find some common ground with people whose stupid political ideology you loathe and despise? Or should you stay true to your principles and risk being marginalised as, at best, unreasonable and, at worst, as a fruitcake, a crank, a dangerous extremist?"

Genuine British political conservatism currently resides under the UKIP banner

The point is central to all that has been marginalising a more consistently conservative perspective in the media generally. It's what kept me from being published in my own country a decade ago. But the simple fact is that, as Murdoch realised for his Stateside audience and as my early Vision Paper recognised, and as those behind Trending Central and Breitbart London understand, when you do 'tell it like it is' the barbs will come thick and fast. After all, there's a very good reason why politically speaking, much genuine British political conservatism currently resides under the UKIP banner. And its why David Cameron-like CINOs attack it as relentlessly as much of the leftwing media. The fact is that, The Spectator might not like the competition, but neither will the BBC, the Guardian and the Huffington Post. They would much rather take on the 'esoteric' natures of the CINO publications. But then well articulated facts and reason have always provided its own intellectual defence. That should be good enough for all of us now regularly writing for Breitbart London, too.