How they Broke Britain by James O’Brien, WH Allen, 2023
The chapters on Cameron and Corbyn are the least interesting so far because they are the least interesting, least Machiavellian characters. Cameron is simply a product of his education and the milieu in which he grew up. The private school system produces emotionally stunted people with a stratospheric sense of entitlement and self-belief but with absolutely zero self-awareness. Cameron is no more than a typical example (with average talent at most) and these deep-seated character flaws are largely what made his premiership such an unmitigated disaster.
I said before that I have tended to think of Corbyn as one of the relatively good guys destroyed by the right-wing media and O’Brien has not completely swayed me. Mostly he was just in some ways incompetent although some of his past associations were, at best, extremely unwise. I remain unconvinced by allegations of anti-Semitism in the Labour party as they were portrayed in tabloid headlines, which is not to say that there is not some truth in them. Starmer on the other hand seems unwilling to align himself with anything at all. The list of his U-turns is flabbergasting. O’Brien lambasts Corbyn and cannot forgive him for not offering a powerful, vocal alternative to the Brexit campaign, but Corbyn is a lifelong Leaver as was Tony Benn. O’Brien would surely have had worse to say if he had betrayed that belief.
I should confess, I was pro-Brexit. Clearly it has been catastrophic for the country. I am no little Englander and was not at all persuaded by the Tory Brexiteers’ lies, but I have always seen the EU as a hugely corrupt gravy train and only had to think of what the effects were on agriculture and wildlife in this country, or, going back a while, the butter mountains and the wine lakes, to believe we would be best getting out. I am also a great believer in local government at every level. I was once talking to a guy who went to the same school as me (Highgate), who had risen pretty high in the ranks of the EU bureaucracy. “I suppose,” he said, “you think it’s just a bunch of venal politicians looking after no-one’s interests but their own and that all that goes on is self-enrichment, backhanders and malfeasance.” “Erm, well, yes.” “Well, you’re wrong. It’s not like that at all. All of that in fact goes on at a level you cannot even begin to imagine.”
Meanwhile the General Election has just been announced, or genny lec as my daughter tells me it is becoming known (like platty jubes and cozzy livs). O’Brien has much to say of course. What made me laugh out loud was his reading out the Daily Mail headline “Rishi Sunak seizes the initiative.” “Seizes the initiative?” O’Brien asks twice, incredulously. “He couldn’t even seize an umbrella.” Why there was no one there to hand one to him is anyone’s guess. Less a matter of guesswork is why now? I think there are several reasons but that the main one is that Sunak knows, as he has admitted, that he will not be able to deliver on Rwanda before the ballot, and that he also knows but has not admitted that it is unlikely in the extreme that he will be able to deliver it at all. We can hope. As O’Brien says, Sunak originally thought the Rwanda plan was “ridiculous and wrong-headed”, then he proceeded to tie that millstone around his own neck.
As pitiful as Sunak’s drenched state was, in another address, his use of the phrase “bold action” was repeated so often that it seemed like a nervous tic. A clue as to what those actions might be would have been something at least. It reminded me of Theresa Maybot repeating “strong and stable government” as though on auto-pilot at the nadir of her time in power.
He has just announced that he would bring back “mandatory” National Service which I suppose is a bold action. Dear God. Do they sit around asking each other to come up with ever increasingly inhumane and retrograde policies? “Hmm, not bad. We need something more cruel though.” What next? The return of corporal punishment? Capital punishment? These gung-ho, backwards-looking attempts at populism are really depressing. As Elon Musk asked, sending young people who don’t know each other to kill each other on behalf of old men who do know each other – what is the point of that?
On May 25th there’s a very short piece by deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden. It really is extraordinarily feeble. “Bold action” comes up in the second of six paragraphs and again in the fifth, which also includes “bold new ideas”. That ain’t gonna work. You can’t just keep saying “bold action” all the time without telling us what it is. Far more insidious is the warning that Keir Starmer will “bar further exploration in the North Sea [to plunder it for oil and gas]; this would not only cost jobs but puts environmental dogma ahead of our energy security.” Dogma? Really? Is this a complete denial of climate change? Then he says it again – is no one proof-reading this awful stuff? “We Conservatives take a different approach. Rishi Sunak will always put Britain’s energy security and your family finances ahead of environmental dogma in our approach to net zero.” I try to minimise the use of expletives in this blog but this makes me really angry. This is basically saying as long as we’re all right in the short term, Jack, fuck the planet. As George Monbiot said in The Guardian some time ago: “To buy himself a few more months of political survival, Rishi Sunak, representing a party that has recently taken £3.5m from major polluters and climate deniers, is threatening the welfare of the human species. He has switched, over the past fortnight, from doing a grand total of nothing to prevent climate chaos to actively sabotaging both the climate programmes he inherited and the efforts of other public bodies.”
Enter stage right none other than Boris Johnson, who urges us to save Britain from socialism, but Starmer is no more a socialist than Tony Bliar. It would be “utterly mad” he says to let this dangerous man into power. I wish he was a bit more dangerous as far as the energy companies are concerned. He is, Johnson continues, “a woke lefty lawyer from North London” – which are all surely good things – “who doesn’t even eat meat, only fish”. That’s woke as in considerate, thoughtful, being aware of social injustice, choosing your words with some care so as not to offend others, making an effort to keep up with what offends because language and its usage constantly evolve, not judging by appearances, by creed, colour, gender, sexuality, but embracing and celebrating diversity, respecting cultures and beliefs other than one’s own is it? Is that not something we should all aspire to, however imperfectly? Wake up Mr Dowden. “Woke” is not an insult. I rest my case. As the questioning of Paula Vennells, CEO of the Post Office, reached its conclusion, one victim of that scandal said that the trouble with these people is that they don’t actually even seem to know the difference between right and wrong. Certainly they have no shame – Vennells’ tears were all for herself.
For more on the subject of “woke” it doesn’t get much better than the brilliant stand-up comedian Stewart Lee:
youtube YouTube Stewart Lee 9 Political Correctness 41st Best Stand Up ever
Nigel Farage, who depicts himself as the great patriot, has announced that he is not going to be involved in the election at all, rather he prefers to head off to America to help the rapist, traitor and clinically insane (surely) Donald Trump in his attempt to regain the American presidency. It’s a cliché but you really couldn’t make this stuff up.
Dominic Cummings is the next subject of How They Broke Britain. He gets a surprisingly easy ride. He is described as “mad as a box of frogs”, solipsistic, an arch manipulator, but O’Brien feels he genuinely had the best interests of the country at heart. Not really good enough when he believes the end justifies absolutely any means (allowing him the luxury of freedom from moral and ethical considerations), including the unconscionable data mining scandal and his pro-Brexit lies about the NHS using outdated figures. Negotiations by Margaret Thatcher reduced our EU contribution from £19 billion to £13 billion, a reduction Cummings chose simply to ignore in his calculations as he presented them to us. And of course Cummings paved the way for Boris Johnson and his handling of the Covid crisis. He seems to have despised absolutely everyone, but politicians and civil servants in particular.
I happened to watch for the first time in years tv advertisements (on Channel 5) and it’s the same marketing gibberish it always was. Mattresses, toothbrushes and toothpaste, hair care and cleaning products. “Hair repair is in its golden era.” Make your bathroom “dazzling not dull”. Use Lenor for “ten times the freshness”. What does that even begin to mean? Define freshness. Cameron was forever on about ordinary, hard-working British families. Each one of those words needs defining, spouting them on repeat is not informed nor informative debate, it’s empty rhetoric used to try to appeal to the basest instincts of the electorate, a Cummings speciality.
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