Who pulled their commercials? A number of well known brands, including drinks firms Grolsch and Kopparberg, IKEA, skincare brand Nivea and the Open University all said they will distance themselves from the new GB News channel.
Why? The organisations were coming under pressure from campaign groups opposed to the new “anti-woke” channel, with suggestions that allowing guests such as Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage air time will help encourage a new era of hate speech on UK television screens. A website boycottGBNews.org was set up, while campaign group, Stop Funding Hate, called on its 123,000 Twitter followers to pressure the brands to suspend commercials.
Letters
Turkish fascism
I think comrade Conrad’s article on fascism fails to achieve all the sixfold intention he states (‘Misusing the F-word’, May 27). He’s certainly right to insist upon clear and historically rooted definitions and also on his remarks against broadening the scope of the term in an inflationary and only pejorative manner. However, he bends the stick too much on to the other side.
The main problem is that he’s too stuck in history and the ‘classical’ cases of fascism, to the extent that this leads him to ignore the obvious fascistic sides of current phenomena he investigates. He intends to evaluate it globally, but only touches on his own native British case. He seems to be right to assume that fascism is not a current threat in the UK. I’ll leave aside the internal strategic debates of the country’s leftist organisations and continue on Conrad’s passing remarks about Turkish leftists’ evaluations of the nature of Turkish regime.
John Gordon Thomson, Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain
Just 30 years after the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s, history was repeating itself. Faced with more failing crops, landlords in Ireland again began evicting the tenant farmers who could no longer earn their keep. The issue had never really gone away: The previous famine had revealed just how few farmers actually owned land, and citizens had been fighting for tenants’ rights since the 1850s. But the latest agricultural crisis caused tension to boil over.
In 1879, farmers launched the Land War, a widespread resistance to unfair rent prices and evictions. With it came the establishment of the Land League, an organization seeking to overhaul Ireland’s feudal system of land ownership.