How They Broke Britain

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Personally, I’m as suspicious as he is of the Mail’s newfound support for freedom of speech on university campuses. Perhaps the truly guilty are not those who gained positions from which they could do such harm - proroguing Parliament and lying to the sovereign for example - but the backbench MPs who thoroughly understood that their leaders were unfit for high office, but stuck by them, trooped through the division lobbies, hoping to curry favour and preferment. But this doesn’t mean that free speech isn’t a real problem, or that some liberal-left men haven’t abdicated all responsibility for asking questions about it, particularly as it pertains to women’s rights, the better to have an easier, more saintly seeming life. Over ten chapters, each focusing on a particular person complicit in the downfall, James O'Brien reveals how a select few have conspired - sometimes by incompetence, sometimes by design - to bring Britain to its knees.

Across ten acerbic and angry chapters, the popular talk show host and author of former Waterstones Non-Fiction Book of the Month How to Be Right takes the politicians, advisers and media moguls responsible for Britain's current crisis to task.million weekly listeners and his first book, How To Be Right , was a Sunday Times bestseller, which won the Parliamentary Book Award for Best Political Book by a non-politician. O'Brien's new book confirms that not only are our politicians and their backers as corrupt and incompetent as you suspected they were, it's actually worse than that.

If ever the fates aligned in Britain’s apparent favour (eg at the Imperial zenith, 100-odd years ago), it now seems to have been our turn for just about everything to tumble the other way (eg J Poo-byn ‘opposing’ various things, yet not The Topic Of The Day in June 2016). All 10 more than deserve his ire, and ours; there seems little point in my going over their entitlement and casual destruction here. View image in fullscreen James O’Brien: ‘relies almost entirely for his text on the hard labour – the investigations, and the thinking – of others’. Each baddie gets a chapter: Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre and Andrew Neil represent the press; Nigel Farage, David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss are his politicians; Matthew Elliott and Dominic Cummings of Vote Leave bring up the rear (like a pantomime horse). The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Those still too blind in that sense will probably not deign to look at it, or if they do, will deny multitudinous, balefully interconnected and provable facts just as they did when incapable/unwilling to consider ‘Project Fear’; others of us, who never felt any urge to align with the ‘Do-Badders’, should at least draw wry consolation from this thorough confirmation of what (and who) went wrong.

Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Pro- and anti-Brexit demonstrators outside parliament in October 2019. Break ranks with the man once described as the “conscience of liberal Britain”, and you risk being seen as a useful idiot not only by him, but by the 1. Every Chapter is a revelation - From the first line of the Introduction- you get hooked and want to read more. A critic from the right who picks a fight with How They Broke Britain may be dismissed by O’Brien as just another hateful ideologue or client journalist, any review further evidence of the incestuous, corrupt and heinously biased world he works so hard to decry. Anyone who ever voted for the politicians at the heart of this book, and responsible for the harm done to Britain's reputation, should also take some of the blame.He maps the web connecting dark think tanks to Downing Street, the journalists involved in selling it to the public and the media bosses pushing their own agendas. His forensic approach is joined by unerring aim - he does more than point the finger, he delivers a rapier thrust to the vital organs of those who have done the damage. I don’t mean that whatever one says will have no effect on their success, though in the case of James O’Brien’s How They Broke Britain, which comprises an extended “charge sheet” of the nine men and one woman its author believes set the UK on a course of unnecessary decline, this is indubitably the case.

Even as he gags, no one’s going to ask him any awkward questions about recent events at the Cenotaph.

You can’t have your face on the cover of your book and not be a brand, and his requires him to be firmly on one side – the other side – when he must know that aspects of the current politics of the left are just as muddled, fractious and potentially dangerous as those of the right. It also makes his criticisms of some extremely hard-working journalists (the BBC’s former political editor, Laura Kuenssberg; the presenter of Today, Nick Robinson) seem snide and unnecessary. Our politicians seem most interested in their own careers, and much of the media only make things worse. This book will help explain about things that bother you and have concerned us Brits too for so long.