Ivan Alman

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Reform UK’s billionaire-funded propaganda channel, GB News, exists to protect the interests of the rich. Its key propaganda strategy is to blame and scapegoat minorities and other vulnerable groups, including those who need assistance in the form of welfare. The inflammatory claims in the article below are based on a highly partisan analysis released on 4 May 2026 by the Conservative Party, using Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) administrative data on actual benefit payments. In 2024–25, approximately 625,000 households (down slightly from 668,000 in 2023/24 when the Conservatives were in power, but double the 2019–20 figure) received more than £32,000 in total welfare payouts. This threshold roughly matches the average post-tax earnings of a full-time worker (median full-time gross pay was about £39,000 in 2025, with take-home pay around £31–32k after tax and NI). About 16,000 households received over £60,000, and the Conservatives highlighted that the number of working-age households on high payments (>£30k) has risen. While these claims appear to be broadly accurate, I will now show how they are misleading, decontextualised, lack nuance, and, like almost all GB News and other right-wing news media content, appear to be framed to provoke maximum outrage, anger, and polarisation, and to deflect blame away from the ultrarichrich and the failed deregulatory free-market ideology of successive governments, rather than to objectively report, inform, and educate. A reminder that while it has the word ‘news’ in the title, it is clearly not a news channel. The article frames the data against a ‘£155 BILLION benefits budget’ that is ‘ballooning’ and will soon ‘dwarf defence spending’. The presentation is deliberately provocative, inflammatory, selective, and misleading. Headlines like “Welfare pays more than work” and phrases such as “critics slam”, “abuse the system”, and “golden ticket” imply widespread laziness or fraud among recipients, strongly and falsely implying that large numbers of able-bodied people are simply choosing benefits over jobs. This rhetoric ignores the legal and policy reality: most very high awards go to households with severe disabilities or caring responsibilities, where benefits (especially Personal Independence Payment, or PIP) are exempt from the household benefit cap precisely to protect the most vulnerable. Would they prefer we turn the most vulnerable in British society into beggars? Bring back work houses? Should we ‘deport’ them to somewhere more affordable? I’m reminded of the time privately educated multimillionaire Richard Tice’s Dubai-based privately educated multimillionaire partner, Isabel Oakeshott, referred to people claiming disability support as “parasites” on another right-wing propaganda channel, TalkTV, which is funded by another divisive billionaire, Rupert Murdoch. While, outside of the inflammatory headlines, the analysis itself notes that these payments are the “highest needs” cases, the framing downplays that context in favour of outrage. Key contextual information that audiences need to make sense of the article is deliberately concealed or downplayed, including the composition of the overall UK welfare budget. The £155bn figure cited appears to refer primarily to working-age and children’s benefits (official forecasts for 2025–26 put this at around £145bn). However, the full UK social security system is forecast at £323bn (Great Britain) or £334bn (UK-wide) in 2025–26. Around 55% of that total (£178bn) goes to pensioners, including £146bn on the state pension alone. Pensions are the single largest item and have grown due to the triple lock and an ageing population. The 625,000 high-payment households represent roughly 2% of the UK’s 29 million households and are a tiny fraction of overall spending; the vast majority of welfare goes to retirees who have contributed through National Insurance over decades, not to “work-shy” working-age claimants. Despite the strong impression given by the article, by populist politicians, and by swathes of Britain’s print and broadcast news media, Britain’s welfare costs are NOT unusually high when benchmarked against culturally similar countries. Nor are levels of taxation. Britain is categorically NOT a “high tax, high welfare” country. This is one of the most widely circulating lies pushed by media and political discourse in the UK for several decades, and should be robustly challenged at every opportunity. Using the standard OECD measure of public social expenditure (which covers pensions, health-related benefits, family support, unemployment, housing, etc.): OECD average: ~21–22% Finland: 31.4% France: 30.6% Germany: 27.9% Italy: ~27.6% UK: 23.0% of GDP Australia: 22.9% (net) While the US is just 19.8%, it has much higher private spending and much worse outcomes across many key quality-of-life measures, including lower life expectancy, more poverty, more public debt, fewer worker holidays and protections, and a far higher homicide rate. The UK sits comfortably in the middle of the pack among developed Western democracies, lower than most continental European peers with similar living standards and higher than the US or some Anglosphere nations. Working-age disability and incapacity spending, while rising post-pandemic, remains close to or below the OECD average as a share of GDP. The welfare model that Reform UK wants to impose is far closer to the US model than our European neighbours. Is that really what GB News audiences and Reform UK voters want? Or have they been fed a diet of divisive, misleading propaganda which seeks to promise them everything and actually make their lives far worse should Reform ever get anywhere near the levers of power? Claims of an “out-of-control” or uniquely bloated welfare system simply do not hold up against comparable countries. GB News, owned by Evangelical “Christian” billionaire hedge fund founder Paul Marshall (alongside other right-leaning investors), has a clear editorial incentive to present the story this way. Sensational framing of “benefits Britain” drives engagement among its core audience, who are often older, taxpayer-focused, and receptive to narratives of waste, dependency, and government failure. Highlighting the figures now, under a Labour government, serves to attack current Government policy while glossing over the fact that the benefit-cap loopholes and post-pandemic rises occurred across governments and administrations. It also keeps pressure on Labour to pursue tougher reforms, aligning with the channel’s broader populist-right, small-state, low-tax, anti-union, anti-regulation, and anti-immigrant #TuftonStreet-aligned leanings. Billionaire ownership of media may not be inherently sinister, but it does shape coverage priorities: stories that resonate with anti-Left sentiment and boost ratings are prioritised over dry, balanced, informative fiscal analysis. We see this pattern repeated daily right across the massive media empires owned by Marshall (GB News, UnHerd, Spectator), Murdoch (Sun, Times, TalkTV/Radio), and Jonathan Harmsworth (Mail, METRO, i newspaper), with many non-billionaire-owned news media (Express, London Standard, Telegraph) also adopting this framing. The choice of a non-expert guest from Spiked magazine is also significant for similar ideological reasons. Spiked (originally the Revolutionary Communist Party’s Living Marxism) is a small but vocal, opaquely funded outlet that specialises in contrarian, divisive, anti-welfare-state, anti-migrant, anti-Islam, anti-feminist, anti-tax, free-speech-focused culture-war commentary from a libertarian-right perspective. Its contributors frequently argue that generous benefits create dependency and cultural decay rather than addressing structural issues. Selecting such a guest, rather than, say, a neutral economist, DWP statistician, or disability-sector expert, allows the segment to amplify an emotive, “common-sense” critique without the inconvenient caveats (disability exemptions, pension dominance, OECD comparisons) that a data-focused expert would introduce. It lends an intellectual veneer to an elite populist narrative while staying firmly inside the channel’s ideological comfort zone. This is a classic media tactic: pair selective facts with aligned commentators to reinforce the desired framing rather than test it. @Ofcom have absolutely failed to reign in this clearly ideological approach, making GB News effectively Britain's Fox News. Maybe at the next general election we can look forward to its partisan presenters claiming that the election was fraudulent or “stolen”, should Reform UK do worse than current opinion polls suggest. In short, the raw numbers are real and worth debating: welfare reform, work incentives, and disability assessment are of course legitimate policy questions. As are taxation of the ultrarich, rising inequality, regulation of the financial institutions and crypto, worker’s rights, environmental protections, politicians receiving gifts of £5 million from old men with two names living in Thailand, politicians lying to voters about buying a house in their constituency, and the concentration of media ownership in the hands aof a few right-wing billionaires. But he GB News presentation strips away essential context to manufacture a culture-war-style scandal. The reality about welfare is far more nuanced than GB News claims: the UK spends a middling amount on social protection by international standards, raised by middling levels of taxation, with the bulk going to pensioners, and with the high awards highlighted overwhelmingly going to support people with severe needs who cannot reasonably be expected to “choose work.”