The BBC’s Newsnight has been on the wane for some time, its budget being slashed and its team of specialist correspondents axed as it pivoted to a late-night debate show. Now its Friday edition has been brought forward to 7pm and hosting duties handed to 5 Live cheeky chappie Matt Chorley, could it dumb down even more?
Step forward Winston Marshall, introduced as a “podcaster and former Mumford & Sons member”, who was last week invited on the show to debate tax policy with Dr Faiza Shaheen, a London School of Economics academic and expert in the field of economic inequality.
The ‘debate’ went as well as one might expect, with the banjo-botherer comprehensively bested by Shaheen as he attempted to explain taxes to the former director of the Centre for Labour and Social Studies, head of inequality and sustainable development at Save the Children and senior researcher at the New Economics Foundation.
“I’m sure you will have a similar worldview to Andy Burnham, but think more taxes and er, er, discouraging and disincentivising businesses, which creates [sic] wealth… I, I understand a lot of people are worried about inequality. I’m worried about poverty. And if you want to lift up the poor you have to create wealth,” he said.
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“How’s that going?” asked Shaheen, not unreasonably, before Marshall proceeded to speak over her loudly.
“We’ve got the highest tax burden since the end of the war!” he said. “It’s going before the answer is always more tax, we need to more tax [sic] – it doesn’t work like that. We need to gut it. We need to encourage people to work.”
Quite! Although whether Marshall is qualified to pontificate on this is questionable, not being an economist nor having ever run a business, but being a former musician who left Mumford & Sons six years ago and has since tried to make a living as a right wing podcaster. It is an ambition not exactly hurt by being the son of Sir Paul Marshall, the hedge fund manager with an estimated wealth of £875 million who owns the Spectator and Unherd and is the co-owner of GB News!
Marshall Junior went on to display more of that famed charm on the programme when asked about Katie Zacharia, the former White House press secretary sacked by Donald Trump last week after just five days in the job.
“I do like these Fox News girls,” he said. “This kind of the blonde bombshell, it’s a very… it’s a sort of beautiful American archetype. It’s wonderful.” When Shaheen suggested appointing someone for their looks rather than ability might be misogynistic, Marshall queried more than once, “Oh really? Why’s that misogynistic, to compliment her on her looks?” before Chorley was forced to step in.
Last time Rats in a Sack was forced to consider Marshall was earlier this year, when he was treating Fox News to his solution to dangerous small boats carrying migrants across the Channel: laying mines in the world’s busiest shipping lane. There could be “sections maybe that are mined [and] sections that are open to allow a proper operation”, explained Marshall, who, as a banjoist, has limited experience in the design of large-scale marine construction projects.
Still, that’s the sort of expert the exciting new-look Newsnight is going for now. Next week: Johnny Borrell from Razorlight looks forward to John Healey’s first budget, while one of the Futureheads explains the inadvertent impact on Ukraine of EU tariffs on China.
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