Ep 16: James O'Brien on How they Broke Britain

James O'Brien is often described as the voice of liberal England. With this regular radio slot on LBC and his huge online following, he is a reminder that popular doesn’t have to be populism. His patient, forensic but totally accessible unpicking of cynical political dishonsesty, particularly of the Brexist variety, has been a beacon of sanity for literally millions of people - at a time when so many other media outlets, including the BBC, no longer seem prepared to call out deliberately misleading public messaging. O’Brien sometimes feels like a lone voice of reason and that points to a profound change in our society. Politicians have always tried to avoid answering difficult questions and portray their own actions as virtuous and ingenious, but the kind of profound dishonesty characterised by Boris Johnson coupled with the refusal to take responsibility for your own failings, perhaps best epitomised by Liz Truss, feels like a newer phenomenon. This plays into a wider prospect, of a country that now feels broken, its media, its politics and perhaps most importantly its public services, all deeply dysfunctional. The roots and causes of that malaise are the subject of James OBrien’s new book, How they Broke Britain. In the excellent introduction, O’Brien talks of the boiling frog metaphor and succinctly explains the premise of his book: it is “the story of slowly boiled water from which an entire country failed to escape”.

Like anyone who has been profoundly distressed by that boiling water, I have been a big admirer of O’Brien’s work, both on LBC and on Twitter. This was particularly the case as his book has a similar title to my own, How Britain Broke the World. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest they are companion volumes, but I was to some extent attempting in my work to look at some of the similar effects of Britain’s internal politics on the wider world. So it was a huge pleasure and privilege to have James on the podcast. He is, as you’d expect for a consummate radio presenter, an excellent guest and I really hope you get as much from listening to him as I did from interviewing him.

Thanks for listening and please subscribe to this show if you haven’t already. You can follow my work at https://arthursnell.substack.com/ as well as on Twitter and Bluesky. 

Finally, a link to the Disorder Podcast which I mentioned at the top of the show: https://www.goalhangerpodcasts.com/disorder

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@snellarthur.bsky.social. You can sometimes find me on other podcasts - most often Disorder which I am involved with in partnership with RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute, the world's oldest think tank.

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