Broken Britain (2024)

Book Review from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

How They Broke Britain. By James O’Brien. Penguin. 2023. £10.99

This is an entertaining and well-written book from the host of Britain’s most popular radio talk-show. It has been floating around the top of the best-seller lists for the last few months and it is easy to see why. It taps effortlessly into the view that Britain has been hopelessly misgoverned for years and it focuses – with a chapter for each – on a number of the leading players, from media moguls Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre and Andrew Neil through, inevitably, to the likes of Johnson, Truss and Sunak. Dominic Cummings also gets his own chapter.

As with all books of this type, there is a tendency to overstate the role politicians in particular play with regard to the state of the economy, though where the book is most successful is the focus it places on the ideological ties and networks that have underpinned and sustained the dominant political assumptions of our time. These are the view that ‘trickle-down’ economics has some merit, that the EU was both a singular barrier to UK economic growth and also to genuine democratic sovereignty, that the poor are poor because they are essentially feckless and that immigration is the major issue of our times that should be (pre-)occupying political minds everywhere. As the General Election demonstrated, they are dominant views that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour has done little to challenge.

O’Brien is strongest when he writes in detail of the revolving door that exists between the right-wing think-tanks generating this stuff, the right-wing media and the recently departed Tory government. Many people will not have heard too much about the plethora of secretive ‘policy institutes’ and similar that exist in and around Tufton Street in Westminster, but they will have seen their representatives pop up with unerring regularity on news and current affairs programmes for years, opining in the manner of independent ‘experts’ – the Centre for Policy Studies, the Institute for Economic Affairs, Civitas, the Adam Smith Institute, Policy Exchange and the bizarre Taxpayers’ Alliance. These are the people who fomented and nurtured the likes of Liz Truss and O’Brien isn’t in a forgiving mood towards them.

The think-tank/media/political nexus that has dominated UK discourse for years and which has more recently formed ever more bizarre offshoots like the increasingly unhinged GB News, is indeed laid bare. It is good stuff and worth buying for this alone.

Less intuitively, there is also a chapter on Jeremy Corbyn, largely on the grounds that he failed to provide effective opposition to this nexus. Much of what O’Brien says here has resonance too, though occasionally he is a little unfair perhaps:

‘There used to be two ways for non-Conservative politicians to negotiate the UK’s hideously right-wing media: either you appeased them in the hope of avoiding their nastiest attacks or you took the fight straight to them and relied on sympathetic or impartial outlets to get your message out there. Corbyn and his closest advisers invented a third: completely fail to engage; alienate and demonise almost all journalists; claim constant victimhood; and offer up pathetic excuses when confronted with evidence of your own poor judgement’ (p.268).

Arguably, this is more Corbyn of 2019 General Election vintage, as earlier one of the more successful aspects of his period leading Labour was the way his supporters built up alternative media in opposition to the mainstream (even though he lost in 2017 too, it was narrow and this is something that helped him win over 6 percent more of the vote than Starmer did in his recent landslide, amounting to almost 12.9 million votes compared to Starmer’s 9.7 million). Indeed, while socialists have little to learn from the Corbyn experience generally, this aspect is interesting and O’Brien arguably seems to rather overlook the influence of alternative media like The Canary – which became the UK’s third most popular politics news website – and related social media.

This is a minor caveat though, and there can be little doubt that much of what O’Brien has written is a tour de force, exposing and cataloguing a network of pro-capitalist, right-wing goons who have just received an unexpectedly large – to most of them at least – kick in the ballots.

Dave Perrin

Proper Gander: Radio Ga-Ga (2020)

The Proper Gander column from the October 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Switch over from TV current affairs programmes to those on DAB radio, and you’ll notice quite a shift in tone. The telly’s news bulletins and shows like the BBC’s Question Time or Newsnight appear airbrushed and staid when compared with the more blunt discussions found on the commercial talk radio stations.

With nearly three million listeners each week, the heavyweight in the market is LBC, which as the London Broadcasting Company was the first licenced commercial radio station, back in 1973. It became more widely known after relaunching nationally on the DAB platform in 2014 with the self-aggrandising boast of ‘Leading Britain’s Conversation’. In 2017 the station gained further publicity from its interview with Diane Abbott MP when she made a hash of explaining Labour’s funding plans for the police, and also when it ditched Katie Hopkins as a presenter for advocating a ‘final solution’ following the Manchester Arena bombing. Not all of LBC’s hosts are poisonous rent-a-gobs like Hopkins or Nigel Farage, whose regular programme was dropped a few months ago. James O’Brien’s phone-in slot often shows up racists and xenophobes for what they are, and he wearily ran rings around Jacob Rees-Mogg when interviewing him about the practicalities of leaving the European Union. Frosty conversations are a hallmark of LBC.

Less popular, but more populist is TalkRADIO. This station, relaunched on DAB in 2016, follows a similar format of having phone-in discussion programmes helmed by opinionated hosts wearing headphones. While LBC presenters are more likely to try and catch out their interviewees, TalkRADIO hosts tend to bring in guests who reinforce their own opinions, which are invariably of the patriotic, right wing libertarian variety. This stance reflects who ultimately owns the station: along with Virgin Radio, Times Radio and Talksport, it’s part of Wireless Group, which is part of News Corp, owned by pro-Trump Rupert Murdoch.

Among TalkRADIO’s regular presenters is Mike Graham, who refers to the station as being ‘the home of common sense’ for the ‘silent majority’. He lays out his trade when he says on one show ‘we don’t need any lessons in history from the Guardian reading yoghurt knitting lentil munching morons who think that there’s something wrong with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’. As well as presenting The Independent Republic of Mike Graham, he chairs Plank of the Week, where he sits with a couple of other pundits to slag off people recently in the public eye. One ‘plank of the week’ was Banksy for his efforts in arranging a boat to rescue migrants at risk in the Mediterranean Sea.

Another frequent target is ‘woke’ culture, which the station associates with transgender activists, Black Lives Matter (‘a ghastly, horrible organisation that would like to see the destruction of everything that is good about Britain’, according to Mike Graham) and Extinction Rebellion (‘pathetic’, so says another presenter, Mike Parry). The station particularly focuses on its rival the BBC’s emphasis on diversity. For instance, Ian Collins in his show called the BBC directive about training its staff in avoiding racial bias ‘absolute cast-iron bonkers’ and other presenter Dan Wootton slated the BBC for being obsessed with ‘vile, toxic, tribal identity politics’.

The ‘wokeness’ of the BBC is also criticised because having a ‘liberal London groupthink’ means that it isn’t as impartial as it is supposed to be. On one of Mike Graham’s shows, regular guest and TV presenter Neil Oliver says that news is expected to be neutral, ‘a magnolia paint colour version of events’, and that the BBC gives this impression to disguise its left-leaning bias. On one of his shows, Ian Collins adds that BBC presenters should leave their political opinions on subjects such as Black Lives Matter outside the studio. But he, and the other TalkRADIO presenters, aren’t shy to inflict their own views on us. They simultaneously berate the BBC for being biased while making the most of their own biased broadcasting.

Whether or not the BBC is partial in the way TalkRADIO accuses, it’s right to point out that the BBC isn’t impartial. And it can’t be impartial, because it is part of the establishment, and therefore reflects the ideology which maintains the status quo. It’s partial towards acceptance of the system overall. TalkRADIO is the same, just in a more extreme and in-your-face way.

While the BBC has to stick to stricter editorial rules than TalkRADIO or LBC, all news broadcasters have to follow Ofcom’s code of guidance about ‘due impartiality’, which means that alternative views should be considered. Earlier in the year, TalkRADIO was found not to have done this and was fined £75,000 after former presenter George Galloway discussed allegations of antisemitism in the Labour Party and the role of the Russian state in the Salisbury poisonings. When the station’s presenters do cite different opinions or interview activists, it’s invariably with a dismissive, sneering tone.

TalkRADIO’s preoccupations are shown by how it repeatedly latches on to the same kind of subject in the same kind of way. Its recent fixations have included dance troupe Diversity’s Black Lives Matter routine on Britain’s Got Talent and the possibility of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘Rule Britannia’ being removed from the Proms because of associations with colonialism. While these and any topic should be discussed, TalkRADIO doesn’t scrutinise, for example, Donald Trump or Sky News. Nor does it have programmes about poverty or exploitation or environmental threats or war. The subjects the channel doesn’t cover tell us as much about its stance as those which it does.

TalkRADIO’s critique (if it can be called that) of left-wing ideology would be of interest, but it’s based on a caricature, and it comes from a cynical, cold place. A distorted worldview. Listen to TalkRADIO for too long, and you’d think Britain is divided only into ‘lentil munching morons’ infatuated with diversity quotas, and the Union Jack-waving ‘silent majority’ fed up with ‘political correctness gone mad’.

Mike Foster