LBC broadcaster on what ails his native country, his faith in youth and why he won’t be tracking down his Irish biological mother
The 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.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.
“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. 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.
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. “They’ll be doing nativism. They’ll be going after refugees. Aneurin Bevan 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.
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. 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,
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.
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