GB News, Brexit and two obscure think tanks

“EXPOSED,” ran a headline on GB News’s website this week. “Keir Starmer rushing through winner-takes-all EU deal that hands Brussels control over WHOLE of UK.”

It may not surprise observers of the hard right conspiracist channel that Keir Starmer has not rushed through a “winner-takes-all” EU deal that had handed Brussels control of EVEN A LITTLE BIT, let alone the WHOLE of the UK. The article by noted trade analyst Lewis Henderson (“a Multi-Skilled Journalist at GB News with experience in sports reporting and commentary”, no less) was referring to a new sanitary and phytosanitary deal with the EU which will eliminate routine border checks for food exports and imports on certain products.

But what is of interest here is not exactly why Henderson thinks reducing checks on plums, cherries and peaches (the sort of “medium-risk” fruit whose quick transit is most likely to immediately benefit from these changes) poses such a threat to parliamentary sovereignty. It’s where it came from: obscure, fervently anti-EU think tanks with the same old backers, opaque funding and a determination to rip up any agreements with the bloc and trade on WTO terms. Is it 2018?

“The Stand for Our Sovereignty campaign, with support from Facts4EU, has exposed the lopsidedness of the deal,” reports Henderson, and you can be forgiven for never having heard of either. One has been running longer than the other; both, in the wake of Starmer’s generally warmly-received reset of UK-EU relations, appear like the Japanese soldier who held out in the Philippines for nearly 29 years after WWII ended, had that soldier had a website which looked like it had been designed on Geocities in 1999.

Stand for Our Sovereignty appears the newer of the two, formed in the past year “when an individual running a well-known independence organisation started talking to colleagues in other organisations about his concerns that the country’s sovereignty had suddenly come under serious threat,” it says. It now, it claims, makes the news (although it does concede “mostly GB News and the Daily Express”).

A gallery underneath shows the “famous faces endorsing Stand for Our Sovereignty”: Suella Braverman, Bill Cash, David ‘Frosty’ Frost, Kate Hoey, David Jones, John Redwood and Daily Mail columnist Boris Johnson. Plus there are biographies of chairman Leigh Evans (“a regular contributor on GB News”) and vice-chairs Ben Philips (“a regular guest on GB News”) and Claire Bullivant (who really needs to get on GB News).

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Facts4EU, whose website is, astonishingly, even more amateurish, is meanwhile “the most prolific researcher and publisher of original facts in the World relating to the UK’s global standing, since 2015”. Who is behind it, however, is also even less clear.

The website simply states that its founders are “ordinary people, mostly but not exclusively in business, previously minding our own business and living our everyday lives” and that “we have funded 90% of the costs ourselves, with the balance coming from small, individual public subscriptions that have helped us to keep going somehow”.

And how small are those subscriptions? A box below allows readers to make a “quick, one-off” credit card payment of up to £1,000, a perfectly normal figure for an average person to gift to a website on a whim. And while Facts4EU is primarily a source of anti-EU propaganda, it will not surprise anyone au fait with GB News and its wider online ecosystem that it also retains an obsession with Covid (“Coronavirus or ‘Con-Us Virus’?”).

While we know the name of the final Japanese soldier to surrender after the second world war – Hiroo Onoda, who gave himself up on Lubang Island in 1974 having refused to believe it was over and missing the Beatles’ entire career in the process – we know of not a single person behind Facts4EU. Not one name is given on the website, not one address. And yet that has not stopped GB News and the Express from giving them (him? her?) the credence of a serious academic institution.

Ironically, they won, but they never got over it. And the world moved on – the WTO dream, so fervently advocated, still, by Stand for Our Sovereignty, died when the initial UK-EU trade deal was negotiated by one of its “famous face” backers, Lord Frost, and signed by, another, Boris Johnson. Meanwhile voters have endorsed Starmer’s reset, with polls consistently finding majority support and just 17% of Britons supporting loosening ties with the EU further (including 34% of Leave and 42% of Reform voters).

After accepting his war was finally over, Onoda moved to Brazil and became a cattle farmer. We’re not necessarily suggesting Cash, Frost, Hoey and the like do that. But they could at least use some of those donations to modernise their websites. Seriously, guys – it’s 2025. We’ve got Squarespace now and everything.