Ofcom opens two investigations into GB News after record complaints over anti-gay claims

The regulator is examining a July broadcast in which a guest linked Pride to bestiality and paedophilia, and a June programme in which another guest linked gay men to the sexual abuse of children. Neither case is new. That is rather the point.

Ofcom has opened two standards investigations into GB News, confirming in its latest broadcast bulletin that it will examine an edition of Alex Armstrong Tonight from 5 July and an edition of The Saturday Five from 20 June. Between them the two programmes attracted around 15,000 complaints, with the July broadcast alone setting what is understood to be a record for a single GB News show.

The regulator does not use the word finally. A considerable number of complainants might.

What Ofcom is investigating

• Alex Armstrong Tonight, 5 July 2026. A discussion about whether Pride events are suitable for children, held days after Pride in London, in which the Catholic commentator and CitizenGO campaigns manager Caroline Farrow made remarks about paedophilia and bestiality. More than 12,000 complaints followed.
• The Saturday Five, 20 June 2026. Comments by Syntyche Djunga, who posts as Based and Bougie, about gay men and children. Roughly 3,000 complaints followed.
• Both are standards cases, which in practice means Ofcom is testing whether material with the potential to cause offence was justified by the context in which it was broadcast.
• The Good Law Project, which filed a detailed complaint over the Farrow segment, says campaigns by Bimini, Liam Rondi and Love Queers drove much of the public complaint volume. The Green party leader Zack Polanski signed an open letter calling on the regulator to act.
• No timetable has been published. Ofcom investigations of this kind routinely run for months.

What was said

Farrow told the programme that Pride was no longer about gay rights and had instead become a celebration of every sexuality that is not heterosexual, a list into which she folded furries, bestiality and, in her phrasing, "minor attracted people, you know, paedophiles". She had earlier described Pride in London as a heavily sexualised display.

She was speaking opposite the former Liberal Democrat councillor Mathew Hulbert, who objected at the time, and was chaired by Armstrong, who is gay and who pushed back during the segment, telling viewers that the overwhelming majority of people he had filmed at Pride the previous year were there for entirely ordinary reasons.

The June case concerns remarks attributed to Djunga about gay men being more prone to sexual deviancy and, according to the Good Law Project's account, to "child sexual assault with their adopted children".

The July edition has since been taken down from YouTube.

The channel's position

GB News said at the time that the comments belonged to a contributor rather than the channel, that they were expressed in a live debate, that they were robustly and repeatedly challenged by the two other contributors present, and that the channel takes its obligations as a licensed broadcaster seriously.

It is a familiar structure of defence, and one that Ofcom will now have to weigh rather than simply accept. The Broadcasting Code does not treat a live booking as a shield in itself. The question is whether a broadcaster that repeatedly books guests who say this sort of thing can keep describing the outcome as a surprise.

Armstrong returned to the subject on a later programme, calling the conflation of Pride with the celebration of paedophilia an "age-old gay trope" used to demonise gay people, and saying the remarks did not reflect his views or those of a channel where LGBTQ+ people also work.

The Howie precedent

This is the part worth watching, because Ofcom has already been here. In January 2025 the GB News presenter Josh Howie suggested that full inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in a church would extend to paedophiles. Around 70,000 people complained, and the regulator found that GB News had breached the code. No sanction followed, on the basis that the channel had broadcast an apology and a fuller discussion of the context within weeks.

Eighteen months later, two more guests have arrived at broadly the same claim on the same channel, and the regulator is once again writing the same sort of letter. If the finding in 2025 was that context and a subsequent apology were sufficient remedy, the reasonable question now is what a remedy is actually for. A breach finding that carries no consequence is not really a deterrent, it is a filing exercise, and the pattern of complaint numbers suggests audiences have worked that out.

What happens next

• Ofcom can conclude that a programme was not in breach, that the matter is resolved, or that there was a breach of the code.
• Sanctions are available where breaches are serious or repeated, and range from a direction to broadcast a statement of findings, through financial penalties, to licence revocation in the most extreme cases.
• Ofcom is separately under legal pressure over its enforcement record, with the Good Law Project having brought action over its handling of complaints about trans-related content on TalkTV.
• Any outcome in these two cases will be published in a future broadcast bulletin.

The channel will presumably argue, again, that a live guest said something and was challenged. The regulator will decide, again, whether that is enough. The only genuinely new element is the volume of people prepared to sit down and fill in the complaint form, and the fact that they now appear to be doing it in the expectation that nothing much will happen.