Few media organisations founded on the back of student activism survive that long or succeed to that degree.
Novara has become an alternative to news analysis and commentary for a UK audience alienated by the mainstream news industry, dominated by boomers and Gen Xers with right-wing or centrist views.
Most of the British left has long produced either doctrinaire party newspapers or websites with low-grade aesthetics. This has changed in the last decade with the rise of a new generation of tech-savvy millennial leftists.
Over several years, Novara has developed a respectable YouTube presence with nearly one million subscribers. Despite its tight budget, the leftist outfit looks much slicker and more professional than GBNews did when it first aired.
At first, Novara was strongly associated with Aaron Bastani, who made his name on the media left through YouTube monologues and interviews with notable figures such as Marxist geographer David Harvey.
Although many followers still equate Bastani and Novara, it is not defined by a single journalist, which is one of its strengths.
Fortunately, Ash Sarkar soon emerged as a second Novara star, becoming a semi-regular talking head on TV chat shows and news programmes.
Bastani and Sarkar have evolved over the years, journeying through the Corbyn years and the aftermath of Labour’s defeat in 2019.
Long framed as the voice of ‘woke ideology’, Sarkar has pivoted her attention to a left-wing critique of identity politics. Bastani has gone from promoting his idea of “fully automated luxury communism” to covering urban decay and its impact on our lives.
During the Brexit crisis, Novara co-founder James Butler became a key voice on constitutional issues during the parliamentary stalemate. He later moved on to work for the London Review of Books.
Most of the original team is still in place. Michael Walker is still a regular host, along with fellow presenters Bastani, Dalia Gabriel, and Moya Lothian-McLean, until she left for The Glasgow Bell. Of course, every fan has their favourite presenter.
The Novara network has also helped build reputations for new writers. Economist Grace Blakeley made waves as a Novara commentator before publishing her first book.
Novara has spawned spinoff projects and even imitators in the alternative media ecology. The platform’s influence has extended far beyond the narrow confines of an iPhone screen.
New Media, New Politics
Novara Media has come a long way from its origins amid student protests, the anti-austerity movement and Occupy London.
Despite backing Jeremy Corbyn and becoming a major alternative media flank for the Corbyn project, Novara has managed to avoid the trap of becoming a party project with sectarian commitments.
Its success as an alternative media organisation is the result of carving out an independent space for itself and developing a loyal, paying audience through consistent output.
Although the mainstream media cannot ignore Novara’s existence, their acknowledgement takes interesting forms.
Somehow, Bastani appears more welcome on GBNews and UnHerd these days than on the BBC and The Guardian. Meanwhile, Sarkar receives a warmer reception, though not always a warm one, from liberal publications and chat TV shows.
Sarkar telling Piers Morgan, “I’m literally a communist!” in response to his inane questioning was just one highlight. Novara viewers’ delight matched the shock in the newsroom.
This visibility inspires controversy on the left.
Many earnest socialists wouldn’t go anywhere near GBNews or Murdoch-owned stations for fear of being co-opted.
The best counter-argument to their ideological purity is that, unless the public sees figures like these, the right will treat the liberal centre as the left, thereby rendering actual leftists invisible. The right has long employed this tactic to shift the Overton Window farther to the right.
Nevertheless, it’s still a high-risk strategy for leftists to go on GBNews, given that the terms of debate are devised to snare them in right-wing narratives.
The left also tends to suspect any signs of success as reflections of weakness and impurity. But this is a symptom of the many defeats the left has suffered over the decades.
Every project has its haters. Novara has its critics on the left, just as every group, regardless of size, has detractors. One particularly shoddy episode was a brief Twitter campaign in 2017 to boycott the platform, which achieved nothing but online harassment.
There are many critics of Novara, but most can be categorised into two narrow groups.
You have the right-wing critics who dismiss the group’s output as “far-left woke bullshit”, though they would say the same about the BBC.
And you also have left-wing critics who criticise Novara for being insufficiently radical. Of course, there’s always someone to your left on the left, and no one ever wants to concede they might not be the purest leftist imaginable.
Some left critics would lambast Novara Media for their “walk and chew gum” approach to Labour’s crisis over Antisemitism at its peak in 2018. The left was split over how to respond to the smear machine.
But the illusion was that there was a “correct line” that would dispel it all. The reality is that the Labour left couldn’t fight back adequately because it lacked bureaucratic power. This allowed the right to maintain the upper hand.
Likewise, the Labour left was in disarray over Brexit. The People’s Vote Campaign became a battering ram against the Corbyn leadership. Of course, Novara took a critical line on this at the time, having supported a ‘Remain and Reform’ line in 2016.
Plenty of left Remainers still disagree with Novara’s coverage of Brexit, particularly its criticisms of the second referendum’s demands.
The difficult truth is that the Labour vote of 2017 was a soft Remain, soft Leave coalition. It met a grim fate in 2019.
So much of this feels like yesterday’s wars now.
Unsurprisingly, the largest anti-Novara cohort is the extreme centre. These are the very people who bitterly opposed the Corbyn project and saw Keir Starmer as the second coming of Tony Blair.
Liberal mums and centrist dads used to dismiss Novara Media as the press bureau of the Corbyn “cult.”
Now this crowd is more likely to see Novara as ‘pro-Putin’ for favouring a peace deal in Ukraine rather than perpetual war.
Most of Novara’s critics mistake the group for a monolith with a party line. However, the project is far more pluralist than most other progressive media outlets, with an ideological range that spans from social democracy to libertarian communism.
Many centrists and right-wingers hoped the defeat of the Corbyn project would mean the end of Novara as well.
To be sure, the death of the Corbyn project was a major political defeat for everyone involved. Novara could have easily lost its way during that depressing time. Far from dying off, though, the platform saw rapid growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. Novara Media showed its staying power, managing to expand its live programmes to five nights a week.
After the Corbyn years, Novara has gradually shifted its focus away from Westminster politics.
It has provided much-needed criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza, another subject the mainstream would rather not have to face.
Alternative Left Futures
Once a one-hour show on London’s Resonance FM, Novara offers its audience a varied multimedia offering of news commentary, interviews and reportage.
Whether left critics want to admit it, they have a lot to learn from this model.
That said, Novara Media will face increasing pressure to conform as it continues to expand and professionalise. This is the difficulty all alternative media organisations face, especially on the left.
Surviving in a hostile media environment is one thing. Flourishing long-term in a market economy is another. The battle is never over for alternative news organisations, especially those attempting to forge a different media economy.
Novara Media must do more than survive. It has to keep its independence.
This could become more challenging as the platform continues to grow and evolve over time. The pressure to conform is always there, and the market is a merciless force.
Many establishment hacks would like these millennial upstarts to disappear for good, but there’s little chance of that happening anytime soon. More importantly, the people who follow Novara every week are not going to disappear either.
This is because Novara represents a cross-section of news consumers not typically covered by the mainstream. The BBC has little time for Novara viewers, just as The Guardian has little time for Novara readers.
What Novara has achieved without corporate backing is a testament to technological change and the decline of traditional news. It’s a millennial left response to status quo media, made possible by YouTube and other platforms.
The rise of online publishing has transformed the news industry. But the pace of technological change has produced new enemies for the establishment. At least for now, Novara Media is the biggest in the UK.
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Screenshot courtesy of Novara Media. All rights reserved.
