James O’Brien and low liberalism
A review of How They Broke Britain by James O’Brien
James O’Brien is a well-known British journalist. The host of a popular show on LBC radio, O’Brien is renowned for his liberal views and polemical tone. We should note his new book, How They Broke Britain, for O’Brien is a figurehead in a wider movement. Recently, liberalism has established a popular support base, ‘low liberals’ embracing key liberal principles yet combining these with elements of populism, authoritarianism and left-wing radicalism. In Britain, low liberalism has enjoyed marked growth.
How They Broke Britain is a well-written book. O’Brien has an engaging turn of phrase and indicts ten people ‘who broke Britain’: Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre, Andrew Neil, Matthew Elliott, Nigel Farage, David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn, Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. We may dispute whether this selection is balanced – figures such as Alastair Campbell are conspicuously absent – yet I will not defend these ten; most have diminished Britain.
But such use of biography entails problems. As I have written before, journalists tend to overestimate the extent to which individuals influence politics. In academic literature, outcomes primarily reflect institutions, rather than parties or (much less) individuals.
O’Brien is guiltier than most. Early in the book, he elaborates the influence of his subjects,
‘[Because] levers of power and influence are controlled by a comparatively tiny number of people, in three easily identifiable and avowedly right-wing areas of public life – the media, politics and wealth – the sheer abnormality of the national situation is rarely noted… Strikes routinely cripple every corner of the public sector, most notably in the NHS where patient satisfaction has plummeted while waiting lists grow exponentially… The challenge is to stop seeing every example of national self-sabotage and decay in isolation and recognise instead that they are all symptoms of the same lethal malaise.’
Empirically, this is difficult to defend and O’Brien makes little effort. Opening with a Chomsky quote – an early sign that the book is not traditionally liberal – O’Brien emphasizes the shadowy and unseen. Much is made of think-tanks, the ‘secretly funded vessels… [which]… operate as lobby groups tirelessly promoting policies that allow businesses, or wealth, to operate with as little regulation, taxation or scrutiny as possible’.
Apparently, Liz Truss’s ‘disastrous tenure in Downing Street was not… some sort of aberration. It was an absolute and inevitable culmination of the forces and manoeuvres detailed here, some conscious and deliberate, some accidental or unwitting, but all, ultimately, calamitous.’
Given these problems, some assertions are rich. In one passage, O’Brien complains that Murdoch and Dacre ‘[inflate] bogus notions of conspiracy and secretive collusion between people in positions of power’. In another, he tells us that ‘Humans often seem to favour fear over facts’.
Of course, O’Brien is not an academic and How They Broke Britain is a popular book. Many readers prefer such analysis and the influence of personalities is easier to grasp. Yet the popular account is a diverse genre. For example, the BBC’s Reithian model uses a balanced tone and, from a functional perspective, aims to secure popular support for liberal democracy. This may involve certain myths – to some extent, all ideologies engage in generalizations – but the ends are defensible.
The myths of low liberalism are more difficult to justify. If How They Broke Britain does not depict reality, what does it achieve? One suspects that it provides gratification. By identifying hate figures, O’Brien gives human form to the frustrations of readers. This model is familiar, outlets such as the Sun and Fox News long employing it, yet the liberal version is novel. Perhaps we should not be surprised. Western societies are in trouble, middle classes enduring declines in living standards. In an age of postmaterial values, discontent was always likely to take a liberal form. Indeed, recent scholarship recognizes the propensity of liberals to seek gratification through stigmatizing outgroups, just like authoritarians.
Whilst liberal democracy has long faced challenges from authoritarians, such liberal critiques are troubling. Historically, liberals have been the staunchest defenders of the system, Reithianism owing much to the ideology. Low liberalism may bolster parts of liberal democracy – it entails a wider basis of respect for the rights of certain minorities, strengthening egalitarian aspects of democracy – yet other elements are destabilizing. Reading How They Broke Britain, one gets the impression that the system is rotten. For example, O’Brien tells us how Boris Johnson ‘smash[ed] up the last vestiges of parliamentary democracy and political integrity’.
Given the growth of low liberalism, one worries that it will crowd out traditional versions. Once, the average reader might have consumed more considered work; postwar political writing was more informative and less polemical.
Today, many reach for books such as How They Broke Britain.
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I haven’t read O’Brien’s book, so my comments are based on his talk-radio persona, not his literary work.
O’Brien feels like a bruiser. He's like a Nigel Farage (or maybe a Piers Morgan) style populist for the other side. His book may quote-mine Noam Chomsky, but it’s hard to imagine O’Brien having a productive conversation with Slavoj Žižek or David Harvey, for instance. He doesn’t strike me as one of those leftists who’s into theory, who can happily discuss the ideas of Foucault, Lyotard, or Deleuze and Guattari.
That might just be his gig. Douglas Murray writes for lowbrow papers like the New York Post, but I’ve heard him mention Jürgen Habermas’s "An Awareness of What is Missing”, and he’d obviously engaged with it at a serious level. Could O'Brien be secretly like that? I don't think so.
You’re right about the partisan selectivity of not mentioning Alastair Campbell, who famously brow-beat Dr David Kelly into lying about WMDs for a government dossier, causing the scientist to take his own life when he realised what horrors Campbell had used the dossier to justify.
Isn’t there also a problem of perspective when you only focus on your own country’s political class and decide they’re uniquely bad? Four of the previous five French Presidents have had serious corruption scandals (Giscard - the Bokassa diamond; Mitterrand - illegal wiretapping, personally authorising the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior; Chirac - found guilty of corruption; Sarkozy - found guilty of corruption, influence trading, wiretapping, sentenced to jail). The only apparently non-corrupt recent President - Hollande - is generally considered the least effective. Italy has given us Giulio Andreotti (who hired the Mafia to murder a journalist about to expose his corruption); Bettino Craxi (whose Tangentopoli crimes led him to flee to Tunisia); and, of course, Silvio Berlusconi. Ireland had the incredible Charles Haughey, who famously stole the money from a charity fundraiser for a colleague’s cancer operation.
Then again, some politicians can be both very corrupt and yet apparently do good for their countries. Robert Walpole and David Lloyd George were arguably like that.
JOB is a prime example of audience capture. He knows that self-righteous anger sells better than open-minded nuance, so that's what he's selling.
Perhaps all political movements need their "attack dogs". Still, it's a style I find distinctly unappealing. One weakness of JOB'S style is that he is never allowed to lose an argument. As a result, he will only ever talk to callers who make the dumbest defences of positions he opposes. I remember one incident a while back when he cut off a caller prematurely when he found out he worked for one of those evil Tufton Street think tanks - you'd think, given how much he goes on about their pernicious influence elsewhere, he'd revel in the opportunity to take one down a peg or two, but I think the subtext was "oh crap, this guy's actually clever, he knows his stuff, I can't possibly risk him making me look foolish, best cut and run."