who is a respected economist and political commentator (maybe the closest the UK has to Paul Krugman - but, you know, no Nobel):
On Monday 22nd September I watched a party political broadcast on behalf of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. It was on the BBC, and it was entitled ‘News at Ten’. Unfortunately that news bulletin is no longer available on the BBC's website, so all I can do is give you a flavour of what it was like.
It starts 16 minutes into the bulletin, with Chris Mason, Political Editor of BBC News, interviewing the leader of the Liberal Democrat party, Ed Davey. The Liberal Democrats are having their party conference, so this is a chance for its leader to make a relatively rare appearance (see below) on the news, and perhaps explain what the Liberal Democrat’s policies are, or what their political aims are. But Chris Mason had other ideas.
“Do you feel a moral duty to keep Nigel Farage out of power” is his second question. His third is “You say that Nigel Farage gets too much attention, but ...” He holds up a little figurine of Farage that he bought at the conference.”... You are obsessed with him, aren’t you? Frightened even.” And so it continues, with pretty well every question from Mason being about Reform. Finally he takes on Davey’s claim that the BBC is giving too much uncritical airtime to Farage, and accuses Davey of behaving like Donald Trump! Mason’s summing up at the end is about Nigel Farage.
This segment was then followed by the man himself, with Farage announcing a new policy to remove settled status from immigrants who have been in the UK for a number of years. Despite apparently discussing the Farage policy, the BBC failed to say clearly that there was no basis to his claim that this would save public money.
https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2025/09/farage-and-bbc.html("Party Political Broadcasts" are the short segments that public service broadcasters must give to major political parties every few months for them to use as they want (paid political ads being banned on British TV))
The BBC, and other TV news, try to justify their extensive Reform coverage by saying "yes, they may have very few MPs, but they're very strong in the polls". But this has become a self-fulfilling prophesy. If the coverage is "Reform is getting popular", then, in a time when no party has particularly strong positive support for "these are the polices we need", then discontented voters go to wherever they hear other discontented voters are going.
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