Mehdi Hasan is back. He is little changed from when he was last dominating the Left-wing scene in Britain, holding forth on Islam in the Oxford Union chamber and debating Douglas Murray about multiculturalism.

The two men, Hasan and Murray, have led parallel lives. They are the same age and were contemporaries at Oxford. They are the heirs to that great British debater, Christopher Hitchens. Murray is Hitchens in his neocon pomp; Hasan is a glimpse at what might have been had the master stayed true to his New Statesman origins. Propelled by their accents and elite British training in the argumentative arts, Murray and Hasan, like Hitchens, sought their fortunes in America. They are scrappy British bulldogs, filled with that pugnacious drive to, as Hasan’s book title says, “Win Every Argument”.

Hasan is now bringing the argument back to his native land. Yesterday, he unveiled Zeteo UK, the British cousin of Zeteo, which he launched two years ago in opposition to the American “mainstream media”. With 677,000 subscribers on Substack and over two million subscribers on YouTube, it is now a major player in the bustling marketplace of “alternative media”. The question is whether it can replicate that success in Britain.

According to Hasan, Zeteo UK is “not just a media company; it’s a movement for media accountability”, one free from “billionaire influence”. In the launch video, he takes aim at the BBC. Mainstream media outlets are not merely competitors in the battle for clicks and attention. They are Zeteo‘s number one enemy.

Israel is at the center of the Zeteo project and worldview. The first video in the publication’s “Debunked!” series was “Debunked! Top seven lies about Gaza.” Israel is, according to Zeteo, the key reason we shouldn’t trust the legacy media, which is “happily manufacturing consent” for Israel’s wars — and is no doubt paid handsomely to do so. Zeteo UK will be pitching itself as the main outlet for what the Economist has recently called “Gen-Z socialism”: anti-billionaire, anti-West, and above all, anti-Israel.

In Britain, however, Hasan’s venture is entering a saturated market. Recent years have seen a blossoming of alternative media on both sides of the political aisle. On the Left, Novara Media sets the template. While the more traditional bastions of the British Left, the Guardian and the New Statesman, kept a cautious distance, Novara was the cheerleader of Corbynism. PoliticsJoe is another relic of the 2010s era of Left populism. Its modus operandi is the vox pop, often involving games of gammon-baiting. What Novara and PoliticsJoe had in common was that they were scrappy start-ups by genuine outsiders and unknowns, fluent in youth culture and new media. Zeteo UK’s launch video, on the other hand, boasts its big names, most of whom, like Hasan, have been drawn from the “legacy media” ranks. The faces in its line-up, including Owen Jones and Grace Blakeley, are all familiar. There is little fresh, young talent.

There may, however, be a gap in the market for Zeteo UK to exploit. The politics that Hasan has long preached — his proposals for political union between the Muslim community and young Left-wingers — have now found considerable success in the Green Party of Zack Polanski. It is little surprise, then, that Polanski has welcomed the news. Zeteo UK could serve as the media arm of the Green Party much as Novara once did for Corbyn’s Labour.

Hasan will not want to dwell on anything that might breach the peace between the two factions — there will likely be little on trans rights. Israel and the billionaires: these are the key elements of “Gen-Z socialism”, and of the emerging political alignment on the Left. These are, of course, global subjects, calling into question whether there is really a need for a nationally specific Zeteo spin-off. But in Britain, as in America, these subjects will be Zeteo’s bread and butter.

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Samuel Rubinstein is a writer and historian.

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