GB News's 'all British' music station exposes a cultural vacuum that musicians and progressives should fill with a Rock Against Racism-style response
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/johnharris. "Can UK pop cut immigration and stop the boats? I suppose we’ll find out with GB News Music Radio | John Harris | The Guardian." October 21, 2026. www.theguardian.com
The Gist
GB News is launching a radio station that only plays British acts, and the author sees it as a nationalist project stepping into a space the left has left empty. He argues that artists whose music grew out of cultural mixing should speak up, as they did with Rock Against Racism in 1979, and that a similar touring effort should go to places where Reform is strong.
Conclusion
Musicians and cultural figures should publicly push back against GB News Music Radio's nativist framing, as Rock Against Racism did in 1979, by stating that British music is built on cultural mixing and by taking that message to Reform-leaning communities.
Premises
- In 1979, during a polarised period with a rising far right, Rock Against Racism and its musicians actively celebrated multiracial Britain through events like the Militant Entertainment Tour.
- There is no comparable cultural response today to a similarly unsettling political climate, which leaves a vacant cultural-political space.
- GB News, a strongly rightwing channel associated with Farage and Reform figures, is filling that space with an 'all British, all day' station restricted to artists from Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
- The station's criteria are incoherent and potentially exclusionary: it is unclear how 'British' will be defined, and people on the right such as Jenrick and Braverman treat Englishness as an ethnic identity, which could yield a whitewashed playlist.
- Musicians cannot legally block licensed stations from playing their work, but they can publicly express displeasure and clarify their values, and British music is itself founded on the cultural mixing that GB News-associated voices oppose.
- The message needs to reach people's daily lives and towns, not just online, which makes a modern equivalent of the Militant Entertainment tour in Reform heartlands worth imagining.
Assumptions
- Cultural and musical activism can meaningfully shift political attitudes on immigration and national identity.
- The 1979 RAR model is transferable to the present despite changed media and political conditions.
- GB News Music Radio is a vehicle for nativist politics rather than a neutral or merely commercial music offering.
- Prominent artists have both the moral obligation and the influence to respond publicly.
- The ethnic definition of Britishness advanced by some Reform-aligned politicians will plausibly shape the station's programming.
- British music is predominantly the product of cross-cultural influence.