Tag Archives: GB News

Tanya Park

From broadsheet to outrage factory: the decline of the Spectator and the Telegraph

By Tanya Park | Wed 25th February 2026 - 10:30 am

Liberals should care about the collapse of serious conservative journalism. Not because the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph were ever friends to progressive politics (they weren’t), but because a functioning liberal democracy depends on a press that engages honestly with reality across the political spectrum. What has replaced these publications’ particular brand of reactionary journalism is something considerably worse: reactionary journalism stripped of any pretence to intellectual seriousness. And that is bad for everyone.

Let us be clear about what these publications actually were. The Spectator spent much of the twentieth century providing intellectual cover for policies that entrenched inequality and treated the interests of the powerful as synonymous with the national interest. The Telegraph was the unabashed voice of privilege: the paper of the officer class, the Home Counties, the quietly certain that things were arranged more or less as they ought to be. To mourn their decline is not to pretend they were ever on the right side of history. It is simply to note that the seeds of today’s dysfunction were present in the editorial culture all along: a culture that prioritised tribal comfort over truth, and consistently failed to hold power to account when that power wore a blue rosette.

The lurch, and what drove it

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Mark Valladares

Welcome to my day: 2 October 2023 – autumn has come…

By Mark Valladares | Mon 2nd October 2023 - 7:41 am

It’s October already, and despite the rather pleasant September that we’ve had, today offered a sense that the seasons are turning. And whilst the Conservatives are still in Manchester, engaged in what the Economist described as “magical thinking” (paywall, I’m afraid), the rest of us have moved on to what will happen in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, Tamworth and, of most interest to Liberal Democrats, Mid Bedfordshire.

If the polls are accurate, Labour should win in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, but Tamworth is supposedly neck and neck, despite Labour’s recent performance in local elections there, and Mid Bedfordshire is being claimed by all three major parties. Should the Conservatives hold either or both, it will be a confidence boost for them, even if it persuades them to keep going as they are – in the face of the national polling data. Thus, it’s important that we keep pushing in Mid Bedfordshire, and I’m perpetually impressed by the reports of activists converging on the area from across the country.

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Recent Comments

  • Chris Cory
    While I agree with every word, I am at the same time, more than a little discombobulated. If we believe all this fine "power to the people" stuff, then isn't...
  • Ian
    The way the party runs itself is hardly an exemplar for putting our values into practice, is it? Nor evidence that senior people in the party have much interes...
  • David Allen
    British politics since the 2008 crash has been a contest between establishment Governments and insurgent opponents. The Tory and Labour establishment parties h...
  • Kevin Hawkins
    I have frequently commented on Lib Dem Voice that we should not take one week’s by-election results (or even several week’s results) seriously. We have goo...
  • Dan Falchikov
    Well said: "David Howarth’s Being Liberal explores the Liberal disposition: open-minded, suspicious of abuses of power, uncomfortable with hierarchy, treatin...