James O’Brien on post-Brexit Britain: ‘This conflation of patriotism with a sense of superiority’

Every publisher seeks a theme, one that mirrors a country’s soul or mood. This season’s publishing zeitgeist in Britain is “UKatastrophe” – where politics and society in the country is measured, often to be found wanting.

The list of books is growing: former BBC presenter Gavin Esler’s often angry polemic Britain Is Better than This; former Conservative minister Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge; and radio host James O’Brien’s How They Broke Britain.

Born to a single Irish mother and adopted, O’Brien, with nearly 1½ million listeners a week to his British commercial station LBC daily talkshow, has become the voice of those who hated Brexit, Boris Johnson, and much else about where power lies in today’s UK.

Speaking this week as former No 10 Downing Street chief of staff Dominic Cummings laid bare the dysfunctionality inside the building during the height of the Covid crisis, O’Brien says half-jokingly that the book’s alternative title was “Why Is Everything So Shit?”

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O’Brien believes this even more now “than I did when I started writing the book, and more widely than I did when I finished it”, because ever since he submitted the manuscript, “everyone has been using the word”.

“I guess there’s an argument about who’s to blame, but I don’t think there’s much argument about how low we’ve been brought and how unnecessary it was,” says the presenter of the three-hour-long The Whole Show.

O’Brien does not lack confidence, as illustrated, perhaps, by the titles for his previous books, How to Be Right, and How Not to Be Wrong, and he is liked and loathed in equal measure.

As always, he is forthright. There are many to blame for the UK’s current woes, he argues. It is “a tale of loss and betrayal; of unbridled arrogance and unchallenged ignorance; of personal impunity, warped ideology and political incompetence”, he writes.

If you’re losing £30 million a year on a commercial project, you’re probably not in it for the money

—  O'Brien on GB News

And the British media, TV and newspapers in what was once known as Fleet Street, is at the head of the queue, where politicians get away with declaring “the demonstrably untrue” by “supine or sycophantic journalists”.

Equally, he blames a slew of privately, often secretly funded “think tanks” that have over the last few decades largely seized control of the debate inside the Conservative Party, and won platforms to portray themselves as independent voices across British broadcasting.

Now the battle for hearts and minds has moved fully into TV, with the creation of GB News, fronted by a slew of Conservative MPs, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, and former Ukip leader Nigel Farage. They are soon to be joined by Boris Johnson.

Curiously, O’Brien argues that GB News can be both successful and a failure at one and the same time; unable, he says, with more than a touch of pride, to “touch the kind of numbers that we’ve been doing for years”.

However, he goes on, the real focus for those behind GB News, including hedge-fund chairman Paul Marshall, is not the ill-educated, the disgruntled or the impoverished, but rather to win “disproportionate” influence over the current and future path of the Conservatives.

“If you’re losing £30 million a year on a commercial project, you’re probably not in it for the money,” he says. “They’ve bought themselves a seat if not at top table then certainly at a table where seats didn’t used to be for sale.”

I don’t buy the idea that liberals are out of touch. I think people who think immigration is the source of their problems are the ones that are out of touch

The politically right-wing station has put “on a cloak of respectability, latterly in the last month or two by getting rid of some particularly ridiculous characters but I suspect that they’ll just keep banging the same drum”, says O’Brien.

“They’ll be doing nativism. They’ll be going after refugees. Aneurin Bevan [postwar Labour minister who founded the NHS] put it best: the project has always been about persuading voters to use their power to protect wealth. For people with no wealth to protect those with wealth.

“They’re there to distract from the real reasons for inequality and unfairness and to focus people’s attention on well, in the case of GB News, everything from Covid vaccines to foreigners, that they’re the real reason why your life isn’t going in the way that you want it to go.”

Is all of this not just the typical argument one expects to hear from a left-leaning, London-based liberal, one untouched by issues that inflame debate?

O’Brien rejects the point. Most people holding anti-immigrant feelings are “not getting their ideas from interactions with immigrants: they’re getting their ideas from people like Nigel Farage telling them that immigrants are awful”, he says.

[ A ‘proper f***ing lunch’ with Nigel Farage: ‘I mustn’t be sloshed this evening’ ]

Opinion polling taken when British newspapers “take their foot off the gas” about immigration supports his contention, he argues, since the number of people citing immigration as their number one concern during such times plummets.

“So no, I don’t buy the idea that liberals are out of touch. I think people who think immigration is the source of their problems are the ones that are out of touch, but I have enormous sympathy for them because of the effort and epic expense put into convincing them of that.”

Demographics will change opinions, he says. “I mean, if you, or your mum’s care home is understaffed, you are going to have to ask yourself some fairly tough questions about why you spent the first two decades of this century calling for people to be sent back where they came from.”

The National Health Service in the UK has 110,000 unfillable vacancies, while hospitality and other businesses are shy of workers because Brexit, “driven by insularity and xenophobia, has created an environment into which a lot of people don’t want to come”, he says,

Despite the promises of Brexiteers, however, immigration into the UK has not fallen. Rather, the source of immigration has changed, with fewer people coming from eastern Europe and more from southeast Asia.

However, the UK’s challenges on the issue of immigration could get worse if “the same people that managed to inflame baseless racism against eastern Europeans decide to turn their attention to people who’ve come here from India, or Bangladesh or Pakistan to fill existing vacancies.

“If they turn their demagoguery in that direction, things could get quite ugly again. Possibly uglier than we’ve seen in a while,” he says, because this time the immigration debate would have “the added ingredient of colour”.

You can’t turn up in someone’s life like a hand grenade and pull the pin out the back of your neck

—  O'Brien on his decision not to track down his Irish mother

O’Brien has faith in the coming generation, one that perhaps has a greater understanding than earlier generations about the sins of the British empire, including an understanding about the country’s role in centuries of the slave trade.

“I think that runs deep in our society – deeper than I appreciated as a younger man – that this belief, that this conflation of patriotism with a sense of superiority, underpins an awful lot of what’s going on,” he says.

Such attitudes lead some British people to be convinced that “the reason why we’ve got stately homes is because we are a superior breed, it’s not because we, you know, went around the world robbing and pillaging, and then slaving”, he says.

Now a proud Irish passport holder, O’Brien enjoys programmes where people trace their family roots, but he has no desire to do the same, even though he knows that his birth mother is still alive, and where she is living.

He easily found his birth mother’s name from documents his adopted parents had kept for him in the attic, unlike his friend, comedian Dara Ó Briain, who was adopted in Ireland under much tougher disclosure rules and found the bureaucracy around his search “unnecessarily hard”.

“A lot of women in Ireland in their 60s and 70s have raised families and married men who know nothing about the babies that they gave up. You can’t turn up in someone’s life like a hand grenade and pull the pin out the back of your neck. You’ve just not got that right,” he says.

His Irish background, which he says he has always romanticised, is important to him, because he often wonders how life for “the unadopted me” growing up in a small town or village in Ireland would have been like during the 1970s. “Not easy, I would suspect.”

“I’ve always had a consciousness of the other me, the unadopted me,” he says, saying that it affects his politics and his sense of justice and equality and attitude to privilege: “I’ve always been incredibly conscious of serendipity and good fortune in my life.”

Would he, not because of anyone’s fault, have grown up less loved, or less privileged in Ireland, he wonders. So the question is not one of nationality, but rather of opportunity lost, or found? “Yeah, I think so, it’s got more to do with ‘the unadopted lad’.”

How They Broke Britain by James O’Brien is published by Ebury